Resolution completed! I have my first tattoo! I am feeling dazed and amazed. I was trying to pin down the feeling, and at first I thought joy and also…pride?—but pride isn’t quite right. TRIUMPH. It’s triumph. To FINALLY have stopped dithering after DECADES; to FINALLY have DONE IT. I felt similarly when I got my cartilage piercing. Like “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” plus the huge satisfaction of having overcome a number of hurdles to make something happen.

I didn’t want to post a picture right away, because pretty much every time I see a picture of someone’s brand-new still-fresh-and-bleeding-and-covered-in-Saniderm tattoo I think of something I read in a pregnancy book about how you may want to wait a couple days to take a picture of your newborn for the birth announcements; it tactfully suggested that the baby would then be, er, EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL than it was on the day of its birth. My tattoo is now three days old, so it still has some pinkness around the edges but it has settled down considerably and, while not ready for studio portraits, is ready for its birth announcement:

(Another thing I have learned from other people’s tattoo photos is to include BODY CONTEXT: it can be surprisingly disturbing to see a tattoo and not know WHAT PART OF THE BODY AM I LOOKING AT.)

The first picture is prettier, but the angle makes it seem as if the tulip is tilted. The second picture loses a bit of the leaf and is not as flattering to my skin and has part of the exercise bike in it, but shows the placement, which I LOVE: it was not what I had in mind, but I’d decided ahead of time to defer to the artist’s judgement whenever possible and I think she was exactly right. She did it so that the back leaf traces the calf muscle. I would not have thought to do that, and would have just centered the whole thing on the side of the calf like a big sticker—which would have been FINE, but not anywhere near as good as what the artist chose.

If I seem to be getting ahead of myself, it’s because when it’s me reading this kind of post, I can’t really CONCENTRATE until I’ve seen the finished tattoo/cake/artwork/remodel/whatever. I would be kind of skimming, thinking yes yes yes uh huh when do we see it. Now that we’ve seen it, I will start where we left off: with the making of the appointment. I’d chosen “tulip on the calf” because even though I felt MORE enthusiastic about getting something on my upper arm, I couldn’t commit to anything, neither placement (shoulder cap? upper arm? back of shoulder? more like front of shoulder?) nor flower (peony? peony plus bud? rose? cluster of roses? mixed bouquet?); whereas I COULD commit to a tulip on the calf.

It was nice to then have well over a month to make sure I continued to feel content with that decision, and I did. My main concern was that I might have told her too SMALL a tulip, but several of you assured me that that would be easy and normal to fix at the appointment, which I already knew included built-in time for adjustments and so forth, so I trusted that it would be okay, which is to say that I wrung my hands for weeks and worried it would not be okay. I was particularly worried that she would say “Oh! Well, we can change the size, but I haven’t booked enough time for that larger tattoo.” That turned out to be a non-issue, at least with this particular tattoo: the artist commented that tulips and pansies in particular are quicker-than-usual tattoos to apply (if you’re interested, she said peonies and roses are slower than usual), so even making it a fair amount larger didn’t matter much for the time allotment.

I wore to the appointment the shorts/socks/shoes I normally wear in the summer, so that she could see the exact display area I had in mind, and we ended up with a tulip that was just under 8 inches—and I think I would have gone for more like 9 inches, except we were getting pretty close to a veiny area of my calf, and I didn’t want a big magenta tulip calling attention to it or running up against it.

She’d asked for a reference photo, and I’d sent one that gave the basic idea of what I wanted; she then asked for more information about the color of the tulip, so I sent a word description (magenta), and included another reference photo of what I considered magenta tulips, in case the word magenta wasn’t as precise as I’d hoped. Then I didn’t look at those photos again: I didn’t want to accidentally memorize the reference photos and then notice all the ways in which the tattoo was different. I looked afterward, and she did make a satisfying number of changes, and I’d say she significantly improved it.

You may remember I’d considered adding my birth surname to the tattoo, but I let that simmer for awhile and realized I DIDN’T feel settled about that decision for an assortment of reasons, so I left it for now; it seemed like something I could have her add later.

