First test today with a bone needle I've made, and its result.
The shape creates a good amount of skin trauma without placing the ink exactly how I want it. I think I'll make some shaping adjustments next time, but overall I'm pleased that it worked.
Inspired by a silhouette from an old movie. Ink and watercolor in the watercolor sketchbook. Strange ciphers on the sign courtesy the part of my brain leading to my dominant hand.
Dia Sacrificia was transformative, and incredible.
The postponement of the event led to a smaller turnout, which ended up being a blessing. The tight group forged quick bonds, and was more open to ceremony and participating in the rituals than I think they would have been otherwise.
A 40 foot heptagram was carved into the earth, a fire dug out into the middle, candles placed for each of the seven planets. In this space we ended ceremony, warmed bare feet by the fire, made offerings to the earth.
I hand painted our altar, which my partner built on Friday, a temple to Osiris and to our ancestors, who were most certainly with us throughout the evening.
The meditation I led brought us into connection with the true nature of time, of different states of Being, with our ancestors, with our guiding spirits,
and the ritual I performed, my first performance in years, a ritual self-tattoo, commemorated years of transformation and spiritual work, and was rejuvenating in ways I can't even begin to describe.
All were welcome, all joined the following day in meals and communion, in cleaning up and drying marigolds, in play and laughter.
Like shaping the earth, shaping a life takes years, but it feels as though we are on a wonderful path with wonderful people, and I am so grateful.
So, a few photos from the morning after, to share what I can of the experience.
The tattoo that I received/gave myself in ritual, a commemoration of spiritual attainment.
I have plans to extend the ceremony, to add to this and even it out with handwork when it heals: to turn it into a long lasting sigil, an earned adornment.
This tattoo was done using a cutting technique that I do not offer to clients for many (kind of obvious) reasons.
The first tattoo I ever saw done was an initiation tattoo for a gang.
Tattooing in my life has only been commercial for short periods at a time. When I had to leave LA the first time, for instance, I went through a period where I walked to the local white hipster American traditional shop and got flash from an artist I thought was cute once every two weeks pretty much without fail. No matter how hard I tried, though, it never gave me the feeling that the tattoos I saw in my youth gave me. Commercial tattooing is necessarily void of communal initiation, void of rites of passage, void of the sense that you earned it.
And I don't intend to diminish the incredible artistry and skill in commercial tattooing. There are millions of artists in the world far, for more masterful at this medium than I, that's for sure. I'd be honored to learn from any one of these new masters I'm sure. Theirs are not clients who want the things I've mentioned, their clients are art collectors: ever more discerning and ambitious. And they themselves are artists. True artists, worthy of their title.
But the rest of my life was spent at barrio "tattoo shops" -- studios in someone's house, a homemade kit pulled out in a car. Or the real shops that made it through the ringer of county and city health codes and existed legitimately, masters of black and grey slinging ink for kings and captains of war. Masters who learned in alleyways and cars, their own garages, or from other masters who made it to legitimacy from their own set (of these there are many). These were artists, and holy men. Keepers of knowledge, of stories, keepers of titles. The marks they gave had power beyond the ability of most of you to comprehend.
But I'd left this world, this life. I lived suspended in a different one, suspended in a different culture. The last correspondence with a friend who'd gone to jail told me that she'd rather be where she was than where I was: invisible, a life erased. Attempting and failing mostly to integrate into a society I phenotypically passed into but for whom my attempts at assimilation were always discordant and wrong. She said that at least in prison she still had respect.
I've wanted to engage in the sacred practice of tattooing since I was 13 years old, but never knew how to start. Those willing to be my mentors were long gone, the path to survival ultimately took me from the path to my purpose. I sought new mentors in commercial shops, but never seriously. For those years I didn't have much to say, for those years I was mostly silent. I could never ask for what it was I needed.
A few years ago a mentor was sought: someone with a background kind of like mine, but she doesn't know it completely. But she wasn't ready, because she's too good. She's a master because she knows there is always so much more to learn.
But she told me to read, and I read the canon. The canon reads of sailors and circus freaks, punks and soldiers, and it's wonderful. But it's reductive, it's culturally incomplete. It largely ignores tens of thousands of years of Indigenous tattooing, tattooing that looked a lot more like what I grew up with.
I had this revelation, then, that I would not join the ranks of commercial tattooers. That my purpose was not, after all, to work a bed in a shop. I learned on a machine, because coil machines were friendly to me, but I quickly became obsessed with just a needle in my hand.
And this practice of mine grew from memory, from the advice of people I love, people who are much better artists than I and who practice professionally. And also from the advice of ghosts, people who once saw wide eyes and who invited me in to see how they worked. People who told stories of prison tattoo rites, who told stories of war, and who passed into these stories forever to be remembered by the survivors.
My client list stays small for these reasons, because ultimately I am not the person you come to when you just want something beautiful and grand on your skin. I am the person you come to when you want to commemorate a rite of passage with drumbeats and incense and bleeding, when you want to meditate or cry or pray while you go through this ritual. I am the person you come to when you understand what all this means, and when you are searching for spiritual initiation, and when you've earned it.