Greenstorm's Journal

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.