At A Glance
Author	Shannon Larratt
IAM	glider
When	It just happened
Artist	Shane Faulkner
Studio	King of Fools
Location	Toronto, Canada

This tattoo story may seem filled with superfluous tales, but that's how I live my life. I believe that all of my tattoos already exist, and to achieve them (to earn them?), I have to live my life in a way that causes me to "fall into" them. Even the tattoos I don't have yet surround me as if I'm standing inside a ghost, always there but still unseen. As time goes by, more and more of them are revealed.

I've been growing my hair out for the last three years. I enjoy having long hair and always have — I like the way it looks and feels, I like that as a male it separates me from the mainstream, and I enjoy the commitment required in acquiring it (which reminds me of ear stretching in some ways). I find that when I have long hair it's as integral a part of my self identity as any mod is. After growing out my hair, I've also gotten my forehead tattooed, up to the hairline but no farther because I didn't want to cut my hair (you can read my experience on the first session here).

My forehead tattoo, healed after the first session.

The design of my facial tattoo is a full headpiece extending from just below my eyes and up and over my skull. Since that first session I've balanced what upsets me more: the thought of having to cut all my hair off, or the thought of having my facial tattoo incomplete. As "luck" would have it my hair was severely damaged earlier this summer after I was bedridden due to surgery, leaving it dramatically thinned out and broken. I really didn't have any option other than cutting it, so I decided to make the best of the situation and have my tattoo finished (although I will regrow it).

Even though cutting my hair was the right decision, it still wasn't something I wanted to do emotionally. I've always found that difficult or unpleasant tasks can be made easier and their meaning can be put into context by ritualizing them. More than that though, for something as significant as a facial tattoo, I think it's important to take it very seriously and invest yourself emotionally by preparing for it with a series of steps to bring yourself into a state where you are able to receive the tattoo without baggage.

Five years ago my friends Todd and Scott Fox drowned on a beach that we'd all been swimming at since we were kids. If any of my friends influenced my decisions in life and as an artist, they did. A storm's rain had just broken and the water was far choppier than usual with whitecaps swelling four or five feet high in spots. We all knew that the limestone steps down into and under the lake caused a wicked undertow, but Scott dived in anyway. He slipped on the rocks and went under, but didn't come back up. His twin brother Todd dived in to save him, but both were swallowed up by the lake's currents and neither of them survived the storm. I was not about to just cut my hair in my bathroom — I couldn't do it in a place without meaning, and since the first moment I considered cutting my hair, something told me that beach was where I had to cut it off.

As Rachel and I drove the two and a half hours to get there, a thunderstorm storm started to build. Sheets of rain pounded the highway, bringing visibility to the point where most cars (and one beleaguered motorcyclist) had pulled over to the side of the road waiting for it to pass. We kept driving, and the farther we got from the city the happier I became. Every mile became more green and lush and full of life.

The story on the first stage of this tattoo explains the design process in more detail, but to simplify, the tattoo is intended to symbolize the singularity and interconnectedness of all life on the planet (hence the multiple circular entities bound together with energy conduits), and to express my belief that we are all part of that single biological entity (the superbeing that most people perceive as "God")... So being in a place not only so full of life, but during a storm when things get mixed up allowing growth to happen was wonderfully appropriate.

Rachel and I walked out to a long limestone outcropping over the lake. Immense waves crashed around us, falling inches from where we sat but never hitting us. Dusted with lake mist, Rachel began cutting off my hair. As she shaved it off, I collected it, and within a few minutes all of my hair was transposed from my head to my hands.

Thinking about both my life and the superbeing's life, and my future, I placed my hair into a small metal bowl, sprinkled it with gasoline, and lit it. I pushed the flaming bowl of hair out into the waves, where it shriveled, burned for a moment, and was then flipped into the water as a large wave struck it. The hair was immediately sucked down into the water and I watched it being pulled out into the depths. I dived into the water, not to retrieve a half burned hairball nor to follow its fate, but to offer myself to the lake and be reborn on some small level.

Ritually cutting my hair to prepare for the arrival of the tattoo.

The water was very cold, punching me hard. I sank to the bottom of the shallow oasis I'd chosen, and felt full of passion. Maybe the shock had restarted something inside me, or maybe that's just what happens when you dive into chilly water. Either way, I sat there surrounded by the bringer of both life and death, smiling at it. Rachel swears it all smelled like dead fishes, but it felt right to me and I couldn't smell anything but life. The upset I had at cutting my hair was gone and I felt ready to have the markings on my head expanded.

Two days later was my tattoo appointment.

The day of my appointment I'd made sure to get a good night's sleep beforehand and I made myself a big healthy breakfast — I find that doing so makes the tattooing hurt a lot less and helps the healing as well. I was supposed to be there at 12:30 AM (the whole day had been assigned to me), but I was almost late due to Folsom Street Fair (a leather-culture event in Toronto's gay district) taking over all the parking lots in the area with vendor's booths. After a bit of driving up and down the side streets I found a spot and rushed over to King Of Fools' new location on the corner of Yonge and Wellesley.

The first stage of the tattoo had several concentric circles which had been ended by the hairline, and at different points due to my hairline not being exactly the same on each side... I think the most difficult part of the tattoo process was actually sketching out (directly on my head — stencils weren't going to work) the transition between the two sections. In hindsight I probably should have shaved my head last year and done the tattoo in one step, but still, Shane did an amazing job achieving the design I asked for. After an hour or so of drawing on my head, raising and lowering parts of it, shifting things around, we had a design that looked symmetrical and said what I needed to say.

Because my tattoo was going to be all white ink with no outline, the tattooing began with wiping the marker down to almost nothing, and tattooing the outline with just distilled water. These raise into deep red lines which could then be used as a reference. After doing those water lines, Shane scrubbed my head clean with alcohol to ensure that there was no chance of any contaminants getting into the new tattoo and discoloring it. He then switched to a shader and began filling in the roughly quarter-inch thick lines.

The actual amount of skin wasn't that large, so the tattooing went quickly and we were done within two hours. The initial lining had been quite painful, but I always find both that the first lines hurt more because no endorphin rush has built up, and because the single (or triple) needle configurations concentrate the pain into such a tight spot. By the time the filling was happening, I was numb enough that the shader rarely bothered me, although I did get a temporary pounding headache as the work on the very peak of my head was being done. Whenever the pain built up to an unpleasant crescendo, I just tried to concentrate on the pain itself (fighting it or trying to think about something else just makes it hurt a lot worse for me), and reminding myself that I knew it was going to hurt and that it was of my own choosing, which seemed to almost entirely alleviate the pain.

I wasn't sure if we were even going to be able to bandage me, but after we were done, Shane taped a couple of meat-packing pads onto my skull, and it seemed to work fine. After squaring up the payment for the tattoo and making an appointment for two weeks later to go over the whole thing with final touch ups (both the new work and the existing tattoo), we joked for a minute about how silly I was going to look walking down the street with this lobotomy-esque bandage on my head. It turned out to be true — people stare more at head injuries than they do at any of the mods I've had. Dragging a crowd of eyeballs behind me, I walked the two blocks back to where I'd parked, only to discover that my car was gone... I realized that I'd parked blocking the entrance to an apartment building's lot, and had been towed. Now I was not only going to have to deal with the general public, but I was going to have to visit the police looking like this.

Bandaged.

I walked back out onto Yonge Street and flagged a cab, which took me down to the Toronto Police's 52 Division, who handed me a card with the location of the closest impound lot — surprisingly, a head covered in bandages didn't even seem to phase the police and they didn't ask about it in any way. When I got to the impound lot, nothing was there though. The towing company swore they hadn't towed it, so I just had the cab take me home. After a bit of calling around, it became clear that the car had in fact been stolen so I filed the report on it with the police ("are you behind on payments, Mr. Larratt?").

However, I got to thinking about what's more likely: a high end car being stolen on a busy street in the middle of the day, or me forgetting where I parked. I'm not known for my memory, so my bet fell on the latter. My friend Badur was kind enough to bail me out with a ride around the neighborhood I'd parked in, and, sure enough, there was the car, exactly where I'd parked it. Somehow I'd walked right up to, looked at it, not recognized it, and wandered off assuming it was towed... Thinking back, I wonder if I'd gotten more of an endorphin buzz than I'd thought — maybe this all was the superbeing's way of protecting me from a car crash on my way home due to the artificial high? If I couldn't recognize the car at the time, was I really qualified to be driving on busy city streets?

The morning after being tattooed.
The red outline is still visible and there is some swelling.

In the stories I tell of my life, I will now include the (lyrical) fact that this tattoo has already saved my life. Of course, if I'd found the car, maybe Rachel would be cursing the tattoo right now as the cause of my death.

     - Shannon Larratt