Getting Stabbed Hundreds Of Thousands Of Times By My Friend Was Better Than Therapy

Don't worry, nobody was murdered or sent to the hospital in the making of this article

Hello new and old people,

So many of you are new here - or new/old, meaning new to AJPT and all of its wonders but not new to me because we go back to Sassy or Jane magazines or XOJane or even my poor old TV talk show!

If you are new, I truly appreciate you checking us out and please tell me what you like and don't like. I got a really articulate letter yesterday from a recently-former reader explaining so precisely everything she hates about AJPT. I wrote her back a lengthy thank you note because that kind of feedback is so kind and useful to me. (She did not respond to my thank you, though, so perhaps the point was that she really didn’t and doesn’t want to hear more from me, which is why she unsubscribed. I am sometimes the last one to get the hint. I also never leave a venue until the lights are glaring and never leave a party until the hosts are in their pajamas. I can work on those.)

So beautiful new people, my budget conscious suggestion, if you want to stick around, is that you upgrade using that 7-day free trial option and during that time, get just three other people to sign on to AJPT and then, your whole first five weeks will be free! Or get five new people to subscribe here and you’re sailing along for more than three months of content for nothing! On the backs of your friends! (You old folks here can do these too.) That's a good deal, you have to admit.

Note that Charlie may be a better business person than I am because his suggestion in his story today is more of a win-win situation for us financially and our ability to keep growing this little business. So listen to him instead of me. Or do both!

Anyway, what I was starting out to say here was that if you are new, feel free to, along with his piece today, check out some of Charlie's defining posts, such as AJPT’s week one classic, I Shit My Pants At Work or the unforgettable I Went Viral For Having A Trump Tattoo On My Forehead. He has been with me at AJPT since day negative one and I couldn't love him more.

And you too, even and sometimes especially when you hate what I'm doing.

Have fun doing whatever you want today and forever!

Love love,

Jane

Audrey and I in happier times, before she spent hours inflicting pain upon me.

I’ve spent a lot of time (and words here at AJPT) trying to figure out how exactly to navigate the whirlwind of emotions I’ve been dealing with lately. More specifically, I’m on a hunt for activities that will allow me to turn off the part of my brain that wants to scream at all times. Getting upset and eventually depressed by things I have no control over has always been my superpower, but can’t a guy get a little kryptonite? Just a nibble, as a treat?

While I haven’t conducted a full schedule of testing on the matter featuring a placebo group, nor filed my findings for peer review, I’m pretty confident I have found something. And it kills me what a damn cliché it is, but if it works, it works.

What is this miracle cure, you ask? Getting tattooed by my friends.

Before I go further, I’m going to pause this article to personally address Another Jane Pratt Thing Founding Member #1 — my dad. [Not hyperbole! He really was! -Jane] Feel free to skip the next paragraph, but before you do, please know that if you become a Founding Member in between now and August 8th, I will work in a personal aside directed to you in a future article. What a deal!

Hi dad! Hope you had fun on your trip to France and drank plenty of Beaujolais to soften the blow of what I’m about to say. Yes, I got another tattoo. Yes, even at 44 I’m still a little worried you might see it and say something about it. Yes, I understand that writing about it is the second least efficient way to hide this from you (just barely behind commuting 900 miles and ringing the doorbell with my shirt off). But yeah, I got another tattoo. Sorry.

After spending most of my professional life connected to the tattoo industry (at Inked, then Tattoodo, then Inked again), I have been around tattooers for way more than enough time to earn my Official Expert badge from Malcolm Gladwell, so I kind of know what I’m talking about here when I say that the concept of getting tattooed as therapy is the dominant cliché in that circle. People love to say that their tattoo was a healing experience (by very definition, it is the polar opposite), and tattooers love to say that their clients treat them like therapists.

As an avowed contrarian, I mocked this idea for years.

My line of thinking was that people wanted to give a deeper explanation as to why they like pretty pictures drawn on their skin besides aesthetics, so connecting the process to therapy made a lot of sense. I chalked it up to the same sort of need for importance people cast upon their tattoos by thinking that every single one needs to “mean something.”¹ Over the decade and a half of my life spent interviewing tattooers and tattooees (is this a real word? If not, it should be), I became quite skilled at hiding my eye rolls whenever somebody said tattoos were their therapy. And for my first 13 tattoos, this held true. Then came lucky number 14 (I’m always a little late to the party).

