“Does it hurt?”
“Does it hurt?” In my eleven years as a tattoo artist, that’s the question I’ve heard most often from clients or slightly tipsy bar patrons who haven’t yet plucked up the courage to get that dream tattoo of a lion battling a scorpion, symbolizing the inner struggle between their zodiac sign and ascendant.
The short answer is “yes,” a tattoo is essentially a wound, just a deliberately inflicted one in a controlled and sterile environment. But it’s still a wound, and it would be strange to think that any wound, physical or emotional, could pass without pain.
However, the answer is much more complex than that, because pain is a highly subjective thing, influenced by many different factors.
I’ll try to delve deeper into the physiological explanation of pain, as well as the various factors that play a role in determining the amount of pain, and I’ll also suggest different ways to cope with the unpleasant sensation, as well as how to prepare before getting a tattoo, so that we can reduce the degree and amount of pain during that desired drawing of infinity that turns into a feather of a phoenix bird, which in turn breaks down into silhouettes of birds flying towards the horizon.
Why do we feel pain?
It’s a pretty obvious question, but sometimes it’s good to repeat the obvious things, because in our fast-paced everyday lives, we forget to notice the obvious and take it for granted. So let’s look at why we feel pain.
Pain is our body’s evolutionary way of protecting us from harm. When we have a wound, it hurts to protect it from further infection or other complications. When we eat something poisonous or spoiled, pain teaches us to avoid such things in the future. We can even see pain at work on a mental level. For example, when we lose someone important to us, we experience emotional pain that helps us realize the value of that person and appreciate the other people in our lives to protect ourselves from the same pain in the future.
So let’s not resent the existence of pain. Since evolution has given us something that is such an integral part of the human experience, it means that we should pay more attention to it, stop categorizing it as good or bad, and simply accept that there will be pain, there’s a reason for pain, and that pain protects us and helps us grow and appreciate life and existence.
The amount of pain is determined by the density of nerve endings in a given area of skin. Nociceptors, or pain receptors, are nerve endings that go directly to our brain where the signals from them are interpreted as sensations ranging from a light touch to unbearable pain.
What is pain?
Pain is an interesting combination of a physiological sensation in a part of the body and the brain’s interpretation of that sensation. What do I mean? Pain is both the feeling in our body and our idea of pain that we have formed in our minds from a very early, even unconscious, childhood. It’s no coincidence that there are people who genuinely enjoy pain and those who would use general anesthesia before popping a pimple if they could. And although our idea of pain is already formed, we can consciously change our perception of that pain, and what’s most important is that we can choose whether to react to the pain (as long as it’s within reasonable limits).
When I started tattooing, like many tattoo artists born at the end of the last millennium, I started on myself, and to this day I really enjoy tattooing myself. One of the main reasons I like to tattoo myself is that this way you are faced with a situation where it is very convenient and even advisable to learn how to cope with pain more easily. And how exactly do you deal with pain? Just like you deal with any difficulty in life. First of all, you accept it! You accept that the pain is there, and it will be there for a while, there’s no way to stop feeling it. What’s really interesting, however, is that we humans are able to use our conscious thinking and impose our will over our impulsive actions. We are fully capable of being the person who feels the pain and at the same time being the person who observes it from the outside as if it were happening somewhere else. It sounds strange, I know, but with a little practice it can be mastered, and then we realize that no matter what happens to us in the physical world, we are fully capable of not reacting to it. We can observe the pain, accept that it’s there, and not react to it. And once you feel that you are capable of this, you seem to acquire a very different and deep feeling about yourself. The feeling that you can simultaneously experience something and observe it from the outside.
At least with tattooing, this is a relatively easy skill to acquire, I suppose if you had to be born in the Middle Ages and, say, have a limb amputated without anesthesia, this strategy would be a little more difficult to apply. But with tattooing, I would say it’s quite easy to achieve. This is the ancient idea of the power of the mind over the body.
Ultimately, pain is an inevitable part of life, there’s no escaping it. We can use tattoos, along with other things, as a way to learn to cope with and accept this pain in our lives. In fact, throughout human history, in many cultures, tattoos have been part of a ritual through which you learn to accept pain and deal with it as part of each person’s personal growth. And today, I believe that such a view of tattooing would help us as a society.
If you can’t always use a pain relief cream.