My remaining worries, in no particular order:

• That it would hurt more than I could tolerate, and I’d have to have her stop

• That I would twitch or move, and cause her to make a mistake

• That I wouldn’t be able to find parking

 

I didn’t find myself worrying much about the decision to get a tattoo, or that I wouldn’t like the tattoo; I felt as if those were worries I’d already bypassed by making the resolution to GO FOR IT AND SEE, BECAUSE THERE IS NO KNOWING THESE ANSWERS AHEAD OF TIME. And I didn’t worry A LOT a lot about the pain, even though I consider my personal pain tolerance levels fairly low, because so many people get tattoos, and many of them go on to get MORE tattoos, and I didn’t know of a single story of someone having the artist stop and leave the tattoo unfinished. (Not that there AREN’T such stories, and at this point if you know of one it would be fun to hear it. But more like I was thinking if it happened OFTEN, then statistically I would expect to have heard a few stories already.)

It did make me nervous that no one seems to have an easy time describing the pain. And that sometimes when you ask people to try to describe it, they start to say things like, “Well, you’ve been through childbirth, right? so I think you’ll be fine,” and they say it in an evaluative, hedging-their-bets kind of way, not in a jolly reassuring way.

So while I was getting the tattoo done, I took notes on my phone to try to describe the pain. I will START by saying that overall, I felt well-prepared for the pain levels, so that OVERALL, the pain was not as bad as I’d expected; but you see how I would not want to keep saying the pain was less than I’d expected, and therefore warp YOUR preparation, so that you would end up feeling that the pain was MORE than you’d expected.

I’d thought I would want to play phone games while getting the tattoo, but actually I felt dreamily inclined to zone out and listen to the music and look at things in the studio: the interesting ceiling, the partial view out the window, the art on the walls, the decorated desk. I am not usually a live-in-the-moment kind of person, but in this particular situation I found that I wanted to Experience the Tattoo. Plus, I wanted to think about the kind of pain it was so that I could try to describe it to you. Here are the things I wrote down:

Buzzing hot scratching
Scrubby sensation, like scribbling, hot scratchy pen
Scratching with a vibrating pin
Outline hurt more, sketching back and forth over a line
Feels like scratching through layers of skin but not like cutting
Pain was all surface, unlike labor or tooth
Little chills to the scalp/face

 

The most helpful thing I remember someone telling me ahead of time was that it was the burn of a sunburn, and that it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to your skin. I would say yes, it was like that, but it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to my skin with A HOT SCRATCHING VIBRATING PIN.

I found it completely manageable; I didn’t wish I’d taken a sedative or a painkiller ahead of time; I didn’t need her to take a break; my eyes didn’t even water. Every so often (like when she was sketch-scratching in a way that felt like line-work rather than coloring-in), I would think “oh: ow. ow. ow.” for a few seconds, but then it would taper back to “huh! that hurts in an interesting way!” A long time ago I got a deep-gums dental cleaning, and I thought back to that: it HURT, it DID, but in a warm itching kind of way that lived very close to the line of being pleasant. …Do not go for a tattoo thinking it will feel pleasant. I just mean, it was the KIND of pain that did not, for me, feel terrible or miserable; it just felt like pain/sensation/heat/scratching. I didn’t feel like I was SUFFERING. (However, afterward I noticed I was pretty sweaty under the arms.)

Also, I kept noticing that the pain was SURFACE pain. I have had other kinds of pain I found not particularly tolerable: labor pain, for example, and bad gas pain, and dental pain. Those pains came FROM WITHIN, and in addition to being extremely and miserably painful, they made me feel PANICKY. The pain of a tattoo all felt completely on the surface, and did not make me feel panicky at all, not even a little: it was like the pain of a skinned knee, or a sunburn—NOT the pain of a deep cut, or something wrong in your organs/intestines, or a broken bone, where it feels like something is deeply WRONG WRONG WRONG and the body is setting off emergency alarms. I felt light in my mind, and a little dazed, but mostly INTERESTED and in the mood to THINK ABOUT the pain, and not at all miserable or unhappy.

Plus, I felt ELATED that the pain was PRODUCING SOMETHING I WANTED. I wondered idly if we would value tattoos as much if they didn’t hurt, and immediately concluded we would NOT. I think if it were as quick and painless as having a permanent sticker put on us, hardly anyone would do it. I think the time and pain is NECESSARY to the experience. I think it’s an essential part of what makes a tattoo feel transformative and badass. I can imagine getting a tattoo to commemorate something, and having the experience/pain of the tattoo accomplish some actual psychological work.

