Stabbed a million times

The tattoo on the front of my thigh got colour today. It's fascinating how ink settles into my mind and body-- it really makes me revise my idea of self-image. This is not something I have done that I've put on myself and it hangs out there. This is first an idea, then a collaboration, then a physical process as its put on, then a point of attention on my body where it hurts and requires care and looks like an alien. After a week or two or three there's a visual process where the ink settles-- right now everything is raised where the needles freaked the skin out, and the ink appears to sit on the surface of those raised lines. The ink migrates down inside the skin visually over the next few weeks, and the raised areas subside. Redness fades. And then there's this thing, a tattoo sitting inside my skin.

At some point my brain switches from 'there's this thing on your skin' (which is where I expected it to stay) to 'this is part of your body'. This piece on the front of my thigh is something I can see every day, very different from the one on my ass, but with the outline there was this same process. First I'd look at it (pretty often, cause it's cool) and think, 'that looks nice' or 'that has a weird texture' or 'what do I think of that shape or line?'. Then the mental settling happened, sometime after the physical ink dropped visually inside my skin, and the artwork mentally became a part of my body. I admire it sometimes, like I admire the tendons in my hands or the musculature of my body or anything else I happen to notice, but I admire it from within, as an extension of myself (my arm, my leg, my tattoo, my bicep).

This leads to some kind of interesting complications - not serious ones, but I do have someone else's artwork on me, and I feel a responsibility to keep that artwork in reasonable condition and not, for instance, sunburn it a bunch which would age it prematurely. I feel a little more protective of it than I would my ordinary skin, even though I'm really quite fond of my skin.

I also think of my body as something of a canvas now, instead of 'only' my body-- when I think of the other things I want on it, or whether I do, I think in terms of positive and negative space on my body and whether things will go with other things in the required fashion.

So in short, the tattoo feels more subsumed into my identity than i expected, and my self-image has expanded to include myself, not as a tattooed person specifically, but as an artistic whole with very specific visually artistic aspects.

Anyhow, rambling.

BTW

It's -pretty- but the colour hasn't settled into my brain yet. But it is PRETTY.

Cycles, Work, Blood, and Moving Hell

Speaking of tattooes, there are two more I intend on getting: my season tree and ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (note for later consideration). Piotr was the first person besides myself I ever heard verbalise the connection between a nature religion/pagan/Demeter stuff and the cyclic nature of everything from circumstances to emotion and thought, but that concept has been absolutely central to my intellectual and emotional being more or less since I achieved the ability to worry about my mental/emotional survival. Season change, or more accurately the growth/decay/humous cycle, is such a solid and overarching metaphor in my mind that it can hold me all by itself when things are bad, and it can tether me when I start to fly too high. Experience informs and strengthens this lifeline of mine.

Having said that, I've just finished with a lot of bad patches lately, and blood days are just over, and I realise I need to start keeping track of these things again. The move disrupted my calender on which I'd been marking my period because the damned thing wasn't on the wall where I was, my cycle itself got badly disrupted a couple of months ago and is perhaps just stabilising now, and in that time of chaos things slid a bit: I contemplated the murder of my coworker (shouldn't there be a name for that, like matricide and infanticide? I spend more awake time with her than even with my boyfriend, it is a special case), I moved three people (myself and my freeloader roommate in to the new place, and my disappearing roommate out after she left with only what she felt like taking) with all the move-out cleaning that entailed.

I'm looking forward to some good bits-- to some more intense socialisation (more intense than seeing each friend once every three months if at all), to money and work and enjoyment thereof if I can insist on a day or two a week working either alone or with someone else in the company, to writing a little and fucking some and doing a little cooking. Basically, I'm looking forward to not being too stressed out to keep my head on straight.

That's all.