“The tattoo becomes an exorcism of sorts.” - Paul Booth | Tattoo Artist | Multimedia Artist TLDR: This post is about a specific tattoo I got during my apprenticeship, and how it has started to tie into my work in EMDR therapy.
Initiation through Tattooing
When I was 16 one of my Uncles got me a cheap tattoo kit from a headshop, and I gave myself my first tattoo at our kitchen table. I traced a semi tribal stylized ouroboros onto my right ankle, and the moment the needle touched my skin, something in me woke, a recognition, a need, it filled me with excitement. The pain was sweet. I left home that year and started practicing on oranges, and friends, boyfriends, anyone who would let me near them. It wasn’t long before I was carving into my best friends legs with an exacto knife in my small camper while my five disk boombox rotated between Korn, Slayer, KMFDM and Loreena Mckennit. Tattoos appealed to me because I felt it was ritual, blood magic, imbuing an image into a living thing. The alchemy of their blood mixing with my ink captivated me. I learned too, that my ancestors, both Native and Celtic, had their own tattoo traditions. I felt I had a birthright.
Tattooing is the most socially acceptable form of body modification in the Western world. It has a long history, stretching across oceans and cultures. It applications vary from decorative, ritualistic, medical. They are tests of endurance, rites of passage, markings of your social status or role in the community. Warrior, poet, undertaker, wife, mother, father, leader. They are a way to collect art, memorialize events and experiences, to record your life and express yourself and your beliefs or passions. As rites of passage, they mark us. Some of us like a decorated temple.
When I was 19, I managed to get an apprenticeship at a local shop, full of award winning artists. My mentor looked at my pile of drawings and said “Be here on Sunday, we open at 2. You’ll clean, mop the floors, autoclave equipment, set up and clean everyone’s stations, and make our stencils. It’s bitchwork, you have to prove you give a fuck about this place, and you have to watch when I’m working. Ask questions, that’s the only way you’ll learn. You have to build a coil machine before you can touch a needle, and then you’ll make your own needles too…eventually, I’ll let you tattoo. And never call it a gun, guns shoot people, it’s a machine.”. I was practicing on volunteers four months in.
A pivotal moment in my life and my apprenticeship was what Josh called my “initiation tattoo”. He said this made me part of the shop. I would design it, and everyone in the shop would work on it. I sat down and started drawing a demon of sorts, something that had been with me since I was a child, something I called when I was sick, unsafe, alone, which was often. The depiction style was largely inspired by Japanese paintings of Yokai. We positioned it on on my upper left thigh.
EMDR | A Demonic Protector
At the ripe age of 30, while I’ve had this piece for 11 years, this tattoo has started to play a direct role in my life in the context of EMDR therapy. In one day, I had an intimate meeting with this being, and followed that experience up with my first time being pierced with flesh hooks.
I started sessions with a new therapist this past week, who uses EMDR. I didn’t really know what it was, only that people had been telling me to try it for years. We’ll call my therapist Will. Will is an older white guy, whose easy going, personable and easy to talk to, and asks good questions. We would first work on “resourcing”. I would go into my imagination and essentially create a calm safe space, a container, as well as three figures that I could invoke during our work whenever I needed them. A “wisdom”, a “nurturer”, and a “protector”.
I came in for an emergency session last weekend, after finding out about a triple homicide that had occurred in the family, back home. I’m no stranger to death or grief, but this one had an edge to it. A venom. I needed to gather myself. We talked for a little bit, and then he said he had been thinking about the tattoo I had told him about, and asked if I would like to begin the resourcing with calling in a protector. He asked if I thought that figure on my leg could fill that role. I knew he could.
He gave me the paddles, and instructions, and we began. I would dip in for 10 seconds with the paddles, then out and translate what I saw to Will, and pick up where I left off again.
I bring the face to my mind:
The face became alive, living, deep resonate breathing, surround sound, a sound that enveloped. Polyphonic, pulsing with potential. I felt my own breath fall into it’s rhythm. He is deep reds, purples and blues around the mouth and eyes, yellow eyes. We stare at each other, his face hangs in a void.