The experience of getting tattooed is always a little tough to explain to those who haven’t been through it since it’s such an amalgamation of different things. It feels trivial but also monumental (tattoos are famously permanent). It’s mentally exhilarating to have a new tattoo and see how your body has changed, but it’s physically stressful and painful to get one. There are so many rules and rituals attached to the before, during, and after of the endeavor, with a hundred people eager to share a hundred different pieces of advice to get you through them all. Sometimes I think of it as a permanent haircut, other times a shot that makes you look cooler. But never therapy.

While I was getting tattooed by my friend Audrey, the T-word never even entered my brain. Nor did it occur to me for the week it took to go from oozy to crusty to shiny and healed (the human body is gross). It was a little later when I noticed that my thoughts kept coming back to things Audrey and I had talked about over the course of the nine-ish hours the process took across a couple of sessions. And not entirely in the “my friend told me a funny story” kind of way, although there were those too. No, it was more in an introspective way, realizing how calming the entire process had been. I walked out of each session feeling pretty damn fantastic, which normally isn’t how people describe getting stabbed for hours on end. For the first time, I was starting to understand why people made the whole therapy claim.

The one similarity I see between the two is the vulnerability. Opening up and talking about your deepest secrets and worries leaves you incredibly vulnerable, and so does letting an artist perform a medical procedure (leaving the art out of it, that’s what it is) that will forever alter your body. One could argue that the physical pain of being tattooed actually makes you doubly vulnerable. The pain may be the essential factor² here, as it is the pain avoidance that leads to talking as a distraction in the first place, and when combined with the natural vulnerability, real shit gets discussed.

We did all the requisite catching-up stuff, but we also talked about growing up, disordered eating, the tattoo industry, writing, art, marriage, music, and Ireland. We easily covered more ground than we had in the previous x-amount of years if not ever, and I know I sound like a total nerd here, but it was just wonderful. Like life just slowed down for a while.

It was the respite I’d been searching for. Holy shit.

And I haven’t even mentioned the actual tattoo yet. It’s fucking awesome. Just look at the damn thing.

This thing is rad as hell. I’m probably not going to wear shirts any longer. The one theme among the tattoos on the right side of my body is that they’re all yelling, which both irks my wife and seems appropriate for my whole vibe.

When I look at it, I’ll be able to think of so many things. I’ll think about how cool it looks, obviously, but I’ll also remember the time spent getting it, the conversations we had, the music we listened to, and what a truly great time I had. I’ll probably get the Trogdor the Burninator song stuck in my head and giggle a little. And I’ll be proud of how goddamn talented my friend Audrey is.

So yeah, I’m probably still agnostic about the whole “tattoo as therapy” stuff, but I can tell you for goddamn certain my mood has been better since getting it. Every aspect of it just makes me smile. Ten out of ten, would recommend.

Maybe you don’t have a friend who is a tattooer; statistics show that an overwhelming majority of friends are, in fact, not tattooers³. But the tattoo is really not the point here either; the point was finding a niche activity where I could shut out all the chaos for long enough to make me feel a little hopeful about life. Mission accomplished there. I just had to keep poking away (groan), but eventually I found something, and that feels terrific.

Plus it looks hella badass, which is nice too.

1. I really hate this concept, particularly because it stems from a judgmental idea. By talking about how some tattoos “mean something,” a person is naturally shitting on every single tattoo that doesn’t. My tattoos range in meaning from “I got this portrait for my dead mom” to “my friend was in town, his appointment never showed up, and Ralph Wiggum is my spirit animal” to “a pin-up girl in a hot dog suit is hilarious, I must have it!.” Most of my tattoos mean nothing more than I had the money, thought they looked cool, and wanted to get them. That’s it. It’s not rocket surgery, you’re just decorating your meat sack. Who cares?

2. Tattoos have never really hurt that much to me. I’m not trying to sound like a tough guy, I’m not one, because I’m always terrified of the pain before getting a tattoo. But when it’s happening, I’m always struck by how it’s “not that bad.” I think most of this is because I pick spots that are considered less painful, but the chest is not one of those, and it was fine!

3. Also, zero out of six Friends were tattooers. Although if I had to pick one, it would be… Ross. Dude would specialize in dinosaur tattoos in the style of scientific drawings. Who’d you guess? I bet it was Phoebe