SIT STILL, GODDAMNIT

As I sit here somewhat preoccupied by my first appointment on August 18th with a nagging feeling that maaaaaybe I shouldn’t be doing this, I remind myself of several reassuring facts:

1) I’ve been thinking about this for years.
2) I’m willing to put down a lot of money for this.
3) I’m excited to see what the art is going to look like when it’s ready.
4) I’m willing to sit in a tattoo studio with a stranger touching me for a total net time of 20 hours.

Number 4 is especially damning, since I’m not even willing to call Xfinity and talk to a live person about lowering my internet bill. My faucet hose has been leaking for three years, and I’d rather deal with it by changing the pot out from under the sink every four days instead of calling someone to visit my house to install a new one. I have anxiety, butthead. It’s terrible. But I’m not anxious about spending an afternoon with a guy I don’t know who I’m paying good money to wreck my arm for the rest of my life! I must want it pretty bad.

As I rapidly run out of reasons to truly not want this thing, I’m left with one last fear (at least at this moment): my sessions will all be from 12pm – 5pm, with occasional breaks. Five hours is a really fucking long time to sit anywhere doing ANYTHING. I’ve been on a five-hour train ride with nothing but an iPod and it was very hard to sit still after about three hours. All sorts of shifting and moving in my seat. All sorts of causing a huge problem for a tattoo artist who needs me to, like, not squirm at all. FIVE hours.

During another one of my obsessive Reddit excursions where I type Google Search prompts such as “reddit what do you do for long tattoo sessions” and “reddit oh god what the hell am i getting myself into”, I’ve come across some very valuable tips regarding my fear of a torturously long span of time:

Talk to the artists and the clientele in the shop!
Oh FUCK no, dude. That’s not fucking happening. What am I going to talk about? My crippling social anxiety? Ha ha ha ha haaaa! No.

Watch movies on your phone.
OK, this is an idea, sure. My plan is to alternate between podcasts and music pretty much the entire time, which sounds like a good way to pass the time in theory, but one’s mind starts to wander around, oh, minute number 165. Plus, how am I supposed to listen to Never Not Funny with Jimmy Pardo? That shit is never not funny! I’ll be shaking in my chair with uncontrollable snickering, turning my arm into a Jackson Pollock painting. No sir.

Just sit there and focus on your breathing.
Shut up, idiot. This was a real person suggesting on Reddit to just sit there and breathe and try to enjoy it. This dude obviously never actually got a tattoo in his life. I am not going to “breathe and enjoy it” while having 3,000 needles per minute jabbed into my skin. I’m going to “breathe and wish I was dead”.

Perhaps I’ll get to use some hella fidget spinners! Not at all disruptive!

Now, the one tattoo that I currently have only took about 40 minutes to plop onto my skin and I did actually kind of enjoy it. It was certainly an interesting sensation, to say the least. 40 minutes isn’t five hours, but it’s a decent chunk of time and I did spend it talking to the artist. It was mostly dorky-ass questions like “hey, did your tattoos hurt?” and “hey, will this tattoo hurt?” and “hey, tattoos?!”, but he was very nice about it and I’m glad I was able to waste his time with something a child could have done for me in her basement using sharp sticks with finger paint on them.

I read all sorts of testimonials about people having to tap out before the five-hour mark, but most of them were getting tattoos in sensitive areas like their thighs, collar bones, and taints. My artist specifically told me that there was no part of my upper arm that should be bad enough to want to give up mid-session, but if the adrenaline runs out after hour three and it’s just going to be pain for the next two hours, then you can bet your extremely fat butt that I’m going to be wanting to do something else besides sit there and concentrate on my breathing.

Maybe the guy will let me bring a yo-yo.