No Pain, No Gain (CW NonFiction)

No Pain, No Gain

The parlor’s employees and patrons were intimidating the first time I stepped through the doors. I’d always thought I was the kind of person not to take someone at face value, but seeing these heavily pierced and tattooed persons actually scared me. I was rather nervous, clutching my purse to my side – in which tucked inside was the picture of my number one comic book hero in a pose I wanted slightly altered to fit on the back of my leg. It was the perfect spot to fit her entire being and the power that I always thought seemed to illuminate from her.
“Can I help you with something?” It was obvious to Jack and the other artists at the front desk of the shop that my sisters and I stuck out like sore thumbs in this house of body-art and rebellion.
“Uh, yeah. I wanted to know about getting this on the back of my leg. How much it would cost, that kind of a thing,” I fumbled around in my purse with extremely shaky hands for the carefully folded cover-printout of the 192nd issue of X-Men (2nd Series), published in December of 2006. The cover featured Rogue, my favorite X-Men, in a rendition of her original, 1980’s era-green-caped costume done by Chris Bachalo. “I went on to describe how I wanted to change it –in particular taking the syringe out of her hand that she was (I assumed) about to use on Sabretooth, whose head she was standing on.
“And what about these people in the back, did you still want them there, or just her?”
“No, no…just her, and the chain, and the fire coming around her,” I motioned on the picture to what I was talking about.
Jack launched into a spiel about some French painter, and talked about a lot of artsy things about movement and shape that I didn’t understand –I’m not a painter, I wanted to say, I’m a writer! I have no idea what you’re saying! But I nodded along as though I understood completely what he was talking about. Everyone in the shop was ecstatic about it. All of them were comic book fans and a few of them even seeming a little jealous of Jack, who was in line to be my artist, but glad that I walked into their shop to see about doing such a great tattoo.
I took a quick look at Jack’s book, which he walked me through personally, trying hard to point out good pieces that he had done, a lot of which were cartoon-based in nature. I knew that Jack would be the one to do this tattoo for me after looking at other pieces he had done, but my sisters and I left the shop, promising to come back if I didn’t find what I was looking for elsewhere.
We went to another shop across town called Mid-West Tattoos, the only other one we could actually find in the city. Many of the ones on my list of parlors in the area had closed or disappeared to a new unknown location, making finding them hard. The people at the second shop were nice, I was sure, but looking through their albums, my sisters and I decided that their work was lacking something. They didn’t seem as excited about doing it as Jack and the team at Artisan’s had.
It also made me uncomfortable that the artist I initially talked to here, offered to let me come in back and watch him tattoo another patron before even asking if it was OK with the patron first. It also bothered me that, unlike Jack, this artist didn’t offer me any ideas to make it better. He simply took a glance at the photo, said, “Sure, we can do that for about $350-$400” and was ready to do it. He also didn’t seem pleased that I mentioned I had gone to Artisan’s first and Jack was offering to do it for me at a discounted price of $260 –drastically below any of the other estimated costs I had heard.
The only thing that made the trip to Mid-West worthwhile was what one of the more burly artists had to say to me upon taking a look at what I wanted; “Well, that’s not a butterfly.” His obvious distaste for the feminine butterfly that most girls who came in were looking for was apparent in his voice and the way that he leaned over the printout of Rogue. “That’s going to look really cool.” He was impressed that it was going to be my first tattoo, being that it was quite large for a first-timer, covering almost the whole back of my leg. I had decided a long time ago that if I was going to get a tattoo, it was going to be big the first time. Why wimp-out and get something little and dainty? If I couldn’t handle getting something of this size, then I probably didn’t need it at all.
My sisters and I went back to Artisans and set up an appointment with Jack about an hour and a half-later. I put down my $25 dollar deposit and walked out with a date for about a month later, just before Christmas.
The month passed by slowly. Some days I even forgot about it, but then I would take a glance at the mirror where I had posted the date in erasable marker –so to be sure not to forget it, and immense excitement would fill me again. Finally, Finals Week of my first semester of college came and went. I was back in Artisan’s tattoo parlor, my sweat pant leg rolled up past the back of my knee, and a blue outline of my concept on the back of my leg. My sisters were sitting in chairs off to the side, trying to stay out of the way, as Jack pulled on gloves, tested his machine, and poured inks into tiny caps.
