![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Now and then I'll read a story—a good one, often one where it's clear from the level and quality of detail in other places that the author has done research, made a serious effort to know whereof ze speaks—and I'll be sitting there, scrolling happily along, until one of the characters gets tattooed, and then *brake screech* Some minor or major inaccuracy will throw me out of the story, sometimes irretrievably. I have five tattoos myself now, so I'm moderately well-acquainted with the process, and I notice when somebody's Doing It Wrong (for example, describing the process—not the sensation—as “burning”, or talking about changing bandages on a tattoo that's still bleeding two weeks after it was applied).
I'm not sure why this in particular is such a peeve for me, when I let some other kinds of errors slide more easily, but it is. It bothers me even more in 'professional' media, where producers can reasonably be expected (by me, anyway) to pay somebody to make sure they're getting things right, and especially in cases where I know people involved in the creation process actually have tattoos and ought to know enough to correct any errors, because under circumstances like that I can't see any excuse for botching things as badly as they usually do. One friend I complained to about this suggested that the reason representations of tattooing in mainstream media are such a dog's breakfast is that producers don't want to be blamed for “encouraging” folks to get tattoos . . . except that they still show tattooing, and they usually mess up by making the process look a lot quicker, cleaner, and less painful than it actually is, so I suspect it's more to do with laziness/the ignorant assumption that they already know everything they need to about tattooing (and kink, and paganism, and so on) from copying other media depictions that also got it wrong.
Of course, there's not much I can do about mainstream media (at least not until the fannish proletariat seize control of the means of production and implement a utopian meritocracy—I mean . . . *cough*), and really not a lot I can do about fandom, either. What I can do is put my knowledge out there, somewhere it might be accessed by fan writers and others who care about getting the details right, and hope it'll come in handy when you sit down to write that story about Steve Rogers tagging along the day Darcy Lewis spends her first SHIELD paycheque making a start on her half-sleeve, gets captivated by the process and the flash on the walls and decides to have his old unit insignia inscribed over his heart, or the one where Annie Edison walks in on Abed Nadir in the shower and discovers the full-colour art deco shrine to Farscape covering his back and is understandably brimming with questions (somebody please make these happen).
Please note that I am speaking from personal experience here, as a middle-class white cis woman from central Canada who got her first tattoo at age 20 and collected four more from four artists at two studios in different Canadian cities over the next seven-and-a-half years; from accompanying friends to the shop when they got inked; from talking to other friends about tattooing; from hanging out for a while in the Tattooed Knitters & Crocheters board on Ravelry and a few other online spaces; and from wandering into a whole lot of body mod shops over the years to check them out as a potential client or just out of curiosity. Some parts of the tattooing experience that I describe below are pretty universal, while others are probably more particular to my own experience; if other folks want to chime in to discuss how this does or doesn't resonate with your tattooing experiences, or to fill in any of my gaping holes of ignorance (for example home tattooing using improvised materials, cover-ups, or tattoo removal), that'd be hunky-dory. Finally, I'd like to note that this is not so much an essay as it is a bunch of loosely connected, theoretically factual statements.
( Preparation )
( Perforation )
( Aftercare )
( Colour Plates (a few of which contain small amounts of human blood) )
I'm not sure why this in particular is such a peeve for me, when I let some other kinds of errors slide more easily, but it is. It bothers me even more in 'professional' media, where producers can reasonably be expected (by me, anyway) to pay somebody to make sure they're getting things right, and especially in cases where I know people involved in the creation process actually have tattoos and ought to know enough to correct any errors, because under circumstances like that I can't see any excuse for botching things as badly as they usually do. One friend I complained to about this suggested that the reason representations of tattooing in mainstream media are such a dog's breakfast is that producers don't want to be blamed for “encouraging” folks to get tattoos . . . except that they still show tattooing, and they usually mess up by making the process look a lot quicker, cleaner, and less painful than it actually is, so I suspect it's more to do with laziness/the ignorant assumption that they already know everything they need to about tattooing (and kink, and paganism, and so on) from copying other media depictions that also got it wrong.
Of course, there's not much I can do about mainstream media (at least not until the fannish proletariat seize control of the means of production and implement a utopian meritocracy—I mean . . . *cough*), and really not a lot I can do about fandom, either. What I can do is put my knowledge out there, somewhere it might be accessed by fan writers and others who care about getting the details right, and hope it'll come in handy when you sit down to write that story about Steve Rogers tagging along the day Darcy Lewis spends her first SHIELD paycheque making a start on her half-sleeve, gets captivated by the process and the flash on the walls and decides to have his old unit insignia inscribed over his heart, or the one where Annie Edison walks in on Abed Nadir in the shower and discovers the full-colour art deco shrine to Farscape covering his back and is understandably brimming with questions (somebody please make these happen).
Please note that I am speaking from personal experience here, as a middle-class white cis woman from central Canada who got her first tattoo at age 20 and collected four more from four artists at two studios in different Canadian cities over the next seven-and-a-half years; from accompanying friends to the shop when they got inked; from talking to other friends about tattooing; from hanging out for a while in the Tattooed Knitters & Crocheters board on Ravelry and a few other online spaces; and from wandering into a whole lot of body mod shops over the years to check them out as a potential client or just out of curiosity. Some parts of the tattooing experience that I describe below are pretty universal, while others are probably more particular to my own experience; if other folks want to chime in to discuss how this does or doesn't resonate with your tattooing experiences, or to fill in any of my gaping holes of ignorance (for example home tattooing using improvised materials, cover-ups, or tattoo removal), that'd be hunky-dory. Finally, I'd like to note that this is not so much an essay as it is a bunch of loosely connected, theoretically factual statements.
( Preparation )
( Perforation )
( Aftercare )
( Colour Plates (a few of which contain small amounts of human blood) )
Tags:
