Ink.

A third sitting with my main man Michael T. Gardner of Everett's Tattoo Garden.

Not only is he an artist of the highest caliber, he also knows to respond to all my weeps, wails, pleas and complaints with a friendly "Shut the fuck up," and that's a quality to be proud of.

This piece was begun a number of months ago.

(You'll notice the top bit is a cover-up. This isn't due to any lack of affiliation with the good Doctor of Journalism. That piece was very old and had aged poorly; I'm having it redone in another location after the back piece is completed. In the meantime, I'm making sure to stay extra weird, as compensation.)

Because I am surprisingly wimpy when it comes to tattoo pain, I tend to sit for no longer than two hours at a stretch; just enough time to make me forget what I'm doing to myself and start to say, in a sweaty, endorphin-induced haze, "Dude, that actually feels kinda good... Like, you're scratching my back, but, like, REALLY hard... Dude, I love you, man. You're the best." To which Mike answers good-naturedly, "Shut the fuck up."

I have lots of tattoos. I suppose I collect them, in a way. They're much more expensive than most stamps, and much more painful than, say, china cows, but there's something comforting in wearing your art collection permanently all over your body. A sense of ownership, of partnership, even, with the pieces, the like of which one can't have with mere objects.

Of course, I'm biased when I say that. I don't have any physical object collections. My fixation is on getting rid of things. I love moving the most - it enables the kind of wholesale, soul-cleansing bric-a-brac-ectomy for which I just LIVE. Nothing is safe from my rampage of practicality. Cherished stuffed animals; books I can't remember reading or wanting to read; touching birthday cards from faraway friends; Everything Must Go. Only once I've pared down my possessions to the things I am physically unable to part with - only then do I feel my job is done, and can I move forward contentedly, skin shed.

So I suppose perhaps that's why I find tattoos so comforting. I'll never feel OBLIGATED to get rid of them. No one can ever say, "Don't you feel like you have maybe one too many tattoos? Maybe time to cut down, take a few to the Goodwill?" They don't weigh me down; on the contrary, I find them liberating, comforting, like a weird, asymmetrical embrace. They take up no space in my apartment; only in the house in which I've got to live for my entire life, my weird, alien body, and if you've got to live somewhere forever, if you don't ever need to move, why worry about cleaning house, about purging? Why not just furnish it and decorate it as nicely as you're able?

I think about stuff like this sometimes in the midst of a tattoo sitting, while I'm making water-buffalo noises of agony, reminding myself in muttered epithets that I was the one who ASKED for this, and meekly acquiescing to Mike's genial request to "Shut the fuck up."