“The feeling of helplessness you are experiencing,” said The Fitz, “will probably only increase.”

Lying face down, half naked, in a cold room, arms at one’s sides, engenders the rabbit’s fear of the open field and the stooping hawk, of cruel talons digging hot furrows, sudden death from above. Somewhere in the room, the clink of instruments on a tray. People move around unseen, position lights, discuss in low voices. I lie.

The Fitz’s face swings upside down into my field of view, below meadow level — roots of clover and daisies between us. “I usually pick something in my field of view,” he suggests, “and try to light it on fire with my mind. It doesn’t make it hurt less, but it gives you something to do.”

Nearby, the hawk preens. Snap of rubber gloves. Cool mist of antiseptic. Stroke of a cold razor blade. I am drowsily counting carrots when it strikes out of a blue sky.

A modern tattoo gun uses a ring or flat array of needles, not the single needle I expected. Neither are the needles hollow like syringe needles; rather, they are packed so tightly to each other that capillary action draws ink to the tips, like the groove in a fountain pen. The needles — five in a small circle in this case — ride in a small barrel from which they draw ink. They plunge up and down, in and out of the skin, an eighth of an inch dozens of times a second, leaving a slough of slashed and destroyed skin mixed with your pigment of choice. The low tech technique employed is essentially hoping some of the pigment gets in deep enough that it remains below the scabs that form as the epidermis heals and later remains visible through translucent skin.

Does it hurt? Of course it hurts. Don’t be ridiculous. An eight of an inch only sounds like a little bit until it’s your skin. But the pain is insignificant. It’s distracting, but more significant than the amount of pain is the kind. After a few minutes it begins to acquire the grim then hypnotic character of t[he noiseless patient chase with a razor blade through one’s own finger for an errant splinter. One’s flesh becomes instead ‘the’ flesh, object rather than subject, patient rather than actor. Pain, studied carefully in good lighting, ceases to be the bogeyman and assumes instead its real purpose: a ‘check engine’ light on the dashboard of the mind, a warning that something taking place right now is damaging the body, an insistent reminder to examine what is happening.

And what is happening is a transformation of the body as permanent as the ink being implanted. Prior to becoming tattooed, I’d listened with horror to friends casually allowing that their tattoo “hadn’t turned out like I’d hoped” or “wasn’t quite right, but was pretty cool”. This was their very selves they were altering; this was permanent, this was a mar on the jewel box of the solipsistic mind. Off-handedly accepting that the sculptor’s chisel had slipped, that the design was now forever beyond reach of intent to repair, was unimaginable. I always thought I couldn’t possibly come up with anything I would want permanently drawn on my body. I couldn’t imagine being ‘a tattooed person’. Then came the day I was calling body modification studios and asking about branding and scarification and tattooing and trying to decide what most represented the ideal I was seeking and I realized that this thing I was planning was a very different thing than the thing I’d never considered, and had nothing to do with getting something drawn on my body. It was a whole new way of thinking about my self, and it explained why I’d never been able to imagine what tattooed people thought.

What changed? Years wear on, and on us. Accidents, illnesses and falls down stairs or into or out of love leave indelible visible and invisible marks on the self. The realization that the scars that make up the mind and body only accumulate in the net of the flesh as it is drawn through time, makes the body seem less a velvet-lined display box for the mind and more a favorite piece of artfully scuffed luggage. The opportunity to choose one’s own scars becomes a means with which to draw one free breath above the suffocating waves. It is an acceptance of and a triumph over mortality.

That the tattoo may not be ideally realized is unsurprising once the universe is no longer conceived as a perfection. The body is no longer an ideal to be preserved; rather it is a substance to be manipulated toward the perceived ideal, which is a function of desire rather than nature. A tattoo is a way to incorporate an idealized image — any symbol you wish, to any purpose — into the clay itself. Rather than being a crude mar on an ideal self, it is a way to pierce the mundane and provide a point where the ideal and the real touch, to implant a piece of the ideal in the mundane shell that anchors the self. It is a foreign pigment implanted in the flesh but is more natively of the mind than is one’s own body. It is an opportunity to turn one’s own body into a prayer wheel, making every quotidian revolution a repetition of a defining value. Once that is understood, the pain isn’t even a payment to be tolerated; it’s obviously and reasonably a part of claiming a piece of the infinite as one’s own. My only disappointment is that the pain, like any other mortal pain, eventually ceases. At least the ink remains.