The Tao Tattoo Experience

Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

1. The Meaning
2. The Experience
3. The Background
4. Tattwo

I decided to get my Tao tat­too about a month before I actu­ally had it done. Choosing an artist wasn’t hard. Tiana, who’s awe­some bro­ken argyle tat­too reminds me of insou­ciant kites against a sky, had hers done by Jay at New Moon. After see­ing some more of his work, which fea­tures finely detailed lines sim­i­lar to what I had in mind, I decided to go with him as well.

The appoint­ment was short. A quick check to make sure the posi­tion­ing close to the wrist joint was accept­able, and to leave a deposit.

The recep­tion­ist asked me, “What does the kanji mean?”.

“Kanji?”. I ques­tioned her assump­tion, and she quickly cor­rected her­self. “Sorry, is it Chinese or Japanese or Korean…?”. I explained the char­ac­ter, and how it’s writ­ten the same way in Chinese and Japanese, the cal­lig­ra­phy being in a Chinese style.

Pat was with me when the day came. We sat down, and he asked Jay, “How long have you been tat­too­ing?”. Jay squinted at the ana­log on the wall, and said, “Ohhh…since twelve”, and his humour put me at ease.

He shaved my wrist (which I found funny, cause I’m a typ­i­cal hair­less Asian), put on his smart-looking frames, and tried to align the car­bon trans­fer about fif­teen times before I was sat­is­fied with the posi­tion­ing and rota­tion. The area was already raw from the place sten­cil > remove sten­cil > repeat process before the ink­ing started.

He pulled packs of nee­dles out of his drawer, poured out black ink into an ink cup, turned on the machine, and went to work.

I didn’t watch. When I was young, I once watched my pedi­a­tri­cian take vials of blood from my arm and soon felt queasy. For years I thought it was the sight of blood, but it turns out that it was the drain­ing of blood from my sys­tem because I’d still get extremely light-headed when look­ing away dur­ing blood tests. I didn’t watch Jay work any­way because I didn’t want to take the chance.

We talked. About how he sort of fell into the busi­ness. About what the char­ac­ter said¹. About the genius of Trailer Park Boys. About his band, whose sound is influ­enced most by early Pixies². I wanted to talk more about them: how Cobain thought he was meant to be in the band and based Nirvana off their sound, what he thought of Frank Black’s solo career, but didn’t want to dis­tract him.

There were two framed posters of paint­ings of Mary and Jesus on the wall. Above Mary on the left was a car­toon bub­ble added on top that said, “Hey Pendejo!” and above Jesus was, “Nobody fucks with da Jesus!”, a ref­er­ence I guessed to The Big Lebowski.

Before going, I asked a cou­ple peo­ple if their tat­toos hurt. The most com­mon thing they told me was that it felt like a cat scratch or a sun­burn. They describe the pain as more annoy­ing than intol­er­a­ble. I didn’t know what to expect since I have a very low tol­er­ance for pain, but it felt exactly like what it was: being stabbed in the wrist a mil­lion times with a needle.

Even though I didn’t look, I could tell where he was on the char­ac­ter. It only really hurt when going across the tendon.

Pat said he saw my eyes roll back in my head from the pain a cou­ple times. I focused on not tens­ing up, and kept telling myself to breathe.

Halfway through, I stopped. I was get­ting hot so I took off my hoodie, and I could feel beads of sweat form­ing of my fore­head. Jay told me to lie down for a cou­ple min­utes; his nor­mal pro­ce­dure when some­one starts to get warm.

In all, it was an hour from enter­ing to leav­ing. Jay was a super nice guy. He had a very steady hand (so Pat told me) and did jus­tice to all the sub­tle details of the strokes. Unfortunately, he stepped out­side before I could tip him per­son­ally, so I left the tip with the recep­tion­ist³.

Afterward, on the way back to his place for din­ner, Pat told me he was proud of me. It was strange to hear any­one say that. The only other per­son who’s ever said that was my mom, but only about things she was proud of — my marks, my awards — and noth­ing that ever mat­tered to me. My dad was prob­a­bly proud of me, but he would never admit it. It was heart­en­ing to hear Pat say it, like I wasn’t alone in the world, and some­one else cared about how I turned out.

Even Rockstar Jeff con­grat­u­lated me at work when he saw it, which I found odd, like con­grat­u­lat­ing some­one for eat­ing breakfast.

Pat said, “If I told you in sec­ond year⁴ that you were going to get a tat­too, you prob­a­bly wouldn’t have believed me”.

I agreed.

1. He said he never inked it on any­one else before, which was a very good thing. [↑]
2. Note to self: must check them out, because I love Where Is My Mind? off The Pixies’ sec­ond album [↑]
3. I still feel really bad about that. I wanted to thank him again. [↑]
4. When we met in uni­ver­sity [↑]