If you mention bed baths to anyone who has never been in hospital you get a fairly predictable response about how it must be brilliant. It's really not, and for any number of reasons. FIrst off it's not quite as glamorous as people imagine especially when it's being provided by an 18 stone man called Dave (even if he actually does a fine job).
The main problem I had with them is that they just don't actually make you feel clean. A slight washing down with hot soapy water is grand and all but unless you actually rinse the soap off well then it feels like you have a layer of the stuff building up and building up over time. Not being able to articulate this admittedly minor annoyance would eventually bother me greatly. I'm sure I'm not alone on that front.
By this stage dignity wasn't a concern for me but I did like how how much effort the nursing staff went to in making sure that you weren't uncomfortable, although I did find the massive range of euphemisms for your groin utterly baffling. I preferred it when they were just matter of fact about it and didn't make a big deal out of the fact they were giving your genitals a scrub. In fact most would ask if you wanted to do it yourself, which was a nice touch (if you'll excuse the turn of phrase), but I was of the opinion that they could see everything and reach everything without pulling at tubes and wires so would just leave them to it.
At the point immediately post operation I was particularly bad at laying on either side, especially the right side. For some reason doing so would lead to my oxygen saturation plummeting and I would start really struggling for breath, which would freak me out completely. After a while we realised if I had to roll for any reason then I would get an oxygen boost prior to even starting off. At first this was definitely a physiological response but I've often wondered if it then became psychological.
Anyway, the point of all this chat is to highlight that a lot of the time I was rolled over to have my back cleaned it would evoke some comment about the tattoos on my back. Apparently I don't look like someone who would have any never mind the massive ones that cover my back. I can't say I understand fully what that means. I don't know what someone that has tattoos looks like, if you know what I mean.
I have quite a few of them now and they are very personal. Even the couple that are just about visible are pretty discreet. I like to think they tell a story about the person I am and I've decided I'm going to share that with you. Now thi may well be as tedious as hearing about someone else's dreams so don't feel you have to read on from this point but don't say I didn't give you ample warning about the oncoming stream of bollocks.
I can't quite explain why I wanted my first one; only that I knew that I did want one. I decided early on that if I came up with an idea I would keep that idea for about 6 months and then if I still liked it I would go ahead and get it done. I was reading my favourite comic strip when it finally leapt out at me and I thought it was perfect. It was my favourite frame from my favourite Sunday strip of Calvin and Hobbes. It's actually Calvin and Hobbes dancing to classical music at 78 rpm. I love the whole strip (all 21 pnels of it) but this one alone was just perfect. and so right in the middle of my final exams for Uni I tooko a break from studying and went to a tattoo parlour just off Byres Road in Glasgow and got my first tattoo on my left thigh, where I wouldn't have to explain it away to my parents. As acts of rebellion go it was quite meek really.
It's been there nearly 20 years now and I kind of forget it's there and then I'll be sitting in the shower and spot it and it still makes me laugh. I'm sure it seems utterly frivolous and ridiculous to most but I love it still. In all my time in Newcastle only 3 people recognised what it actually was (most thought it was Tigger) but my favourite of the doctors actually has them as his avatar on Facebook so recognised it straight away. Little things like this pleased me immensely.
The second one I had done when living in Cardiff under the notion that as a Scot living in Wales something Celtic would be perfect so I went for a cross in the middle of my back. I took my time choosing which particular one I wanted. It was originally black with blue colouring but after radiotherapy had made it fade dramatically I got it totally redone and had the colour changed to green. The guy who done this told me that it had distended because of my rapid weight gain and loss from my steroid regime and so he tried putting a shadow on it to make it look better but it was never quite right and so I let it annoy me for years before finally deciding to do something about it, more of which later.
It genuinely was brilliant when it was first done - it was done at the tattoo parlour that all the Welsh rugby team got theirs done (I moved down there the very month the Rugby World Cup was held there) - it was only messed up by ridiculous swings in weight pulling at my skin. It was probably never really even that bad but it was enough to niggle at me apparently.
The next one I got was just above it, across my shoulders. I wanted something in red because I was living in Aberdeen (that being the football team colours) and to vaguely represent a Phoenix as I felt my new life up there post bone marrow transplant was enough of a second chance to merit the use of such an idea. I truly hd risen from the flames, in my head at least. It takes a bit of imagination as it looks like a normal tribal piece really but to me it looked like an abstract idea of a phoenix. I would later find out my cousin Stephen has almost the exact same tattoo, except in black. That's what can happen when you get one done from an existing design on a wall of a parlour I suppose.
It was another few years before I got another one and it was actually prompted by my friend in Belfast Celine wanting to get one as memory of her time there. She wanted a Celtic band round her wrist with a claddagh in the centre of it. I got thinking to what I would want to memorialise my time there and the thing I came up with was something that I had kind of wanted to get for a while anyway but seemed appropriate for a place where the police are held with such mistrust.
You see my favourite full on comic book (as compared to a comic strip) is called the Watchmen by Alan Moore. At the very last page of the book it simply says Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, which is Latin for 'Who watches the watchmen?', a line taken from Juvenal's satires. Should you care about such things the answer is that it is actually us, the people, who are meant to keep the aforementioned watchmen in check - not the coastguard as Homer Simpson would maybe suggest.
