The studio smelled like Bactine and Vaseline. A young blonde woman with pimples was getting a calligraphy tattoo of her dog’s name on her ribs. Another young, impossibly skinny woman with blue hair and huge headphones was getting tattoos of a sun and a moon on her hips. There I was, sitting the cold room in a black tank top. I hadn’t worn a fucking tank top since I was ten years old! I was wringing my hands nervously while my artist prepared the stencil. All I could think of was, “What the hell am I doing here? This is crazy! I’m crazy! I’m taking seven hundred pills for anxiety and depression and I’m having a manic episode! Help! Help, there’s no way out! There’s no way out! The walls are closing in on me! The walls are padded and they’re closing in on me and the only way out is through that return air vent up there! Maybe if I sneak away very slowly, slither on the floor, and do a backflip eight feet into the air, I can make my escape with none the wiser…”

I got over it pretty quickly. Once I took a nice, long look in the mirror (admiring my stunning physique, of course), I decided that the tattoo placement was sublime. LET THE TATTOOING COMMENCE!

I had to sit in a folding chair with my arm draped across a slanted arm rest while I watched four other people get their tattoos while lying down on massage tables. After a couple hours of uncomfortable shifting, I became rather green with envy at these motherfuckers who got to basically sleep on a bed. That was approximately half of the tattooing discomfort. The other half of the discomfort was getting a cluster of needles jabbed into my tender flesh at 200x per second.

If you’ve been an avid reader of my Chronicles of the Tattoo feature, you’ll know that I already have a small tattoo on my left arm. So, verily, I’m no stranger to the process of ink-in-flesh. Of course, that one only took about 30 minutes. This monstrosity is going to take 20 hours, with the first five hours (give or take) covered in the initial session. When that needle first touched my skin, I immediately remembered, oh yeah, this is rather painful. There are two kinds of sensations: 1) when he traces outlines, it feels like a very sharp toothpick is being dragged, with much force, across the skin, and 2) when he fills in color, it feels like a blunted toothpick is scraping my fucking skin right off. Needless to say, anyone who tells you that getting tattooed doesn’t hurt is full of fart-inducing beans.

The process felt like it went by more quickly than I had ever imagined. I took exactly four five-minute breaks, wherein I slurped down hefty mouthfuls of delicious orange juice and gulped down hefty mouthfuls of quenching and nourishing Smart Water. At one point I used the bathroom and checked the tattoo progress out in their enormous mirror. I looked quite handsome! Also, besides that obvious fact, the tattoo was looking really cool. At no point did I feel like there was a lack of congruency between how how I looked, how I felt, and how the tattoo looked on my body. I always think I look like some dork who can’t pull off the look, but I think that shit works on me. Thank God.

After getting tortured for hours on end, my session was finally over. Another quick look in their full-length mirror and I was immensely satisfied. I was pleased that I made it through the whole section without freaking out and having a complete panic attack over mutilating half my arm for the rest of my life. The artist applied Tegaderm to the tattoo, and that stuff is the shit. Look it up, it covers wounds while allowing them to both breathe and trap leaking fluids, and you can literally leave it on for five days. After that time, just apply lotion as needed, son. It makes the healing process infinitely easier, since without it you need to wash it twice a day with scalding hot water and spread some incredibly gross and slimy Aquaphor healing ointment on it to keep it from drying out. No one wants to do that! It makes you wonder why anyone would bother getting tattoos in 3370 BCE with nothing but a shitty bottle of Aquaphor. Crazy.

It felt like I had the hugest sunburn of my life for the rest of the day. I went to bed at 6:30pm and didn’t wake up until 7:30am! What a weird day all around!

So now that you’ve feasted your eyes on what is literally one session’s worth of work, you’re probably wondering the same thing I’m wondering: what the hell still needs to be done that will take another 15 hours? Good question! I don’t know, exactly! But I trust the process. For one thing, there’s a very large chunk of my inner arm that haven’t been touched yet. For another thing, my artist said he will need to redo a lot of spots that will likely fade. We need these areas of ink to be like the blackest of nights. The color of the world behind your eyelids.

In any case, I’m very pleased with it and I’m looking forward to avoiding the sun until January. Here’s to Session 2 on September 22.