Interlude Two

What about the tattoos?

Something about pain, perhaps? No. Not really in the way that you'd think. While I'm not afraid in the least of pain, it's all voluntary for the tattoos. It's not like breaking an arm or burning your hand. It's sitting patiently under the little buzzing device, until the color of your skin is something more than "caucasian" or "yellow" or "brown".

My inker Patty Kelley says that she loves my skin, because it takes white - which most people's skin doesn't. You can actually see the white ink in my pictures, because my skin is so even and pale. I don't have freckles so much as the occasional mole, and those can be worked in to the design (and have been).

When I was a kid, I was a "cutter". I remember sitting in the rocking chair (you know that big blue-green chair that the kid in Toy Story jumps into and swirls around in at the very beginning of the first movie? THAT is my chair. It looked exactly like that, and I know how it felt below the fingers and bare legs... How you'd swing around and get pushed to the side like that... I loved that movie for that reason.) and picking at my arm with a knitting needle until I had a good sized gouge that bled faintly.

It didn't hurt. I went on to razor blades and rubbing erasers over my skin to get the burn. I did that one time on my foot, I remember that it was hard to wear a shoe because of that burn. It actually stayed with me for years, before finally vanishing. All the little lines and designs I cut into myself are long gone - razor blades don't produce nearly a thick enough line for a scar to be permanent. My cats have given me more permanent scars than those blades.

It didn't even occur to me that I was doing something I shouldn't have. I did hide my cuts, since I had embellished my left arm with a big pentagram one time that would be necessary. But then, I wasn't much talking to my mother as much as screaming at her during that time, so it wouldn't much matter anyway. It kept my mind off other things.

Whatever other things those were, I can't remember. Perhaps just the boredom of not having anything real to play with, or being out with my friends? My grandmother spent the last 12 years of her life - the twelve years of my entire teen-hood - in a nursing home dying by degrees. My mother took care of her obsessively, at the cost of her own personal life. She didn't go out, had no friends, just went to visit grandma.

And for the first several years, that is to say the years I was in 5th through 10th or so grades, she dragged me with her after school at least two times a week.

To that place, which I will never return. I detest nursing homes. They smell of death and urine, old people and gangrene. I spent far too much time there, among the aged and forgotten, than I did with anyone my own age - and for that I hate my mother. She did me no favors by taking my time up that way. My grandmother had very little to say about me, and certainly by the time I was out of the house she didn't even recognize me.

Pain replaced friends, perhaps.

But it was still artistic.

It was also faintly sexual. As a very very young child, I remember being excited by just the wrong things. Movies which probably should best have been left out of my sight were things I took and ran. Demon Seed, an erotic thriller - maybe not erotic to most people... But it reinforced certain things in my head. Fear and sex can go together if you do them right.

Now, I had sex when I was way too young, but I wasn't getting exposed to anything truly dangerous by playing around with the local boy. And girl, for that matter... But I knew sex felt good way too early. And for me, the fantasy of being bound or captured was far more thrilling than anything typical of a romance novel. Nonconsentual sex, rape fantasies, and bondage were pretty much par for my course, from about 9 on up... I wasn't that young for the real thing, but I knew what I liked already.

Messed up? Slightly. :P

Which is where the tattoos come back to play. Because they represent me in so many ways. I wouldn't go to a shop and just buy a tattoo off the wall. There's no reason for that. Not when I have my own art coming literally out the seams of my house.

My "in flight Shard" was the first tattoo I got. It was actually originally an erotic piece, too, but it looked better as a logo than anything else, so I changed the pose a bit, and ... I love the piece. I always have. There is something about a piece of art that just says you must wear me. By the same token, there's only one small error on one of the current pieces I have, and that's Daverin's head is just a little too small. But that was my fault and I can't even really see her anyway without twisting around and pulling my arm.

My friend Chuck was with me when I got Shard, and he could tell that I was completely on the rush. I hooted and hollared, I was in fact ready for my second tattoo right then and there. It had to wait almost a year.

Tani Chasing Butterflies was next. The freedom and grace of the pose was something that I'd always loved, and it was dug out of an old convention sketchbook - I remember drawing that picture while waiting in the ice cream social line on one Sunday at the San Diego Comic Con. At that time too, I would be dressed up as Tani, head to toe in costume. White hair, striped unitard, tail, leather clothing, the whole bit. I even had fangs made to fit me (which have since been too small to wear due to the way your jaws change over the years) and a little muzzle prosthetic from the shop where I used to work. I had time to blow getting dressed up then. I had no problems (and still don't) with sitting on a guy's lap to get something drawn for free.

