Getting Inked

I got inked on the 29th of December, 2007.

On this day, 35 years ago, I came screaming and shouting into the world. I'm still kicking and screaming.

If you know me, then you know that this past year has been very eventful for me. If you know me better, you know it was even more eventful than the others think.

So to comemmorate this blessed event, I decided to get inked. This is not the first tattoo I got. The first one I got was an American eagle soaring across my upper right arm. I got that in 1999 in Deep Ellum, Dallas, TX, USA. I was in the company of my then girlfriend, Kim, and we both got our tattoos together. Those were the best of times. I still miss those days..

But I digress. I decided that I would celebrate all that happened so far, with a new tattoo. So I went down to the Laurie's Road Saloon for my artwork. I've been going there for almost 2 years now. They've cut my hair, shaved my beard, and taken care of all my tonsorial needs. Its an old-fashioned kind of place, where the barbers wear white sarongs and white shirts. It's a man's kind of place. No soft chairs here. Just the tools of the trade. They cut your hair with clippers and shears. They shave you with a straight razor that, if wielded wrong, could slice your jugular open. The price for this service, with tip, can go from about 60-70 rupees for a shave to 150-200 rupees for a shave, haircut, oil, and massage. Totally worth it.

They also do tattoos. According to the owner, they have had four generations of tattoo artists in the family. I got inked by the latest generation.

Getting a tattoo, for me, is not a decision to be taken lightly. I have wanted tattos for a long time. Since the days that I could draw, I have been tattooing my body with felt pens, and magic markers, and anything I can get my hands on. But when I decided to get a permanent tattoo, I spent over a year agonising over what to get, where to get it, and what significance it had for me. It also didn't help that I have a massive needle phobia. The eagle I have, represents freedom, and flying beyond the problems I had.

This time I wanted something that would have many levels of meaning. So this time I chose the Hanzi glyphs for pingjing which taken together mean serenity. This is important to me in two ways. Primarily, it is the name for the space ship in the TV series Firefly, and my friends know how much I love that show. I have gone to the lengths of threatening to beat people up for not watching the show. The other reason is that I am trying, at least now, to bring my life into shape, and I wanted to have something to symbolise it. So I decided to aspire to become more peaceful, more together. And as a reminder to myself of this, I decided to put this on my arm. So I can now be both geeky and deep in one fell swoop.

With that decision out of the way, I had to figure out exactly which version of serenity I would use. The original Serenity on TV used the Hanzi 平静 (ping2jing4), while the movie used 宁静 (ning2jing4). Wanting to get the absolute perfect tatt done, yours truly went on a hunt for the meanings of the two terms. I found the help I needed on this thread on fireflyfans.net. Apparently there is a contextual difference between the two, and it turned out that 平静 was the one more suited for me. It was also appropriate because I always felt that the TV series was far better than the movie.

So with all that printed out in a nice font, I went off to the tattoo parlour. I took my friend Mummsy (name changed to protect the guilty) with me so that she could take photos and also see that it really doesn't hurt as much as she thought it did.

So there I was, my shirt off, and my soon to be inked arm ready for action. First they scraped off the excess hair (not that there was much, but hey..), and then they overlaid the tracing and transferred it to my arm. After that it was half an hour of the machine jabbing a needle into my arm. Did it hurt? Yes it did, but not as much as you would think. After about 10 minutes, your body kind of goes "ahh fuck it, gimme the fucking painkillers" and starts uploading endorphins to your brain. You may have heard of runner's high, you can also get tattoo high, which is quite a buzz. It's also part of the reason people's tatts tend to multiply.

As far as I'm concerned, getting a tattoo is a spiritual experience. You are changing your body in a VERY permanent way. Sure, you can remove tattoos, you can change them to mean something else. You can even hide them with makeup. But at the end of the day, a tattoo is not just carved into your body, it gets hammered into your soul. At least, that's the way it is for me. I have little respect for people who get tattoos because it's fashionable. If you're doing something like this, it had better mean something to you.

So Yours Truly has a new tattoo. I've put up some of the pics here, and the rest of them are in the Serenity section of my Picasa album.