Making my mark
Sep. 21st, 2013 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sacredchaoMy arm hurts. It's inflamed and ridged and swollen and weeping a little. This is expected and I paid a couple of hundred dollar for it to be in that condition.
There's something surreal about sitting calmly and watching someone permanently alter your body. Granted, the alteration isn't that huge but it's still an irrevocable act or at least one of which the reversal is difficult, painful, expensive and imperfect enough that it might as well be. I did also wonder how the original creator of the main image would feel if they were to see what I'd done with it. From their tiny carving of a coin minting die 2000-2500 years ago a coin minted not long thereafter survived two millenia to be photographed, for that photograph to be digitised, for that digital image to be fiddled with in Photoshop by me and emailed to a tattoo artist who printed it onto stencil paper and transferred it to my arm in the form of ink. That last medium would be the only one they'd have any hope of recognising and even that involved electrically powered vibrating needles. Somehow the transference of that image through so many media over such a distance and time is hugely satisfying. The tiny movements of a hand thousands of years ago are magnified and preserved on my arm. I say preserved, even if the original coin greatly outlasts my arm, which it almost undoubtedly will.
I wonder what it is about altering my body, invariably painfully, that I find so satisfying. That's probably worth dwelling on as there's the potential for that to be a less than entirely healthy addiction. It really is a satisfying thing though. I expend money, time, discomfort and even a small measure of conventional respectability and gain in return not only a body more to my liking but the sense that I have somehow earned it. More and more, I have a body that I like and I can say, on several different levels, that I deserve it. This is mine.
There's something surreal about sitting calmly and watching someone permanently alter your body. Granted, the alteration isn't that huge but it's still an irrevocable act or at least one of which the reversal is difficult, painful, expensive and imperfect enough that it might as well be. I did also wonder how the original creator of the main image would feel if they were to see what I'd done with it. From their tiny carving of a coin minting die 2000-2500 years ago a coin minted not long thereafter survived two millenia to be photographed, for that photograph to be digitised, for that digital image to be fiddled with in Photoshop by me and emailed to a tattoo artist who printed it onto stencil paper and transferred it to my arm in the form of ink. That last medium would be the only one they'd have any hope of recognising and even that involved electrically powered vibrating needles. Somehow the transference of that image through so many media over such a distance and time is hugely satisfying. The tiny movements of a hand thousands of years ago are magnified and preserved on my arm. I say preserved, even if the original coin greatly outlasts my arm, which it almost undoubtedly will.
I wonder what it is about altering my body, invariably painfully, that I find so satisfying. That's probably worth dwelling on as there's the potential for that to be a less than entirely healthy addiction. It really is a satisfying thing though. I expend money, time, discomfort and even a small measure of conventional respectability and gain in return not only a body more to my liking but the sense that I have somehow earned it. More and more, I have a body that I like and I can say, on several different levels, that I deserve it. This is mine.
