It was only a matter of time until I had to learn what it’s like to have my knees tattooed.  That is precisely what happened last night and it was just absolutely no fun at all.  Everybody deals with pain in different ways and everybody experiences it differently, so I don’t consider my take on this to be a fact.  That said, I find when we get to an area that hurts more than usual, I find the best method for dealing with it is to accept the presence of the pain while forcing my mind to focus elsewhere.  It seems to help for me, if for no other reason than it keeps my mind occupied.  The tricky thing with the knee, however, was that every time my mind would start to wander, I would feel my reflex kick in or my leg would want to flinch.  It’s hard to flinch a butt cheek, so I hadn’t had this problem before.  My mental gymnastics were rendered useless and I had no choice but to focus on what was happening and try like hell to not let my leg wiggle.  It was a blast.

What’s better than that? Knowing I still have one more knee to go. And they both have to get shaded.  I have made good choices.

Ok, enough whining.  It hurt like hell at the time, but feels pretty good now and that’s what matters.  Horizakura added some cheery blossoms and water/waves on my knee.  I love how kinetic it looks, especially when I bend my leg.  As always, I’m really happy with the results!  He worked really hard to get the waves on the inside of my knee positioned so that it would look good with my knee bent and straight.  Gotta love that attention to detail!  Two notes before photos: 1) I’m so swollen it looks like I have no knee cap. It’s under there somewhere.  Is there a such thing as cankles for knees?  Thiees? 2) I took a side photo but the door was in focus, not my leg.  I am too ashamed to post it, but not so ashamed that I wouldn’t tell you about it.  It mostly just showed where this appointment stopped and the empty space on the back of my leg.

I’m sorry this post was so long.  Photos!

Last night, Horizakura opted do a little shading on my leg.  Since the last four appointments were all outline, it was nice to get back into shading.  It’s so much more peaceful without the noise of the machine.  This was complimented by Horizakura’s music selection for that evening.  Normally we listen to different kinds of jazz (I don’t know much about jazz, so I’m not going to try to be specific), but last night he was playing this experimental improvisation by a guy named Marc Ribot.  I found a link to the exact video on YouTube.  I don’t really know how else to describe it, but it was really, really cool to get tattooed and listen to this:

Below are pictures from this morning. For some reason, my leg looks like it has already begun to heal.  Normally it doesn’t look like this until later in the evening or the next day.  The only logical conclusion is that I have developed advanced healing powers a la Wolverine.  Behold!

I don’t have any pictures of my back after my second session.  You can blame Mike and Allie’s wedding for that.  I may be at fault too, but it’s easier to point fingers.  Below are pictures after my 3rd session.  This brings the total to roughly 5 hours on my back.

 

Before we proceed, I feel that it is really important to give two people credit for helping me finish my half sleeve.  My friend and colleague Carl and his wife Kyoko were instrumental in setting up my return trip to Japan.  Horishun’s English has improved tremendously since my first appointment with him 8 years ago, but without Kyoko to translate our emails back and forth with each other, I’m not sure I ever would have been able to organize it.  Kyoko and Carl have both become the patron saints of my tattoo. Beyond helping me organize my trip to Japan, Carl also opened the door to my first appointment with Horizakura.

In between starting my half sleeve in 2007 and finishing it in 2015, I had numerous occasions to ponder beginning work on another part of my body.  I desperately wanted to continue my tattoo, but was slowed by a few factors.  First and foremost, I was very aware of the unfinished tattoo on my arm.  How could I even begin to ask another artist to commit to a large scale, long term tattoo project with me when I had yet to complete the first tattoo I started.  The idea didn’t sit well with me.  That, coupled with the fact that I had no opportunity to get an appointment with the artist I wanted, forced me to wait longer than I would have liked.

Finally, in the summer of 2015, Carl was able to personally introduce me to Horizakura at the NYC Tattoo Convention.  We scheduled a time for all three of us to meet at Horizakura’s studio.  This made me happier than I can possibly explain here.  Consider how you would feel if you spent 8+ years hoping for something and finally learned it would become a reality.

After our meeting, Horizakura and I scheduled some appointments, the first of which resulted in this:

This was about 1 hour of work.  This photo was taken after the first time Christine cleaned it for me, so there is still some residual ink and goop there.  Apologies for the shit quality, many of these early pictures are from my phone.