Those Tattoos?

If you saw the gym photos in my "Just Go for Five Minutes" post, you probably noticed the tattoos on my back. This post is to explain why they look the way they do, and why I'd post them anyway.

The tattoos on my left arm and back were supposed to be wings, an angel and demon wing type of thing. They're unfinished and honestly just a mess. I don't spend a lot of time in the mirror, especially looking at my back, so seeing those gym pictures reminded me of choices I made in my addiction that I don't usually have to look at.

Here's how they happened.

I had just gotten out of jail, my first stay longer than a weekend, about 60 days, enough time to get sober. While I was inside, I got a small tattoo done the old school way, pricked by hand over and over. One word: reborn, with the date underneath.

I thought I was staying sober. That's why I got the date. Instead it turned into just another date I relapsed after. But it wasn't pointless, it was like planting a seed in my mind that took a shit load of watering before anything finally grew.

I met someone in jail we will call Rodger who was a great artist and said he could tattoo, and we met up when we both got out. I was 19 or 20, my wife had to buy me a beer. Rodger's drug of choice was meth, and we ended up using, which explains most of what happened next.

Every tattoo happened in Rodger's room, in a house in Martinez across the street from a highway patrol office. I sat on his bed while he sat in a chair. Red flags everywhere, and I ignored all of them. He redid the reborn tattoo with a real machine and it turned out good. He did a Japanese kanji on my wrist that came out pretty decent. Two decent tattoos, so I said fuck it, let's go all in.

No stencils. Everything freehand, both of us high, from an artist with no real experience. The ones on my back and left arm are the worst. The only luck I had was leaving before he finished them, now there's less to cover up.

At the time I didn't care that they came out messed up. I went right back to my lifestyle, and I was too high to care about much of anything.

The map

I know now it's a little embarrassing. But when I look at where the tattoos are and what's happened to them, they read like a map:

My right arm - the bad ones there are already covered with better tattoos. Done.

My left arm - just lines, easy to cover. That one's next. I see it every day, so it's the daily reminder.

My back - the big project. It's going to take a lot of work. It'll get done, just not all at once.

That's the climb, written on my body. The parts that are fixed, the part I'm working on, the part that's still waiting. I used to think of the tattoos as proof of how foolish I was. Now I think of them as a visual record of where my life was then and where it's headed. Having the right mindset about it actually makes a difference, some people come by that naturally, others have to work at it. I'm one of the ones who has to work at it. It's one of the many things I spend my time improving.

This post is for anyone who feels like they haven't made just one bad choice but a stack of them, the kind that starts to feel like there's no way out. There is. I'm not going to pretend it's easy, but the cover-up work is worth it, on skin and everywhere else.

Still climbing. Still leveling up.