My tattoo is a week old today! Weird!
I'm still not used to having a permanent image on my skin, it's most odd. I'll just catch sight of it and think "Oh! That's right. I have a TATTOO now. Huh."
You know what, Mum, I don't think you'll want to read the next two paragraphs after the photo, but do join us for the third. That's when I stop talking about the actual process, and go into why I chose a key. See you there!
I was expecting the sensation of tattooing to be more painful than it actually was. It wasn't like a nice relaxing massage, but it really wasn't agony either. It was more like when a cat starts licking you and won't stop; their tongues are so rough that it's not really a pleasant feeling and, if they get really obsessed, it can start to hurt. So it was sort of like that, but with moments of stinging occasionally.
The annoying part that nobody tells you is that, because a tattoo is essentially scar tissue, it has to heal; so it scabs over and gets really itchy and you cannot scratch it for fear of damaging the image. If you pick at the scab and it takes away too many layers of skin, that will leach out some of the ink too. I'm pleased mine hasn't scabbed too much, so it's looked quite pretty from the moment I unbandaged it, but bloody hell it is itchy now. Annoying! Doc tells me that once the healing is complete the "...bad-ass factor kicks in" and you forget how aggravating it was for that first week or two.
The other thing that Doc C didn't mention until after I'd got my tattoo, was that when people notice a tattoo they tend to ask what the significance of the image is, and they generally want a nicely complex back story. My tattoo is a key, which I chose because I wanted something that I wouldn't be embarrassed by in twenty years time, so I didn't want skulls, or kittens, or Doc's name, much though I love all those things, obviously. So what did I want? I don't really invest a lot of personal significance in symbols, but I did want
something that would remind me that I can do things if I just apply
myself, and it had to be something small that I could cover up if I really needed to with a large bangle. The other reason for the small size is more practical; I have very pale skin and I have a lot of moles, so I couldn't cover a large area of skin up without one getting in the way (actually another thought was just putting numbers next to my moles, so that I looked like a large dot-to-dot drawing, but my moles aren't coherently grouped enough for that!) I also knew that I wanted something that was what it was unambiguously, so I wanted a clear image and I immediately thought of Victorian engraved illustrations.
The more esoteric explanation is that my tattoo means that the right key will unlock anything, you just have to find that key, although really that's a little bit more new age than I like to get usually. Still, when I tell people this version of the back story, I'm also adding in an unlocking gesture with my hand whilst making a clicky noise with my tongue. That seems to be going down well.
Of course after we'd left the tattoo artist, I thought it would be great to have blank key fob tattooed onto the key, so I can write whatever it is that I want to unlock with a felt tip pen. The only difficulty with this ingenious embellishment to the design, is that I can't write with my left hand. The devil really is in the details.
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