Every day I cause people pain.

Some squirm, some sweat profusely, a few hum under their breath to take their mind off the excruciating sensations that I cause. Sometimes I am disconnected from their pain, I forget what they are feeling and pull a longer line, or skip around to different parts of the tattoo, shocking skin where pain has dulled. My own back hurts, my arm and hand with its slowly developing tattoo muscles, (what I like to refer to as the tattooist’s “Crab Claw”,) aches and freezes in a clench, and I think only about myself. But this disconnection happens rarely. Tattooing is an intimate act.

Mostly as I tattoo I become extremely aware of my client. I am concentrating completely on the square inch of skin beneath my needles, but there is still a subconscious part of me that is hyper-attuned — to their breathing (or lack of it), their shifting, where they are looking, and their plummeting pain tolerance or tiredness. Often I surprise the client by prompting them to take deep breaths (they weren’t aware that they stopped breathing,) or by saying that maybe we both need a stretch break when someone is getting extra figety or has stopped talking. Perhaps it has something to do with being that close to a person, and to be the one that they have employed to take them through, for lack of a better term, the “journey’ of their tattoo. I can smell them, I am touching them, our bodies are close together, and this is something that as an artist you just have to get used to.

I noticed when I first began covering my arms with tattoos that my skin no longer belonged to me. People have a natural impulse to touch and stroke tattooed skin (though if the tattoo is well executed you’re not going to feel anything.) The clerk at the mini-mart would catch my bare arm — petting and turning it, some would even peel up my sleeves, especially people at parties and bars when alcohol dissolved their sense of reserve. Similarly, I now have no qualms in touching other people. In my job, when I start a consultation for a tattoo I usually am touching the person within minutes. Whereas before I gave everyone the generally-accepted three-foot bubble of personal space, I now turn complete stranger’s arms and shoulders, lift their clothes, look at the play of muscle as they move, and assess their skin’s pigmentation and sun-damage on different parts of their body.

This is my job. Skin is my new canvas, and I am not so much an artist as an illustrator on this surface. The client is the one with the idea, I am hired artisan with my machines and needles and ink.

Every day I cause people pain.