t minus two days to tattoo!

I'm so excited. I'm getting tattooed on Wednesday. This will be my fifth tattoo technically, seventh if you count my cover-ups, and somewhere in the early 20s of hours I have spent under the needle. Oh yeah!!!! It's an interesting experience and one that I have found, for me, links my body and my spirit.

It's the first time I have really put that concept into words. But in recent months as I have struggled to own my spirit, my soul, and validate my feelings, my craziness, my compulsions and my boundaries, it has become more important that I lay a physical marker for that struggle. Keys give us access to secret rooms, they unlock and give new understanding, they open doors which have been closed to us. They allow for light to be let in, for secrets to be allowed and explored. Mine is about plumbing the depths of my soul.

The ribs is one of the most painful areas to get tattooed, they say. I have one on my foot already, which hurt almost unbelievably. It can't be worse than that. The line down towards my little sausages of toes is not quite steady because I was shaking and pressing them into the table, breathing hard to stay still. And not successful, either. So it will be a challenge to sit still on Wednesday and feel that needle bouncing off my bones and digging into flesh. And yet I am grinning with anticipation as I write this. Ha! I'm twisted.

Tattooing is an ancient practice, the term even coming from the sounds made as a sharpened stick coated with ink is pounded into the flesh. All kinds of mummified bodies have been found with tattooed marks upon them, from the Iceman (fourth or fifth millenium BC, damn that's old) to ancient Egyptians. I could even argue that it's in my genes to want to get tattooed, as Celtic and Pictish people marked themselves with blue woad for battle and religious ceremonies. My addiction to Wikipedia has enlightened me that tattoos settle deep enough in the skin to resist burns and drowning, which is why so many sailors tattooed themselves. Instant identification.

I think that's one of the concepts that appeals to me so much about my own tattoos. This is ME, the me that's on the inside coming out in beautiful, intricate designs. Of course imprinting the soul on the skin is a painful process: that's life.