Emma babbles about her experiences with different piercings, tattoos, the people who can and should do them, and the people who shouldn’t have an opinion on them.
It’s been a goal of mine for a long time to have a lot of tattoos on my arms and across my body. Whenever I was younger, especially in my mid teens, I always imagined myself having lots of tattoos scattered down me, and that I hopefully didn’t still tremble in fear while I ordered my coffee. In the present day, since I reached that god-like freedom of moving out and not being in an immediate arm swinging range of my parents, I’ve tried my hand at multiple piercing places, met a variety of tattoo artists and have tried to reason with my parents on my personal image, and lost. But still, I currently have a total of nine tattoos, ten piercings and the coolness ranking of number one in my immediate family. I’m also a barista, so the tables have indeed turned. But why am I writing an awkwardly titled article about being a very average young adult who uses Pinterest? I have very little else going on in my personality at this moment in time. Did I mention I dropped out of college?
Tattoos mean different things depending on who is getting it and why. A lot of tattoos don’t have a reason, many are just funny, or cute, or freely referencing something very vague that appeals to them. This also applies to piercings too, of course, as some piercings can help reduce migraines, have religious or spiritual connections, or help you gain uniform code violations and those come on funky pink slips of paper that go to your collection like it’s monopoly money. For example, I have a tattoo of a spider on my sternum, to represent a line of a poem I wrote, and a key event in my life that is related to some experiences I have had with anxiety. It was also because I made myself get over my fear of spiders during the summer by just picking them up and holding them or bringing them outside. But I could also get a tattoo of my cat Ted’s fat little face on my calf. I could, I might, and so what if it isn’t “classy” or “outright showing my preference to one of my cats over the other.” Whatever it is, whatever your vision of yourself is, it’s up to you alone.
A key part of achieving your ideal tattoo or piercing is research and communication with the person you’re letting do the work. Always. Research. Know the tattoo style you’re after, look into the artist's portfolios and see how their styles would match your ideas. Research the parlours for both tattoos and piercings, make sure it’s sterile and that you’ve spoken to them about what exactly it is you want. Bringing reference pictures is great, but if they apply the stencil onto your arm and ask you to check it out, you can change your mind about the placement, size, colour, and anything else you feel unsure about. I can promise that your artist or piercer won’t mind reworking parts or changing anything you don’t like, they want you to be happy with it. And if they express some sort of urgency, rush you, etc - don’t let them do it. This isn’t a process you just get on with because someone has to be somewhere in an hour.
Sometimes, a piercer or tattoo artist might hesitate to do what you’re asking for exactly. This should be more common in all seriousness, because ear and body anatomy knowledge is essential for this workplace, as they can give you every chance to know enough about your body and how to take care of anything you want it to be. For example, over the summer when I went to get my cartilage pierced, the piercer explained that he could absolutely do that for me, but you wouldn’t actually be able to see it due to how my ears were against my head - you would basically only see it if you were looking at the back of my head. Naturally I was disappointed, but he wasn’t finished, as he began to show me different spots on my ears that would be great to pierce and showed me the different jewellery to go with each. It was a fantastic experience and I ended up getting a piercing that I adored more than any other one I had (gone but not forgotten, Emma’s snug piercing).
In relation to the actual title of this article, the healing process of all piercings or tattoos is probably one of the most important factors in what we tattoo-havers call “the game.” (The game is hiding tattoos at Christmas and Easter. Have you seen the Saw franchise?). Piercings can’t be your little adrenaline trill on a Friday afternoon if you don’t take care of them properly, and this goes for tattoos as well. You don’t adopt a cat on a whim if you get bored and stop taking care of it after a week because it is important to look after something to keep it safe and healthy, so the metal bar sticking through the skin in your body falls under the same category, in my humble opinion that no one asked for. This of course applies to your tattoos as well. In my experience with both tattoos and piercings, there are some things you learn as immense mistakes, some things you watch your body become over time, and some things that you just need to understand and follow as part of the aftercare process. If I had to make a list, which is my favourite thing to do, I would present it to you as follows:
Number one - clean them, and clean them regularly. It’s a common theme to keep a habit up for the first few weeks or so of doing it, but then slowly letting it drift off the face of your routine over the next few months. Cleaning your piercings and tattoos is so important to ensure the healing process can occur as fast and as smoothly as possible, and typically you shouldn’t ever really stop keeping these things fresh and clean, with consistent moisturising for the tattoos and regular swapping and sterilisation of your piercing jewellery.
Number two - notice the signs, and don’t panic if you begin to question it. When my snug piercing began to grow more swollen than it had been since I had it pierced, I tried to play it off as sleeping on it too much or twisting the jewellery. I kept trying to clean and cool it, while in reality the infection in the piercing was growing so angrily it caused my hands to shake at times from the pain it could send me into in split seconds. I eventually, and much too late in the game, removed the entire piercing and let it heal properly, which was the thing I should have done when I knew the swelling wasn’t going to go down. With tattoos, I have been really fortunate to not have experienced anything as significantly scary as that in those healing periods. But in both cases, you need to allow yourself space to question it. You are more than allowed to take your piercings out, or get your tattoos covered or removed - this is something that I rarely see spoken about on a base level. I definitely see and hear it all of the time, in relation to workplaces, careers, motherhood, age, and are usually used as a way of invalidating your qualifications or your priorities, even in this age of 2023. But you can also be a nineteen year old with an idea that just didn’t pan out the way you had hoped it would. Getting the other side of my nose pierced was a big dream I had and when I did do it, the reality of it not looking the way I had wanted it to really stuck with me, and ended with me taking it out about twelve hours later. You could never get a tattoo or a piercing and be the happiest you have ever been, or perhaps no piercing or tattoo will ever satisfy your vision of yourself, your art or your style. Whichever one it is, you need to allow yourself to express yourself and your freedom, even for a tiny moment in time, to be truly happy with who you are.
Number three - it’s your body. It’s your art, your home, your roof and ceilings and windows. You hold it and it is yours. Never let one person’s loud, low ranking opinion make you feel as if you can’t choose how you live your life. Let yourself live. If someone is placing their judgement onto you over a little earring that you can take out as you please, or a song title on your forearm that will probably be covered, they’re living a deranged lifestyle that is controlled by choosing to see the worst and the prejudice in all. Don’t follow them.