Adventures in Tattoo Acquisition

This is (late) Essay #43 of The 52 Essay Challenge, a series in which I write a new (unpolished & messy) essay each week during 2017.

You might recall my essay on tattoos from a few weeks ago. Welp. I did it. I got my first tattoo.

*

On Friday morning, I went to vinyasa yoga. I hadn’t practiced any physical asanas all week. I needed to ground myself after a doozy of an experience with Kundalini yoga teacher training (read more here). The instructor and my friend, Gabi, gave me a class that I exactly needed. Introspective and grounding poses. Slow pacing. Moments to go within. It was really grounding. After, we talked a little and she offered this delicious beverage: a grounding date smoothie. More like a tea, since it’s a warm beverage. And man, was that delicious! And totally did the trick. I could feel my body get a little heavier, a little more rooted into the earth. Thank you, Gabi and aruveyda!

Also? Warm comfort foods help ground us. So I made blueberry pancakes for lunch. Yes, lunch.

And then it was off to the tattoo shop.

I didn’t make an appointment. I figured: if it’s meant to be, then an artist will be available. If not, then I’ll try again next week. (I know: I sound like a total hippy dippy! At least my Type A self thinks so!)

I walked in and chatted it up with Roman, the person I had talked to before when I was doing reconnaissance work on tattoo shops. He went around to each room, asking the artists for their availability, and it started to look like no one was free and that I’d have to set up an appointment after all. As I was about to hand over my deposit, out walked Ray who said “I can do it.”

When I saw him, I knew right away: Ray is Filipino. I took this as a sign. Yes! Someone who understood my complicated feelings that came with getting a tattoo. Then, it turned out he’s also Buddhist (whaa??) and has kids and is an artist (duh! But I mean, he went to School of Visual Arts in NYC!) and shares the same ideals I have. Talk about a love letter from the universe!

So while he prepped my wrist –swabbing the skin thoroughly, putting the stencil on—and set up the various things he needed (a cream of some kind, some wipes, a tiny cup of ink, a needle and some other stuff), we talked. I was grateful for that. I didn’t have the mind space to really think about what kind of pain awaited me. When he was done, he held the tattoo pen, placed his hand on my arm, turned on the tattoo machine (the vibration of which felt just like Kundalini vibrations, which, strangely, comforted me), and said to me, “Ready?”

“Is this going to hurt?” I asked the obvious question. So obvious it’s rhetorical. Still he answered.

“Yes.”

“Like a bitch?” I half joked. I didn’t know what to expect.

“Yes.” He paused. “It’s what we like to call sakit.” Haha! He used the Tagalog word for hurt, but for me, sakit isn’t all that bad in terms of pain. It’s a word I use after I bang my knee on an open file cabinet. I yelp “Aray!” and then the pain after is sakit. I use it when I have a headache. I use it when I get a paper cut. I don’t know if the pain I was about to endure was quite that low. I took a deep breath.

“Okay.”

He began.

It felt like you would imagine it to feel: a stinging kind of pain. After all, you’re getting stuck by a needle over and over again. Tiny rapid pinpricks of pain. A million bees stinging you in the same small spot. Once in a while, it would smart like a bitch. But only for a split second.

We talked.

“Do you know that women have a higher threshold for pain than men?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah. That’s why we’re the ones having the babies. Haha—“ I stared at the picture that was directly in front of me. I didn’t want to look at the source of my pain, despite the fact that I volunteered for it. The picture was an image of Kali, Hindu goddess, Divine Mother of the Universe, destroyer of evil forces.

Of course.

Nothing is coincidence.

More deep breaths.

We continued to talk as he buzzed the ink and the pain into my skin, wiping every so often. I glanced down every now and then to see the progress. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. That this was real. I was excited. In hindsight, I wish I had just watched the entire thing. But there’s only so much pain I wanted to endure in that moment. The visual accompaniment would have just magnified it for me.

We talked about a lot of things: being brown in this country, raising kids in this day and age (he’s got two of his own), being a kid of immigrant Filipinos and the ways in which we defied our parents (we joked that neither of us was a doctor or lawyer or engineer, but artists of all things! haha), and single origin chocolate (yesss!!). It felt like we could’ve talked all day, well into the night. But alas, he had other appointments and I had children to fetch from school.

He gave me the info on caring for the tattoo, which, by the way, turned out fantastic. (Don’t get excited – it’s not a fancy, intricate tattoo, but I was really happy with it. You’ll see in the photo below.)

“Thanks for talking to me the whole time. It got my mind off the pain. A little bit.”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“But it was also good conversation!” He agreed.

When we parted ways, I told him we’d stay connected. For one, I might have his wife as a guest speaker in my food writing class! But maybe the universe has more in store.

*

The tattoo I got is simple. It’s a single word on the inside of my right wrist: poeta. It’s for those moments when I get low and really really dark, when I start declaring that everything I write is trash, that I’m done with writing, and that I’m throwing in the towel for good (which I know is not something that’s remotely possible, but at times, it can desperately feel this way). It’s me speaking to myself: Bitch, you’re a fucking poet and don’t you forget it! (haha!) I might want to try to forget, but if it’s staring me in the face, permanently embedded in my skin, well, it’s kinda hard to do that.

So yeah. In case it wasn’t clear:

soy un poeta.