Is Greater Than

I have somewhat re-edited my post from a while back entitled "Why I am Tattooed" and Paul Davis published it in his excellent online magazine "Is Greater Than".Is Greater Than: I am a Tattooed Lady

I am consistently sort of baffled that I sometimes write stuff online that I do not publish myself (like I do in this blog)and that other people that I don't know will read it. I got the statistics from Is Greater Than for the months from April (when my story came out) to July, and they told me that there were 288 unique page views of my personal essay on The Magnetic Fields ( The Magnetic Fields/Santa Cruz article is here) and that the average time people spent with my essay was 12 minutes!!!!! In internet time that is an eternity, especially considering the ADD most people (including myself) instantly develop when they go online! Perhaps a couple people were reading my essay and fell asleep at their keyboards because they were so bored?? Ha ha Seriously, both these stats are heartening to say the least.

I used to write a lot, but haven't written except in personal journals for years. I don't harbor any illusions that complete strangers are going to be interested in my life (which is why I started this blog for my mom, and which ever friends wanted to keep up with me), but I have a very interesting and exotic job, which is why I started writing for Paul and Is Greater Than. There are not many people in the tattoo industry that write about it. Tattoo culture has been studied by academics (I am reading an excellent book of academic essays right now put out by Princeton University Press called "Written on the Body"* which I highly recommend) and anthropologists, but when looking for anything written by people inside the profession they are few and far between. I get so overcome with inspiration every day that this is amazing to me. I can't really shut up about it, so I decided to start writing about it. Which I should do more. Now, if I can only find the time between tattoos!



*Someday I'll be writing like this:
"The tattoo has long hovered in a space between the cosmetic and the punitive. Throughout its history, the status of the tattoo has been complicated by its dual association with slavery and penal practices on the one hand and exotic or forbidden sexuality on the other. The tattoo appears often as an involuntary stigma, sometimes as a self-imposed marker of identity, and occasionally as a beautiful corporal decoration.