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Tattooing is a painful process. Everyone knows that. It's 30 minutes, or 4 hours, of holding absolutely still while someone pushes a grouping of needles into your skin over and over at a pretty decent speed. After that, it's 3 days or a week of stiffness and babying that part of your flesh to make sure it heals right. And yet, people do it every day. People like me, sit for hours and hours, to finish off my sleeve, or start my thigh tattoo. People's mothers, children, bankers, nurses, come in and suffer for a small tattoo on their ankle or build their back piece a session at a time.

Why would we suffer for that? Just a bit of ink? Just a little drawing? A design? Everyone's answers are different, but it comes down to...We think it's worth it. So many of the most beautiful things in life are painful at some point. Childbirth is hell (or so I've heard, I have no experience with it). Getting your heart broken sucks, but when you're in love, it's something I'm willing to risk. Plucking or waxing my eyebrows makes me tear up for at least 5 minutes afterwards. I still do it.

My tattoos are a way to make my outsides match my inside. In my head is a map of experiences and minutes and loves and hates, and it's slowly coming to be on my skin. It's a beautiful (and sometimes grotesque) celebration of my life. I have tattoos that represent people, that represent periods of my life, books that I really like, some that I just think are really funny. My best friend and I have matching tattoos on our toes.

Working in a tattoo shop, I see people coming in and sitting through the pain every day. For some, it's not much, I don't think they're that bad. For others, it's just brutal, and they will stop mid-tattoo to go cry for a minute, have some water, whatever, then sit back in the chair once they've had a break. These people come in to get tattoos with their families to get memorials and birth dates and baby footprints. They come by themselves to get decorated, and show what they love on their skin. They come in with friends to get a little something to remember that trip they took to Hawaii.

Tattooing can be painful, absolutely. But it only hurts while it's getting done. It's only sore while it's healing, and usually no worse than a bruise. But the tattoo itself is forever. If we all held back from doing something because it might hurt...We'd never do anything. Tattoos are just a more visible reminder of that, to those of us with them. We think the pain is worth it. We are willing to suffer for something beautiful.

Learn more about this author, Heather LeStabbityDeath.
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