Here they both are immediately after they got done - mine being the pasty coloured skin obviously. Here's the writing in a bit more detail.
Now I know that Latin techinically doesn't need the question mark but I thought it looked better so it went on as I thought otherwise it wouldn't be obvious where it begins and ends.
Having had one done in Glasgow, Cardiff, Aberdeen and Belfast I was considering what I would get to mark my time in Liverpool when real life got a bit in the way and my hospitalisation and eventual move home meant that I wasn't nearly well enough to even consider getting another one done. Then a couple of years ago I caught sight of the cross on my back in the mirror and it just annoyed me one time too many. I sought out a tattooist who could come up with an idea for either covering it up or lasering it off. What we came up with was something approaching compromise as the position and size of it meant that completely covering it would be difficult so I had a series of laser sessions to get it to fade again and then we'd work on top of it. This time instead of being abstract I wanted a proper phoenix, and it was going to be pretty big. It took quite a few sessions but this is what we ended up with.
Now the cross is just about visible still underneath the head of the bird but the real focus I hope is on the main event itself. It is the work of Tim Sandys, whose conversations while he is sticking needles into my skin have been as important to me as the work he's doing. You know you're in pretty capable hands when the person tattooing you also teaches at the Art School. I love it obviously but this is the one that garners the most comments from nursing staff, as they quite simply don't expect to see that on my back when they roll me over.
Just when we were doing that I had a further notion of something I wanted done. There is a line of Nietzschean philosophy that seemed to be appearing in almost everything I was reading for a time. One of the things I had read it in was my old mate from my time in Aberdeen Gavin's degree dissertation, when he asked me (and my then girlfriend Katherine - his best pal) to proofread it for him. It comes from the book Beyond Good and Evil and it is something I've always absolutely loved so I thought I'd get it done in memory of him - the poor fella died a few years previously. I'm sure it will be familiar to you when you read it. Or at least the latter part will.
Without wanting to sound too pompous I have always held great stock in the first line, especially when I was fighting various diseases at different times. To not let myself yield to becoming bitter about the experience was massively important to me, and I think I've just about achieved that. I've also gazed into the abyss a few times and found out quite a lot about myself as a person in the process.
The back pieces were finished just in time for me getting the call for the lung transplant (in fact I missed my final appointment to check to see if any touch up work was needed on the Phoenix) so obviously nothing got done for a wee while but while lying in my bed my mind was racing with ideas as to how I wanted to mark this massive event in my life in tattoo form.
I had a lot of scar tissue that I was particularly keen on covering up as well as I could as the chest drains were generally thrust in without much care for aesthetics. There isn't much I can do about the main clam shell scar, and nor would I want to really, but these smaller ones were just annoying and so just had to go.
I knew fairly on that I wanted something relating to a Chimera, the creature from Greek mythology that was made up of 3 animals, specifically because I now had 3 types of DNA that make up me now. In the original idea the Chimera has teh body of a lion, with an extra head of a goat and its tail being a snake. I knew I didn't want some graphic realisation of that and I stumbled across an idea that finally led to a crest with 3 heads. They're not exactly lion, goat and snake but are certainly close to that theme. Both Tim and I felt that when you're dealing with mythology you don't need to be absolutely exact anyway. And so this is what came of it
I didn't just want one moob to have a tattoo on it and so was thinking about what else to have on my left side to balance things out. I wanted to continue on the DNA theme but felt like the double helix was perhaps a bit on the obvious side, especially as I already have that on the ring that I bought a couple of years ago. A bit of lateral thinking took me back to my original degree and the x-ray crystallography image that allowed Rosalind Franklin to work out the structure of DNA in the first place. As Nobel prizes aren't awarded posthumously Franklin is often overlooked for her role in things in favour of Watson and Crick because she went and bloody died before the prize was awarded in recognition for the work in elucidating the structure. That I got it done on International Women's Day was also pretty perfect.
And finally, we get to a little bit of history. When Charles I was being held in the Tower of London awaiting execution he was going through the collected works of Shakespeare and embedded within one of the pages is the Latin phrase 'Dum Spiro Spero', which roughly translates as 'While I breathe, I hope'. Now if ever there was a motto that completely captures my life it is that, and so I thought that having a pair of Latin wrists would be just tremendous. I got this done yesterday just after a morning when I was in the hospital getting SPIROmetry tests done, so the universe was just aligning as far as I'm concerned.
Obviously this is a much shorter piece of text so I let Tim just put a wee embellishment to join the two parts together.
So there you go. A cartoon strip mixed in with some German philosophy, some Greek mythology and a bunch of Latin thrown in for good measure. High art and low art for all that such things matter.
That lots of my friends don't really understand my having them has never really bothered me. That they make sense to me genuinely is all that matters and that each time I see them I really do get joy from not only the pieces themselves but the memory of getting them done and where I was at the relevant point in my life. And even more than that recently, I have been getting them done by someone who has really got my brain motoring at a time when it wasn't necessarily functioning at its best. Cheers for that Tim.
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