How to make it hurt less?
n the previous paragraph, I described the best and most long-lasting way to deal with pain that I’ve found, which is to change our attitude and perception of pain and to accept that no matter what happens, we have control over our actions. We can be both the one who feels the pain and the one who observes the pain from the outside.
A lot of people would say, “Don’t bother me with nonsense, just tell me how to make it hurt less, I’m not going to become a Buddhist monk, I just want to get my dog’s name tattooed and not feel a thing!” And here’s my answer:
If you’re going to choose the soft and comfortable path of an underdeveloped gender (just kidding, I have nothing against anyone and I fully understand people who don’t handle pain so easily, I’m just choosing to sound like a grumpy old man, and I also have nothing against transgender people, on the contrary, I fully support freedom of expression) then you can use pain relief creams. There is now a huge range of extremely effective pain relief creams on the market, and if you apply them correctly, you will ensure almost complete disappearance of pain for 1 to 3 hours. The important thing here is to know that good pain relief creams are only available from tattoo equipment and consumables stores, as what you have in pharmacies doesn’t work at all. And when you get it, read and follow the application instructions very carefully to achieve the correct result!
(Read the leaflet before use)
Preparation
There are certain things that will help you cope with pain more easily and reduce the sensation of pain. To begin with, get a good night’s sleep the night before. When a person is tired, the perception of pain, both physical and emotional, is greatly heightened, so get some sleep the night before. Another important thing for the day and evening before the tattoo is to avoid the lifestyle of Stoyan Kolev.
Refrain from drinking alcohol and anything else that gives you the feeling that you are a different person or rather a superhero, as these substances also seriously deplete your body and reduce your baseline levels of dopamine and endorphins, which is why the sensation of pain is subsequently greatly increased. Another thing you can do is to get tattooed as early in the day as possible. This will help because after waking up, our adrenaline levels are highest, and throughout the day adrenaline gradually decreases, which also increases the sensation of pain, as adrenaline also helps to cope with and accept pain more easily.
These are the things that will prepare you physiologically, another important component is your mental state. To begin with, go get a tattoo with the clear idea that it will hurt and you are there of your own free will, because you know that in the end you will be happier with yourself and your body. This attitude helps surprisingly much. Also, consider something that could distract you. For me as a tattoo artist, the best way to take the client’s mind off the pain is conversation. Because it makes us think deeply and concentrate on organizing our thoughts so that we don’t look stupid (which is the biggest human fear after the fear of death). In this way, our brain is too busy with thoughts and automatically shifts its attention from pain to somewhere else. If you don’t feel like talking because you are on the more introverted end of the social spectrum, or you are worried that your breath might smell but you don’t have gum and you are embarrassed to ask for it, then you can think of another type of distraction, like music, movies or series, or a book (for some reason when I get tattooed I love to read a book the most, but while I’m reading it in my head I seem to be reading it shouting, which both helps with the pain and the information is remembered more easily while you’re in pain and shouting, but I’m not actually shouting, so as not to look like a little pussy after all!) or, as long as you’ve asked the tattoo artist and they agree, you can bring a friend to keep you company. In the latter case, keep in mind that this person will be incredibly bored at some points, and there is a chance that the tattoo artist will not be entirely OK with this idea, so I say again, ask the tattoo artist!
(Book, music, movie, friend, etc.)
To sum up, the answer to the question “Will it hurt?” is – of course it will hurt! Like many other valuable things that last a lifetime, tattoos also require some pain and suffering. But since you’ve survived all the childhood traumas, transitions, political changes, and inflation, even though your life is incomparably easier than the lives of everyone before you and many people still, I believe you can handle the short-term pain of getting a tattoo.
Also, the techniques I’ve described will help you a lot on the way to memorizing valuable moments and allowing them to literally and figuratively get under your skin.
Overall, be a man and imagine yourself as Conan the Barbarian or Kubrat Pulev and endure the pain, it’s worth it in the end!
I hope this information has been helpful to you. If not, at least it was a pleasure for me to say everything and you are always free to write some angry or even bile-filled comment on one of the many social media or directly here. Or a nice and positive comment in both cases, I, as well as the entire Mastilnitsa team, support freedom of speech and expression, so write freely. I would also be happy if you could share what you would like to talk about in one of the next articles.