If Shard is my male side, Tani's my all-woman side...

Then... Then came the realization that I had two tattoos, and a handfull of artwork, and I knew that I would never stop. I can't. It's an addiction.

When I got Daverin and Sanger, I had designed a trio of couples - Dav and him, Daverin in her "real life" shape as a woman and her girlfriend Brianna, and their predecessors Istvan and Cynthia. All this, just because I'd been playing Call of Cthulhu in real life.

Blame Eric for that one... He's got the picture of me while I'm getting Dav and Sanger, and I'm nearly asleep - it felt so fine, the buzz was on, endorphins were nearly getting the better of me. That wasn't true when I got Istvan and Cynthia, on the inner arm. That hurt like an EXPLETIVE DELETED. We carefully put on Dav and Bri, and then finished up by the end of about a year and a half, the circuit board design that no one had ever seen done before. Everyone in the studio was watching as Patty laid the green and black down on me, and later we finished up with the gold lines - and the power tool. Can't forget that.

Sanger was so part of me... And again: if Shard is my man, Sanger's my hurt man. Daverin is the main character, the first person of my Body Dancing novel. But the story is entirely about Sanger. When I needed to retreat into pain, hurt and anguish - Shard wasn't going to do that. He was there for me when I wanted to take charge of something, or wanted to be dominant. Sanger... Was there to lash out. Or to be lashed, either way.

I started liking rougher sex about that same time. Go figure.

When I got Istvan and Cynthia, I had already started on my right arm's designs. In fact, while I was waiting outside for the shop to open, I drew what became the central design for the trio Snow, Red and Discovery.

Now with about 14 hours of tattooing on me, Patty knew me by sound on the phone. This is a good thing. We can talk about almost anything, and frequently do, while she's working on me. Sometimes I can't talk because I'm just trying not to move - shock sets in about 25 minutes in, and then the endorphins creep out of the brain and make everything better. It's a pattern I have come to enjoy greatly.

Except that one time, when I was dying for a tat, and I went in but Patty wasn't there? So I decided, look, Tani needs to be actually chasing some butterflies. I had Steve draw up some of them, and he did a beautiful job - my only tat by anyone other than Patty, and it took less than half an hour. That meant that the endorphins never kicked in, and I was left still a bit sore and kind of let down. No rush out of those...

Not like the forest...

The elfin forest on my right arm is an absolute thing of beauty. The elves all went on at once, black, then later we colored them in, and then a third session to put down the black for the forest. That took some work because I designed the art flat, and of course your arm has curves on it. A whole batch of trees and treetops had to be cut out entirely, and one of the little bond-creatures, a winged fox thing, had to be moved to the ground instead of the tree branch. But that's fine. Everyone likes the little thing anyway. People in grocery stores or on the street actually stop me and demand to see my arm, because it's so ... green!

No one realizes that you can get color like this, in a tattoo. But you can.

Finishing up the forest was painful, but really worth it. Snow and Apogee are 'me' but this one features people who are actually not 'me' at all - Talon and Vex, elves that are based upon people I knew earlier in the store where I work. I haven't seen either of them in quite some time. Though the guy that I made Vex from has seen his image and his girlfriend thinks it's insanely cool. Discovery and Redhair are also people I knew, from a prior job and never met each other in real life. But we're a team, still... Ahh, fantasy.

And from there, I moved to my back. Dave, Dane and Rita - my Triptych shapeshifters. I had designed them while working on something else years before, but like many of my designs they just happen to be the right pose the first time.

I played with the wings a bit, and that was it. You can just see them poking out from a shirt collar, on me. Rita's the horny one. Dane the introvert, and Dave the hardcore asshole.

By the time I was working on my back, the expense of this was starting to make me realize that I had to insure myself. I haven't done so yet - because I can't find an insurance company that'll do it. But if I'm in some accident and my arm is damaged? I'll kill someone with the remaining one, rest assured...

I have moved from back to chest - with dragons and gryphons and cheetahs making their appearance at last. It brings me to the present day - you can adopt at least four of the seven images on my own sites. Flitters and gryphons, and fine ones at that.

I have plans to cover the rest of me with color. My mom can't stand it - "you're ruining your skin! I gave you that skin!" Yeah, mom, and if it were up to you, I'd be wearing a full three piece suit to go swimming.

My artwork is my heart.

I wear my heart as a half-sleeve, on both arms...