The Tattoo

As a teenager I used to deal with my multiple problems and issues the way most weak, nerdy, inward people deal with their problems--by cutting. I hated myself for it. Between ninth grade and senior year of high school I had turned my left inner forearm into a cut of steak made of scar tissue, with hundreds of cuts incised by everything from fishing line to butcher knives. I hated myself, but loved the cathartic pain it provided. It made the bullying and the anger and the sorrow melt away, and probably kept me from ultimately killing myself.

Well, ten years away from high school my scars were starting to look more like stretch marks from weight loss than self-inflicted physical loathing. Though most of my juvenile problems were long behind me and I had stopped cutting in college, the marks were still visible, and it was too hot where I lived to wear long sleeves, so whenever I tried to find a woman they were ultimately turned off by the hideous scarring. I considered my options, and decided to walk into a tattoo parlor one weekend night to cover it all up.

It was a typical tattoo parlor, with walls of posters, tattoo artists who could have doubled as prisoners, and pictures of famous artists' work scattered about the place. For a Saturday night, they were oddly bored and completely unoccuppied when I walked in. I showed them the arm, and they said for two hundred they'd cover it up nicely. Two hundred seemed cheap, so I thought, for a cover-up job that would change my arm from nasty to almost charming. It was some custom design he came up with that intertwined the scars on my forearm. The job took about three hours and he seemed to work fast. The tattoo needle seemed to hurt a little less than the cutting, as far as I could recall. It was just the usual tattoo black ink--nothing weird.

At least until the tattoo started healing. The usual skin healing process started--it swelled, then went down, then the skin started to peel.

I started having strange pains, deep in the tissue, along the design. The tissue bled at some points, and the scars from the cutting didn't meld with the design as well as I'd hoped. In fact, sometimes it looked worse. It was a long tattoo, and the other side of my forearm would bruise and become very tender for no particular reason. I tried to go back and find the tattoo artists--but the shop had closed. Was it ever there? The place looked like it had been closed for years, even burned out, but there was the tattoo, right on my arm.

Did the design change? It was so complex and intertwined I couldn't tell where it started and ended. I could have sworn sometimes it didn't look the same from day to day.

The pains got worse, and deeper. I could almost see something scratching the inside of my skin under the tattoo, digging into the muscle itself. It was getting worse still. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't move my arm to type, and I couldn't hardly eat or service myself in daily activities.

One night I was tossing and turning, and sweating, with the pain scratching and clawing deep in my arm, almost to the bone. For a couple of hours I shivered and sweated, holding my arm under the cool of the covers. Finally, I thought, I needed to go to the ER. This wasn't natural. I rolled out of bed to dial 911, and my left forearm was still laying in a pool of blood on the sheets, the tattoo searing with pain! The arm had cut itself off through the bone!

Edit: I guess I can't shit gold every time.