On a hot July evening when I was 18 years old, I lay naked from the waist up on the hardwood floor of a home studio. My back was sticky with sweat, and I could feel the beat of rhythmic music through the floorboards. My hands kept me modest as I watched an inked needle slide in and out of my chest, drawing a crescent moon on my sternum. My two best friends made quiet conversation on a couch beside me while my tattoo artist crafted a delicate masterpiece with her gloved hands. I didn’t cry from the needle. Instead, I felt grounded, like it was poking holes for me to breathe through. I was at peace with the pain.
***
I used to feel at war with my body. After years of unexplained stomach aches and period pain that left me doubled over on the shower floor, I developed a bitter relationship with my flesh and bone. The pain had created a sort of divide where I felt separate from the invisible entity that caused so much suffering. I didn’t feel like my body treated me with the respect I deserved. After failing to find success or peace of mind in treatment options for my endometriosis, I’ve spent the last several years searching for a way to coexist with that pain. I never expected to find it by inflicting more, but before I knew it I was under a needle, accidentally reevaluating my relationship with pain.
Stick-and-poke (aka hand-poke) is a method of tattooing where the artist doesn’t use a tattoo gun, but repeatedly dips a needle in ink and then inserts it in the skin to form designs through a series of small dots. Tattooing has ancient roots across the globe. It was often used to express status and identity among Indigenous tribes in the Americas and Asia, and was even used to remove joint pain in Siberia and Northern Europe more than 2500 years ago. Naturally, before the tattoo gun and the modern needle, they were performed with bones, wood, blades and other sharp natural materials. Unfortunately, modern Western society has sidled hand-poked tattoos with the stigma of being violent or unclean. People often associate them with prisons, gangs and drunk decisions — dare I say more so than the average tattoo. When I tell people my tattoos are stick-and-poke, they tend to be shocked at the quality, imagining at first that I let a friend carve jagged lines into my arm at age 15. And while things like that do happen, it’s certainly not the norm. Hand-poked tattoos get a bad rap because they don’t require expensive equipment or a wealth of experience, making them easy to perform unsafely.
I imagine it’s because of this that I’ve struggled to find licensed stick-and-poke artists. Many studios state specifically on their websites that they aren’t comfortable with the hand-poked method and don’t offer it as an option. There are plenty of stick-and-poke artists out there, but they are definitely harder to come by than your typical tattoo gun artist. I was first introduced to the method when I met my tattoo artist through a mutual friend. I was drawn in by the perfect blend of professionalism and comfortability she cultivated in her hand-poke practice. It was important to me that the experience of being tattooed wasn’t intimidating and obscured — I wanted to know and be able to see exactly what was happening to my body.
That was how, despite all of their bad press, I ended up with three stick-and-poke tattoos to date — a bouquet of flowers on my shoulder blade, a daisy on my wrist and a crescent moon on my sternum. I’ve had one tattoo done with a gun — a smiley face on my hip. It was the quickest and the most painless, and comes with a great story that I tell whenever I get the chance (involving two strangers and a late night ice cream trip), but it didn’t come with the personal insight that my hand-poked ones did. Though it accomplishes the same task, the tattoo gun is a sort of mythical instrument to me. It feels oversimplified. The gun covers my skin, I feel a sting, and suddenly there’s a picture there. It doesn’t force me to confront my body in the same way that a single, hand-held needle does. Though I didn’t expect them to be so impactful, my stick-and-poke tattoos became my outlet in practicing pain — in learning to patiently endure it as I did my best to to make the uncomfortable as comfortable as possible.
Fascinated by the experience of reevaluating pain, I took to the internet to see what others had learned on the subject. I came across a chronic pain treatment called Pain Reprocessing Therapy where patients are guided through movements that are often painful for them. As they do so, they are trained to perceive the pain in a different way, so as not to process it in a way that intensifies it. Fear and anxiety can induce more tension in the body, exacerbating the effects of a painful experience. This is why it’s important how we react to pain — our reaction determines how intensely we feel it. When the invisible knife twisted in my gut, I used to feel cheated. I was focused on how unfair it was for the pain to come out of nowhere and ruin my daily routine, and that frustration only amplified its effects. As I sat through the slow process of my stick-and-poke tattoos, I discovered just how much a shift in mindset could affect my experience with pain. When I believed it was something I was going to get through — just a price I was paying for beauty that I wouldn’t be paying forever — it wasn’t as central to me anymore. It was background noise. It was mildly irritating, but completely tolerable. Best of all, I knew that it would end. In the same way I always know that the stabbing in my uterus will eventually subside, I knew that the sting of the needle would give way to peace. The aftermath of pain comes with a pleasant numbness and a sense of strength. Women have a history of being labeled weak creatures, and every instance of pain I fight through reminds me just how far from the truth that is.
There’s a certain solace in pain that you can see. When you’re struck with a migraine, you can’t see the imaginary ice pick chiseling away at your temple. But with a tattoo, you expect the pain. When you can tell precisely when that needle will enter your skin, it doesn’t shock you. You know what it is and what it’s there for, so the anxiety is lessened. You can breathe through it; invite it in. You acknowledge the sting, but you learn to perceive it differently.
This is not to say it’s particularly pleasant to be stabbed repeatedly with a sharp object. It still hurts a considerable amount. The crescent on my sternum was the hardest because it felt the most vulnerable. I had to lie perfectly still on my back with my upper body exposed, opening up to the needle. I would usually tighten up and curl into a ball in reaction to the pain, but now I had to experience it in the calmest and least reactive way possible, so as to not interfere with the tattooing process. I couldn’t writhe and squirm. I had to be still and centered. And while it was very difficult, I realized that I wasn’t just sitting through pain, I was completely relearning how to experience it. My gut reaction to pain used to be to tense up in agony and allow my anger about the unfairness of it all to bubble up and add to the discomfort. Instead, here I was forcing myself to stay calm and feel all that I was feeling without inserting so much negative emotion into the experience. And it was sort of working.
There’s a sense of empowerment in voluntarily enduring a painful experience that’s too often overshadowed by chronic pain that you wish you didn’t have in the first place. When I’m too focused on being angry at my uterine lining for growing out of control, I forget that I’m doing the hard work of overcoming that burden — even if it is an invisible one. But, watching that needle go in and out, I associated pain less with fear and more with just a state of being. It’s unpleasant, yes, but it ebbs and flows and will always start and always end. It’s a reality that I’ve come to live with, rather than run from.
With a finished tattoo, you get a beautiful, tangible result to help congratulate you on making it through something hard. While no one gives you any sort of lovely prize when you make it through your latest aches and pains, I’ve learned that you can still feel just as satisfied. There’s no denying that pain is uncomfortable, but I’m not at odds with my body anymore because I’ve learned to co-exist with it, rather than label it as the enemy. Pain is no longer a state of complete and total agony for me — it’s something I live alongside. I let it test my patience and my boundaries, and I accept that it has neither. We have no choice but to feel pain sometimes, but we can do our best to guide how we feel it.
Statement Columnist Paige Wilson can be reached at wipaige@umich.edu.
The post Relearning pain: A case for the stick-and-poke tattoo appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply