“You ready?”

I didn’t really reply. The needle was buzzing. I had spotted a small imperfection in the fluorescent light directly above my head. Dozens of tiny triangles made up the light, one of them had a spot on it. I was staring at that spot, not letting myself think about anything else.

“Wait! Let me take a picture of the first incision!”

“Mom, really? Incision? I’m not having surgery.”

She snaps the picture, and the needle makes contact. It hurts. It’s not the screaming, mind-numbing pain people had been warning me about, but you can feel it. The first line hurt more than I had expected, and less at the same time.

I can do this, I thought. Not so bad.

The second line. The third. The fourth. The artist did his work, and I tried not to jump. I inhaled right before he touched the needle to my skin, and very, very slowly exhaled as he drew. He takes the needle off, I breathe in. He puts it back, I start to breathe out.

I only looked at what he was doing a few times. Once, when the design was halfway outlined. A quarter of the way there.

“How’s it feel?” he asks.

“Well it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m taking a nice nap.”

He laughs.

At that point it feels like a sunburn. The kind of sunburn you get if you fall asleep outside, under the sun, for hours. A really, really bad sunburn. And it feels almost as if he’s scraping a needle against the sunburn.

Some parts hurt worse than others. At the top of the design, it felt like the needle was going all the way through my skin, into my guts, it burned and it stung and I held my breath.

In the middle of the design, I could barely feel it at all. I was numb, anyway. Just a light scraping, nothing too painful.

I looked again, and the outline was finished. “You can stand up and walk around, if you want.”

I looked at it in the mirror. It looks small. It had felt like a much, much bigger tattoo. Surely he’d been drawing something up my entire torso. It had to be bigger than that. I laid back down.

“I’m switching to a wider needle. So I can color it in. It’s uh… well, it’ll probably hurt a little bit more.”

“Awesome.”

I found the spot on the light that had helped me through the outline. I think he had probably grown accustomed to my breathing pattern, because he waited for me to inhale before he started.

It hurt more. The spot on the light, my teeth clenching, my slow, controlled exhaling… it wasn’t enough. I sought around for something I could focus on. My fingernails dug into my arm, creating curved lines deep into my skin.

Jeremy.

Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy.

JeremyJeremyJeremyJeremy.

I repeated the name over and over in my head. I saw his face. I focused on that. I traced over the curve of his nose, the line of his jaw, over and over again.

Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy.

It hurt a little less.

I looked at how it was coming along. It was halfway filled in. I had thought we were finished. Of course not.

“I’m going to go cross-eyed from looking at this for so long! It’s a great design, I’m happy to be tattooing it.”

I smiled. I couldn’t speak. Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy.

Eventually it was coming to an end. I looked at it, it looked finished to me. He wiped it off with a cloth. “Sorry if this is a bit cold. A girl last week nearly jumped off the table.”

“It’s fine. It’s nice.” The cool cloth did feel very nice on the sunburn.

“I’m just cleaning it off a bit, to see if I missed any spots. I’ll fill those in, and we’re done.”

He had indeed missed a few spots, two or three or four or five, and once those were filled in, he said, “Congratulations! You survived your first tattoo.”

“Thanks.” I got off the table and looked in the mirror. It looked fantastic. It looked real, nothing like the pictures I’d been photoshop-ing for days. It wasn’t perfect. The lines weren’t ruler-straight, they weren’t all perfectly even in width.

“I love it.”

I looked again at it. It was imperfect. Like me.

Which was perfect.