i hella ♥ SFO

under the needle

I am not the type of person who would get a tattoo.

Or at least that’s what I staunchly believed for 27 years, until I contradicted it in the most absolute way possible 5 days ago by getting inked.

To many it seemed like some sort of random, momentary lapse in judgment but it didn’t happen that way. I didn’t just wake up one day and decide I wanted a tattoo

The first person I knew with a tattoo was my sister who got inked at age 15, an age where you would be smart to keep it a secret from your parents unless you want to be grounded for the rest of your life.

Because of this aura of secrecy that surrounded my sister’s teeny, tiny butterfly tat on her buttock, I made the mental association that tattoos were for the bad. Yow!  The bad, beautiful, rebellious older girls my sister hung out with who were all too cool for school. Drew Barrymore, who was in her wild-child phase then, had tattoos.

 At the naïve age of 11, I was still on the straight and narrow path, and hadn’t had  even a drop of alcohol or a puff of tobacco smoke. I was the opposite of bad. I was the one who never wanted to make my parents upset. 

Also, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to get a tattoo? Why would anyone want their skin cut up by needles and marred with a design that they’ll get sick of eventually? “Remember, it’ll be on your skin forever”, were the words I echoed from the adults who wagged their tongues at the tattooed young’uns.

Times have changed. Getting a tattoo is hardly an act of rebellion nowadays. The old edict that said you could never land a respectable job if you had a tattoo is overshadowed by the not-so-far-fetched possibility that your boss may have a tattoo. Perfectly respectable ladies and gentlemen have tattoos. Heck, even my mother has a tattoo and she got hers before I even decided I wanted mine.

It’s even safe to say that tattoos have lost their edge (unless you were to get one on your face or some other really extreme spot).

Hence, my decision to get inked was not an act of rebellion. I’m too old for that shit.

In college, I met more people from the tribe of the inked. And though there are people from all walks of life who get tattooed for a variety of different reasons, all the people with tats in college were from the artist, musician crowd who wore ripped jeans, and Buddha beads.  Not even the athletes on campus were inked, though the sight of a basketball or soccer player with a tribal design inked on their skin is a bit of a cliché nowadays. Hence, in my college years, tattoos still belonged to the world of the so-called “deviants”.

It was then that I remember liking a tattoo for the first time. It belonged to one of the coolest girls on campus, an intricate mandala on the small of her back that peeped out from above her low-waist bell-bottoms whenever she leaned over.  Nowadays, a tattoo positioned as such is referred to as a “tramp stamp”, but I still think it looked fab.

And yet, even though I hung with “deviant” crowd, I still didn’t consider myself the tattoo type. I just wasn’t bad enough.

Over the years, I began to mingle with a heavily tattooed musician crowd whose every major appendage was covered in black ink.  They were even m ore deviant than the deviants in college. But what I learned from this crowd was that tattoos weren’t always done as an act of deviance for deviance’s sake. They chose meaningful designs that meant something very special to them., or that stood for their deepest principles  And though I never really understood how huge tattoos of demon skulls with flaming eye sockets and tentacles could be “meaningful” and “special”, I took their word to heart.

And still, I didn’t want a tattoo.  I considered meaning to be fleeting and dynamic. The meanings, and even the feelings we associate with our memories change as new experiences colour the way we perceive them.  Principles are revised through time. I couldn’t possibly encapsulate any of those things into a static image. And I didn’t want my principles on display on my skin.

So for 27 years, I was not the type of person who would get a tattoo.

But curiously, I have always dabbled in minor forms of body modification, some involving pain, and some not.

I’ve dyed my hair all sorts of odd, unnatural colours, probably my first radical act at age 13.

I have 5 piercings on my ears. My first pair was done when I was a baby. My 3^rd hole was done in high school when I liked this guy with an earring and thought he was the coolest guy I had ever met. The 2 subsequent ones were done to make my parents just that little bit worried; to show them that I had my own mind, that I was not their baby, and that I could make decisions regarding what I could do with my body on my own. 

Nearly ten years later, I again felt the need to get a nose-piercing. Why? Because I felt the dying away of an old self. Make sense much? (I eventually had to remove it because my body kept rejecting it.)

Through the years, I had unknowingly, unconsciously participated in the age-old ritual of “marking” myself to signify a variety of things: a coming of age, maybe, or a sign of “belonging” to a certain group.  These kinds of rituals, practiced by our tribal ancestors, is something so ingrained in us, so primal, that we seek to recreate it in our modern society where ritual doesn’t have much of a place anymore.

I have a friend who got his first tattoo done by holy monks in a sacred temple in Bangkok. Those who choose to get tattooed by these monks have no say in the final outcome of the design, which are said to be magical and powerful. In this case, I think the the ritual  definitely counts just as much as the tattoo itself.

And after 4 years in Australia, having gone through significant of mental, spiritual, and emotional trials, I felt a deep need to “mark” myself again to outwardly signify my transformation.  I wanted a tattoo.

And when I got up off the tattoo chair with my skin bleeding and fiery red, I finally understood. I had passed “through the fire” and risen from the ashes. I had gone under the needle.  I had withstood the pain, passed the mental exercise, gaining mastery over my mind and body. I was now marked.

I remember basking in that initial feeling of achievement before actually checking to see how the tattoo actually looked.  But like every tattoo-phile, I fell in love with it at  first sight like a mother bonding with her newborn.

And like everyone who has been through a coming-of-age ritual, I feel I’m different even though most people don’t even notice it’s there.

Not everyone has to get something painful or permanent to mark themselves. Each to his own. I know that I could have just gone out and bought a new pair of shoes or something. But hey, I guess I am the tattoo type after all.