It usually happens about a year after my last tattoo was inked onto my skin. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. But it always hits me eventually.
The feeling of getting a tattoo is so specific, so weird, that I find it hard to convey to people who haven’t experienced it. Obviously it varies from person to person (and tattoo artist to tattoo artist), but in my particular body, it feels like:
someone stabbing me very quickly, very shallowly, over and over again, in one contained area, with a remarkably tiny needle
a sharp sunburn or other sudden burn on the location
the type of pain that, in a sadomasochistic kink scene, would make me think about saying “yellow,” like it was a viable option on the distant horizon, but not actually say it
It seems like an odd sensation, therefore, to crave in the way that one can crave an orgasm or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. And yet the craving does always return to me, so clear and particular in its demands.
The same way I might get horny with sadomasochistic eagerness upon reuniting with a beau who’s tied me up beautifully and made me spacey with their careful rope knots, or a partner who’s dripped hot wax onto me in wild patterns at night, I sometimes get horny at the thought of a new tattoo. It’s hard to talk about because, for me at least, it’s not horny horny. Like, I don’t want to fuck when I think about it. I don’t envision fucking, or want to fuck, my tattoo artist. It’s actually not even about her at all, though it certainly helps that the art she’s left on my skin every time she’s touched it has been exactly, exactly what I wanted. For me it’s really just about the act, the feeling.
Would I feel differently if I’d dated or fucked a tattoo artist and they’d pressed their needle to my skin? Would the arousal have ramped up more immediately, more noticeably? Or would it still have been – as it is now – a feeling that moreso creeps up when I think about the thing, than while the thing is actually happening?
The first time I got a tattoo, it felt weirdly erotic, absurdly intimate. Two of my friends had blocked out the whole day at this particular small-town tattoo parlor, each to get large pieces on their arms (a lighthouse, an elephant). I’d asked to tag along, wanting my first tattoo, something small, but not feeling quite brave enough at that point to book my own appointment; instead I wanted to ride the coattails of theirs. So, in between the lighthouse and the elephant, the butch-seeming tattoo artist with the long blonde braid found time to tattoo a solid red heart on the lower part of my belly, where it met with my mons pubis.
The trouble was that this was – is – an erogenous zone for me, which was precisely the reason I was getting a tattoo there: to X-mark the spot for any confused lovers who found their way there. (This, weirdly, worked. I found that mentioning or explaining this tattoo to a date or hookup would almost always lead to better, hotter sex for me, both because it showed a partner precisely where to press, and because the very act of them lingering on a non-genital hotspot before going straight to pussytown made sex feel better for me.)
I had the weird experience of feeling zaps of arousal shoot through me alongside the pain, while the artist carved crimson ink into me. I really wasn’t trying to be a creep or a weirdo but it sorta felt like getting tattooed on my nipple, or even my labia – there was a pleasure alongside the pain that I had to bite back. Maybe this is part of why I sometimes ache for tattoos in the way one can ache for a deep hard fuck. Maybe that’s weird to admit. Who knows.
I was so happy when I found my current tattoo artist, because she had that perfect mix of 1) artistry the likes of which you’d actually like to have on your body for the rest of your goddamn life and 2) a temperament and personality I could feel calm and unpressured around. Like my hairdresser, with whom I share a similar level of “I won’t let anyone else touch me” trust, my tattoo artist makes enough small talk to set me at ease and feel like I’ve ticked the conversation box for the day, but then seems to go into a trance in which further conversation is neither expected nor needed. At both the tattoo parlor and the hairdresser, I always bring my Kindle now, and read a book – maybe a preachy self-help book, maybe a clever erotic novel, maybe a colorful case history – and it weirdly seems to sink me further into the feeling that this is, in some sense, a scene. I have to distract myself from the kinkiness of it with a book, or else I’d get too absorbed, feel too subby having my epidermis poked or my roots painted.
But beyond all of this, if you talk to any oft-tattooed person about the craving to be inked, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you about endorphins. One of the most beautiful things about the tattooing experience for me is the hill-valley-hill-valley journey of pain, followed by endorphin rushes, and then more pain, and then more endorphins. It shows me what my body does to manage pain, in a way that is easy to observe and to track over time. The stabs will feel sharp and abrasive for a minute or two and then fade down to background noise as I get absorbed in my book, and as my brain pumps natural painkillers into my system. And then eventually those neuro-drugs will wear off and the worst of the pain will set back in. And then I’ll have to breathe, and count, and remind myself that it is possible to live only in the “now” and to last until the next now, and the next, and the next, and to get through a whole afternoon of ink that way and live to tell the tale.
There’s something perverse, too, about paying for the whole thing at the end. You OK the transaction on the debit card machine, balking inwardly at the number even as you tell yourself, “Permanent art on your skin isn’t something you should skimp on.” You tip, because that’s the done thing and the artist deserves it. You’re still hazy from the needle, maybe dehydrated; your blood sugar is likely low and you need something to eat, you’re dizzy but euphoric, your skin looking different like you could be a whole different you now if you wanted to be. You type in your PIN and pay for your pain. You feel a sweet deep heat like you’d get from any big purchase that you knew was absolutely right, like a laptop you needed for school or a new phone you’d spent months budgeting for – like, oh yes, this is so fancy and beautiful, and I don’t even need to feel guilty about it.
I remember the embarrassment, once, of realizing I didn’t have any cash with me at a tattoo parlor that was cash-only (I think their machine was temporarily broken that day). Freshly inked, with “THIS TOO / SHALL PASS” newly shining on the insides of my wrists, I dashed across the crosswalk to a convenience store that had an ATM, and clumsily withdrew the right amount plus a tip. I felt frantic, humiliated – probably in a heightened way because of the endorphins. What if they thought I was gonna do the tattoo-parlor equivalent of “dine and dash”? What if they thought I was gonna… sit and quit? Endure and detour? Ink and hoodwink? I came back and paid the guy, but I never went into that place again.
My next tattoo, I think, is going to be a large piece on my thigh, and it’ll be the most explicitly sexual of all my tattoos so far. I’m waiting until my artist gets back from maternity leave in the fall. But until then, I’ll probably have the thought at least once a week – in my body as much as in my brain – that I want another tattoo, and I want it now.