Translate.
I go back, and he lifts his head up and exposes his throat to me. The flesh is dark, striated, textured and muscular. I can see the glow of warmth or fire in his throat. This is a gesture of vulnerability.
Translate.
More of the scene becomes visible to me. I see that there is a great furnace in his abdomen, a magma or fire burns there, steadily. This is what sustains him, and anything he consumes is consumed by that fire and is completely transmuted, it is an utter death. Complete. It' is warm, almost inviting.
Translate
He leans down to me, I am floating in the void, his face is huge. He peels his lips back, purple gums, mottled with blues, and reveals his teeth. Not in a threatening way, almost playful, demonstrative. I can feel his breath, smell it.
Translate
I touch the teeth; he is holding me in his giant hands now. I am a child again, seven again, but with very long hair. The teeth have color, and texture, some of them are tusklike, jutting out of the mouth, they are all pointed. And the texture feels slick, and almost like the fine grain of sanded wood.
Translate
He gently opens his jaw, and I crawl into his mouth, pulling myself up with his teeth to lift myself. His mouth is not slimy or wet, it doesn’t smell the way you would expect, it is like a cave in the shape of a mouth, with a fat curling tongue, and the flesh is deep red, a mossy velvet texture. The warm glow and heat of his belly glows at the back of the throat, warming me. I curl up on his tongue and feel safe, and sleepy.
Translate: Will laughs nervously, and tells me we will stop now. I should come back out and give thanks/say goodbye.
I turn around and crawl out between his teeth and drop into his open palm. He puts me down and I am looking up at him. I am all the ages I have ever been, and we say nothing. I watch him sit back up, and I can see the whole of his body now except his groin, in shadow, he sits crossed legged and faces forward, with some thousand-yard stare, like he has gone back to being some living statue, durance glowing in the dark. A faint light comes down from above. We don’t need to say anything, we just understand each other.
Will says he wanted to gauge how I handled it, if I could focus and how vivid the experience would be for me. It was immersive. I left the session with a feeling of completion that I don’t usually have after therapy. Usually I feel overstimulated, like I’ve been asked to strip naked, examined, and then kicked back out into the world.
Instead I felt empowered, excited, centered. I am eager to meet other resources, to form relationships with them, those things that sit in my psyche, waiting to be dug up and resurrected, utilized. I plan to enshrine them in ink as well. Tattoos can boost the immune system and help our bodies cope with stress, as well as serve as a therapeutic coping tool, and people often use them this way intentionally and outside of the context or influence of clinical therapy.
Leave a comment
The bilateral buzzing of the paddles and the hum of a needle can work together. It’s art therapy, perhaps at it’s most intuitive and primordial level. This application is and has been part of their medicinal value, whether we are conscious of it or not. Not only can we mark our growth, and embody archetypes like healers and protectors like what we find in modalities like EMDR, we can transmute internal suffering through the physical stimulus and experience of pain, and this is why I believe it is essential that we be present with the pain. Using substances or creams to numb ourselves prevents this catharsis from occurring, perpetuating repression and bypassing the aspect of endurance, which is psychological as much as it is physical.
If we allow ourselves to experience the discomfort, or even to take pleasure in the sensations and push through, we build and fortify resilience. I know many people who use tattoos instead of engaging in dangerous self harm, and I think that the ritualistic aspect of getting a tattoo is part of what separates it from glorified self harm. This is true for other pain sacraments as well, including other forms of body modification, ceremonial temporary piercing, flagellation, fire walking. Intention and ceremonial framing can transform an act of self hatred and destruction into something transformative and ecstatic.
-Raven
P.S. In the next post I’ll be sharing my first experience pulling with flesh hooks, an event that followed this EMDR session the same day. Pictured above.
Thanks for reading The Midnight Harpy Journal. It’s free. It’s weird.
