My tattoos help me feel more comfortable in my own skin

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/07/tattoos-skin-dinosaur

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The needle never hurts any less. Five previous sessions taught me that much, but I tried to push the fact out of my mind as Austin the tattoo artist gave his instrument a few experimental pulses before setting into the afternoon’s work. The tattoo gun sounded like an angry hornet communicating in morse code. Laid out on my back, I took a deep breath as I felt Austin start filling in the ink outline he had started on a couple of sittings before. Two hours later, the pain was gone and the art remained.

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When I first walked into that shop three years ago, artwork of an allosaurus skeleton in hand, I was a little shocked at myself. I had always been “meek and mild”, as a college friend once described me, and getting inked felt like something reserved for people tougher or wilder than my nerdy self. I just didn’t feel like I was the sort of person who got tattooed.

Three years and four pieces later, I realise how stupid that thought was. Who’s the sort of person who gets tattooed? Almost everyone. Ink has never been the sole domain of prisoners, sailors or soldiers. During the 11 hours or so I’ve spent having art beautifully and painfully jabbed into my arm, I’ve seen people of all different backgrounds who have felt the same sting as they commit what they love to their skin. So far, none of them have jumped on to a Harley and throttled off into the desert sunset after walking out the door.

Yet, no matter how intricate the work or how skilled the artist, it’s still normal to look at tattoos as the brand of everything philistine and immature. Without any curiosity about why people get tattooed and what those intimate illustrations mean, the judgmental still hold on to the stereotype that tattoos are juvenile sketches drunkenly picked off a tattoo parlour wall at an indecent hour of the night, a bold and true signal of loose morals.

That’s not to mention the litany of other knee-jerk objections. That any tattoo will become boring and unwelcome with time. That tattoos will fade and sag with age. That tattoos are mutilations of a body that – depending on how religious you are – a god or your parents gave you. That you might as well dive into a pool of hepatitis. That no one will ever want to hire you. The risk of not getting hired or, worse, fired is sadly real. But that unfortunate reality stems from the social stigma attached to an artform with which many people engage.

I can’t speak for anyone else. Everyone has their own reasons for being tattooed. But, for me, the ink on my body marks a life trajectory I never expected to follow.

The west got under my skin. I knew I had to move out that way as soon as I saw the Milky Way splashed above a dark landscape of rock and juniper during a 2009 trip, and two years later I settled in Utah for good. I could finally explore the painted deserts and ancient outcrops I had dreamed of seeing since I was a child, and, though I had never set out to be a writer, I had somehow ploughed a path to a career musing about prehistoric life. I started spending weeks at a time hiking the sun-beaten stone and sand looking for buried monsters. In time, I knew I wanted to express that affection through a tattoo, and it had to be the allosaurus.

I asked science-minded artist Glendon Mellow to draw the design – the great Jurassic carnivore in a classic dinosaur “death pose”, head thrown back and jaws agape. The dinosaur was more than a representation of my adopted home state and my affection for the past. There’s so much we still don’t know about dinosaurs and the life Jurassic – the tattoo is a promise to myself to keep searching for signs of life in rock and bone.

My tattoos are a way to remind myself of what I love

Two other dinosaurs, ceratosaurus and torvosaurus, soon followed, their skeletons intertwined on my right arm around the original allosaurus. Together, they represent the three apex predators of the Jurassic strata I’ve been helping research crews uncover each summer. And, as I write this, I’m in the middle of another on my left arm – a raven and coyote skull juxtaposed against a claret cup cactus and a jackalope (a mythical western chimera, a jackrabbit with the horns of a pronghorn). The inspiration for this latest one actually came while I was walking the desert searching for my Mesozoic friends, where signs of life and death are so closely intertwined.

These tattoos will fade some in time. Sun and my lymph nodes will take their toll. An eventual touching up can remedy that. And even if the improbable happens and I give up my life as a desert rat scrabbling for old bones, the tattoos will still be intricate reminders of those chapters in my life. That’s really what keeps me going back under the needle. My tattoos aren’t for you. They’re for me. They are a way to remind myself of what I love, injected into a bodily shell I’ve never fully felt comfortable in. They are a way to choose my own skin and wrap myself in reminders of the life I’ve lived and where I hope the future might lead me. They are the best way I know to wear my heart on my sleeve.