So after two hours and far too much discomfort, I’m halfway through with the inking of my new tattoo. Of course, it’s taking longer than I expected and of course this first session involved a lot more pain than I envisioned before I lay down on that damn massage table.
The status right now? The outline is complete, but it’s going to take another two hours to get all those colors under my skin. Still, even partway done, the results are a little unexpected. In some ways the change is great and in other ways it’s disconcertingly different from what my subconscious anticipated. It seems I had a Platonian construct built somewhere deep inside my brain before the little needle-machine-of-pain even got started.
Reminds me of my fiction. I think I know exactly where I’m going but it never ends up where I expected, plus the pain thing of course. Somewhere in the process there is always pain. Right now I’m trying to kickstart my work on The Rampant after focusing on short story rewrites for the last month. I need to follow my lead with Ben and his tattoo table, just focus and see what happens.
Note: the griffin on the right is my old, as-yet-uncovered mythic creature. It should disappear into background colors once the piece is complete.