Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

136 The Tattoo Relationship
Clients who bleed profusely, whose skin swells in reaction to the
needle, or who faint during the process also tend to be negatively
defined by tattooists. All tattooists possess a wealth of"horror stories"
about the 4 or 5 percent of clients who do not facilitate the
tattoo process due to their tendency to faint or get sick.
A very small proportion pass out but, generally, they are
younger men who come in and try to impress upon me their
bravado. Those are always the ones that go out. It's not the
ones that come in and say, "I'm scared to shit." They never go.
It's the one who says, "Fuck man, just give it to me:' Bam!
They're gone like that. I really don't like that. That scares me. I
had some guy go into some sort of bizarre fit in front of me at
one point early in my career when I first started tattooing. I got
about five minutes into the tattoo and he started to pale a little
bit. So I said, "Ok. Look, just relax. Loosen your pants... :' I
went through the routine as I know it to be done. Head
between the knees. And before he got his hands to his pants he
went out. I pushed him back into the chair and I took a popper
which I have here all the time-I have ammonia caps. I
snapped the popper under his nose and at that point his entire
body went rigid. He sprung back out of the chair, arched up,
his arms and legs went out. It was the summer time and he
had shorts on and he had these flip flop shoes on-his toes
spread and his fingers spread and he began to tremble all over
his entire body. I sat there with this guy in front of me doing
this, not having any idea what the fuck was happening. I stood
up and I punched him in the chest as hard as I could. He
folded up into a little ball, pissed allover the floor and came
back to consciousness. I died a thousand deaths at that point.
That's it. That's what I don't like about tattooing. There's the
potential for that kind of trauma; it does occur every now and
then. That's the most distasteful aspect of tattooing.
Although the tattooing process is not especially painful, as we
have seen, pain is a major concern in the minds of most novice
clients. How troublesome the pain of the tattooing process is to
the recipient depends on the location of the tattoo, the skill of the
tattooist, the quality of the eqUipment (especially the condition of