The ONLY time I felt a TWINGE of anything different was when she was very near the ankle and I felt what I think must have been a little taste of what it feels like to get a tattoo over a bone; that BRIEF MOMENT felt more like INTERNAL pain, and I would not want to experience too much of that.

Some notes from the artist, when I said it didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected:

• She mentioned something I already knew, which is that the area where I was getting a tattoo was not a particularly painful area for getting a tattoo

• She mentioned that she was known for having a light touch, and that it might hurt more if I were getting it done elsewhere. This made me a little nervous: do I remember reading something somewhere about some artists causing more pain but their tattoos last longer because they’re placed deeper, or am I making that up from an anxiety dream?

 

I see I have skipped ahead again. I’d intended to be thorough but also orderly. Let’s hop back to the arrival at the studio: I DID find parking. I went in. I met the tattoo artist. There was no one else in the studio; I wondered if it might be fun to be in a studio along with other people getting tattoos from other artists, or if it was nicer to have quiet/privacy; I think I could be happy either way. She showed me the first work-up, which was a color print-out, and she’d cut around it so I could hold it up to my calf and get the idea. We agreed on larger; she made it larger and printed it out; I held it up and said yes. She verified the colors with me, and said the greens would be a little darker than shown, and the blossom would be a little more purpley than shown.

She had me fill out a consent form that was very similar to the one I filled out when I got a cartilage piercing: my name, my age, my address; was I intoxicated? did I have any contagious/transmissible diseases? did I have allergies? And things like had I eaten in the last two hours, what medications was I taking. Also a pretty long list of things I had to say I understood: that tattoos were permanent and so were tattoo mistakes; that the tattoo artist couldn’t know if there were things in the tattoo inks that I might be allergic to; that a tattoo might get infected, might heal wrong, would fade with time, might need touching up. It was an electronic form, and I also had to take a photo of my driver’s license and upload it.

In the meantime, the tattoo artist had made a purple-outline version of the tattoo design that she could apply to my leg so we could agree on the exact placement, and so that she’d have a guideline to work with. She had me stand, and she sat on the floor next to my calf and took some time squinting, before smucking the design decisively onto my leg. She said she could wipe it off and reapply as many times as I wanted, and that she could put it higher, lower, forward, back, tilted, whatever. As mentioned, it was not where I had pictured it, but I’d decided ahead of time to go with her judgement unless I disliked something; I took a minute to make sure I didn’t dislike it, and I didn’t, and in fact I found I almost immediately VERY MUCH liked it. In the days since, I’ve felt almost appalled at the idea that I could have gone with my own original little-thought/no-experience idea instead! She does this for a living; I chose her because I liked her work; she has a lot of experience with what looks nice in this exact medium; trusting her judgement was the way to go.

She said the purple outline needed to dry for a bit, so she had me go sit in the waiting area while she got her tattooing stuff ready. I was trying not to make her nervous by watching her intently, so I mostly noticed from my casual peeks that she was getting out a lot of different colors of ink and putting small quantities into little containers. There was also a tray with equipment, like at the dentist’s office, and a cloth and a bottle of what I assumed was a disinfectant or other cleaning solution. Several times during the tattoo she wiped down my calf with a nice cool wet cloth, so that was probably the cool wetness.

Then she had me get up onto the table, and I’d forgotten to be nervous ahead of time about getting up onto the table. I am always nervous about such things. I think I don’t have a very strong sense of where my body is and, combined with excessive self-consciousness, this makes things like “positioning my human body on a table” disproportionately embarrassing and difficult—and especially if it’s a narrowish table, as it was, and if it’s covered with slidey paper, which it was, and if I have to lie in any particular position or scoot myself into a different position, which I did. I do better if I can think it through a little ahead of time. In this case, I just sort of went for it, figuring I was not the only person who did not have lots of experience climbing onto a tattooing table. She then had me move my legs back, toward her. I then spent the rest of the session worried that I had crept them forward again, and that she was having to lean over uncomfortably; at some point I realized that would be HER problem to fix if so, and that she has PLENTY of experience asking people to move.

Before she started, I told her that I was worried I might twitch or wiggle, and she said not to worry, that she is very good at keeping people still. And indeed: throughout the entire tattoo, I was intermittently aware of the firm pressure of her hand right near where she was working, keeping my calf, and specifically the inch or so of it she was currently working on, immobile. I felt pretty able to shift my head or arms a little, or pick up my phone, without worrying that I might move my leg.