I rested my head on my arms, staring around the room, trying not to think about what it would feel like when the needle would start pulsating against my skin. Rogue looked gorgeous, even as an outline. Over the last month, I had debated a few times on whether I should actually go through with this. I worried about my future self; how I would feel about having this entity on the back of my leg for the rest of my life. She was hide-able, I decided. Besides, the reason I wanted her wasn’t because she was a comic book character. It was because she was gorgeous, strong, talented, and my hero. She had always been my favorite comic book character –the one who can’t touch people for risk of hurting them, the one who struggles with herself every day because she wants things that she can’t have. I felt a connection to her, not because of her power, but because of her strong sense of family, her desires, the risks she was willing to take to help people. I wanted to be like her and I wanted homage to her greatness.
“I’ll just do a couple of lines to start out with to let you get a feel for what it’s going to be like, and then we’ll really get started.” Jack took a moment to let me calm down before leaning over my leg, starting somewhere near the bottom.
The actual laying on the chair and repeatedly being stabbed was actually rather boring. People often ask me what it feels like, and “didn’t that hurt?” Well, of course it hurt, you idiot. It is a tattoo. But honestly, it wasn’t that bad. After an hour or so in the chair, it felt a lot like a cat scratch –long, and searing. Really the most entertaining part of it, besides listening to my sisters and my random spouting of obscenities, was the parlor’s employees (and even one or two patrons) entering the backroom to watch Jack work, uttering words like, “Fuckin’ sweet, man”, and “That looks so cool,” over and over again.
At the end of the first sitting, nearly four hours later, the outline and black shading were finished. I walked out, my leg covered in a layer of petroleum jelly, wrapped in saran wrap and medical tape. A list of care-instructions was folded neatly in my purse along with fifteen dollars for supplies, and an appointment to put in the color and final additions in two weeks.
The aftercare was actually the worst part. My leg was pretty sore for the first couple of days after getting it done, but I hobbled my way around the house, suddenly glad for the tiny cement shower in the mud-room that had been the bane of my childhood. It was the perfect size with an extendable showerhead, to wash an otherwise awkward area without getting completely drenched in the process, three times a day. Once a tattoo is in the healing process, it actually begins to peel, which makes you itch like crazy, but of course actually scratching it would ruin the art, so I had to suffer in silence. It also didn’t help that I was apparently using to much of the healing ointment, and broke out in hives from it, which just added to the annoyance.
Two weeks later, not quite fully healed, I was back in the chair for another long sitting. Time dwindled slowly as my sisters still sat nearby. They made me sound like a pervert to Jack. He actually let me peruse a very interesting (though rather creepy) comic book involving demonic sodomy once he had learned of my interests. Finally, nearly an hour after the shop had closed I was finally finished and looking at the finished product. Needless to say, even while he had been tattooing it, I was feeling apprehensive, especially since I hadn’t been able to watch it be done. I admitted that I felt, “kind of like a poser”, and was assured that it didn’t matter, because it was still a really ‘sweet’ tattoo.
Looking at her then, my face flushed. It was exactly what I had wanted but with Jack’s own creative touch as well. I had originally planned to get a small, black, encircled X somewhere else, but we had decided to incorporate it into this one. The vision in my head had been of a solid black X so when Jack brought up the idea to doing it in purple, my reaction was mixed.
“What kind of purple are we talking about here? Like…lavender or darker?”
“I’m thinking more of a metallic,” He replied, mixing up his inks before we started. “It’s going to look really good with the blues and the greens to add in some different colors because there is so much of the blue going on.”
I loved it. I still love it. People always ask , “What are you going to think of it when you’re 80?”, and I shrug at them. It’s still going to be beautiful, so what does it matter?
Getting my tattoo made me realize a lot of things. First, I realized how cool my family actually is, my Mom in particular. She was always one of those “cool moms” but the fact that she might even like my tattoos more then I do, is highly amusing. She actually encourages me to show them off, and is just as excited about my other ideas for body-art as I am.
Secondly, I learned that what other people think doesn’t matter. Some people might say that it was stupid to get a comic book heroine on the back of my leg –especially when I only read the older collections, but really…it’s none of their business. I don’t have to explain myself to them, and I don’t expect them to tell me why they did some of the stupid things that they probably did when they were my age. As long as I’m happy with it, that’s all that matters.
Lastly, like the signs in the tattoo parlors across the nation say: No Pain, No Gain. Like everything in life, you’re going to have to give a little something up –be it in the form of cash, valuables, time, or even a little self-inflicted pain, in order to get something that you really want. In the end, you’re left with something totally gorgeous that you’re going to have to remind you of what an awesome time you had when you were young. I might not live to be 80, or even 25, but either way, I am going to be able to say that I got a kick-ass tattoo, of a very pretty southern belle, and that it was totally worth it.