She did surprisingly little pre-talk. She said “Ready?,” and I said “Ready,” and she began. I noticed she would put a little friction right where she was about to work on the tattoo—not just the pressure of the hand holding my leg still, but like the little rub-rub-rub a nurse might do right before giving a shot. This was helpful: the pain never came from an unexpected place.

There was a lot of WIPING during the tattoo: bzz bzz bzz, wipe, bzz bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, wipe. I’m just going to assume wiping up blood, but maybe also ink? I don’t really know how it works. There were also several more extensive wipe-downs, where she wiped the whole calf with a cool fluid; that felt very nice against the heat of the process. I’d have been interested to see if there was a lot of blood on the cloths, but she’d whisked them away and it seemed too weird to ask. In retrospect, I should have just asked: tattoo artists as a group do not seem easily off-put by weird stuff.

The tattooing itself (excluding consultation, revisions, set-up, me wanting to pee one last time before she got started) took almost exactly one hour, which surprised me: when I’d estimated a six-inch tattoo, she’d said she could do that in an hour or two, which already surprised me; when we made the tattoo bigger, I’d expected something more like two or three hours. This is when she told me that tulips (and pansies) go surprisingly quickly. I think I could easily have endured at least another hour without a break, but it’s hard to say. I was talking to a co-worker who has had a fair amount of tattoo work done, and she said even with a break for a snack/drink in the middle, her own limit is about three hours; after that she starts to feel icky/woozy.

When she was done, I half-sat up so I could see the tattoo, while leaving my calf sideways up on the table; the tattoo artist was putting away her supplies and also periodically wiping the blood that was seeping out of the tattoo. The tattooed skin was noticeably raised/puffy, with pink all around it. (It had flattened by the next day; the pink is still there three days later, but much narrower, and less bright.) She took a few photos, and then asked me about adhesive. I do get pink marks from bandaids, and sometimes they’re itchy/raised marks, but it’s not enough of a problem to make me stop using bandaids. She said in that case she would go ahead and put on Saniderm, but that I should only leave it on until the next morning, instead of for several days as usual; she said I would get almost all of the benefit of it, but without as much exposure to adhesive. And she said if it itched or bothered me before then, I should just take it off early, no big deal; and in that case I would follow the no-Saniderm section of the aftercare instructions.

The Saniderm was like…a piece of very thin and not very shiny cling-wrap, and sticky. She cut a sheet of it to fit around the whole tattoo plus a nice wide border, and then she applied it, and it was not very visible. She said it was normal for the tattoo to seep blood and fluid, and for that blood/fluid to build up under the Saniderm; but she said if fluid started leaking out, that meant the sterile seal was broken, and I should remove the Saniderm and follow the no-Saniderm healing instructions. The Saniderm DID leak, just a couple hours later, so I wore it even less than the original smaller amount of time she’d prescribed.

Aftercare instructions vary WIDELY. So widely, it makes me very nervous: one place says do THIS, avoid THAT; another place says, do THAT, definitely not THIS. The aftercare instructions my tattoo artist gives for non-Saniderm healing: wash three times per day with unscented antibacterial soap (just using your hand, no washcloth), for as long as the tattoo is still seeping/damp; when the tattoo stops seeping and starts to feel dry/tight, apply a little bit of unscented sensitive skin lotion after washing, and drop down to washing once or twice a day. Keep up the washing/moisturizing routine for 2-3 weeks. DON’T SCRATCH OR PICK OR EXFOLIATE.

I was worried about the discomfort of sleeping, wearing pants, etc., but it’s been okay. I am very AWARE OF my pants where they brush against the tattoo, which continues to feel like a sunburn. I am CAREFUL when getting into / out of bed, and I don’t SLIDE my leg across the sheets, I only pick my leg up and put it back down in the new position; but it’s fine to sleep on it. When I first get up in the morning and swing my legs into a standing position, there is a sudden increase in the burning feeling. I keep the shower temperature lower, and try to keep the tattoo away from the shower spray as much as I can; hot water hurts more, as it does with a sunburn, and the spray is unpleasant.

I am extremely, extremely pleased with the tattoo, and am looking forward to getting more. A part of me wishes I’d started sooner; a much larger part of me feels pleased with the idea of starting NOW, in mid-life, as a treat.