Tatto Trance

The rhythmic sound of an electric toothbrush is followed by the pound of a needle. Then comes the wipe of a cooling towel and a soothing bit of Vaseline. Sound, pound, wipe, lubricant. Sound, pound, wipe, lubricant. 1,2,3,4—1,2,3,4—1,2,3,4—1,2….The sky is misty grey and the hills are twenty-one shades of lush green. The uphill trail is soggy from days of rain; scattered with white quartz from pea to egg size and various stages of sheep dung. I’m alone—but I’m not. I can hear my boots, but not hers. A gentle hand brushes down my sleeve. I put my hand back, but she didn’t take it.

“Can you answer me a question?”

“What’d you say?” Cat said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Ahh. yea. I’m fine. Just kinda somewhere else.”
“You need a break?”
“Naw. I’m good.”
“Okay. Let me know when you need me to stop for a bit.”

The rhythm of Cat’s tattooing resumed.

As I passed the Medicare threshold, my wife paid for adding some new body art to my collection. I wasted no time making an appointment. When I had opened the door to the small tattoo shop in old town Scottsdale, the distinct smell of a desert antiseptic—sage brush meets rain—took me back to the hours I had already spent there. Cat, the tattoo artist, turned to look at me. Her name does her justice. She stood frozen in place, squinting, as the outside halo of sunlight rained into the room. The door closed behind me and I stepped into the Light of the New Moon. Cat’s surreal mystical art that hangs on the walls, drummed psychic energy into the space. She seemed to be one with her art and studio and I feel privileged to be one of her many living canvasses. She’s the artist who has given design to my vision and ink to every tattoo on my body.

“Oh. Good to see you,” she said. “Come around here and take a look at what I have for you.”

She handed me her large IPad. On it was a completed drawing of the draft she had shown me via text a few weeks ago. This image would add to the work we had begun together several years ago. The new tattoo would fill the right side of my back; a female blue winged alchemist floats with priestly arms outstretched in prayer. She is the alchemist, the anima mundi, who is creating her philosopher’s stone of magic. The tattoo would eventually be completed over two sessions and seven hours. The image on the opposite side of my back had taken three sessions totaling eleven hours; a raven with a peacock tail rising from the gatekeeper’s cauldron. The mystical bird is flying above the sun toward the moon. The artwork on my arms and chest augment my mythic pilgrimage and have taken nearly fifteen hours of work. These tattoos, and whatever will follow, are a pictorial explanation of my personal myth; the mystical work of an alchemist.

I started my tattoo skin journal after walking across Ireland. A reoccurring dream, a vision, and a talking raven began the continual dialogue with my ally who lives in the psychoidal world. This is the world of a visionary experience, the luminous state of mind where Carl Jung wrote “The Red Book.” Jung’s two-year calligraphy and mandala journal of creative imagination is the external expression of his interior soul work. The tattoos you see had already been etched on the soul of Life’s Alchemist.

The rhythm of Cat’s artistry and the constant pounding of the needle create a soul opening for me to slide into another level of consciousness. A mental, physical, and psychic state that replicates walking the pilgrim’s trail while fasting. The exhaustion and hunger create a crack in the egg of this world’s reality, creating a labyrinth which leads to where the unseen becomes visible.

“I can feel you behind me. Why won’t you take my hand?”

Not expecting an answer, I tightened the straps on my pack, relieving some of the stress on my aching shoulders. A turn in the trail took me from the open fields and up into an ancient forest of giant mountain ash. The leaves glistened with an Irish mist, while the intertwined limbs eclipsed the sun. The breeze sang like a spectral choir. In some recent past, the heavy rains had so softened the ground that high winds toppled a few of the giant trees, exposing a root base higher than the roof of a house. The bog blackened roots stood as tombstones to another Aeon. The darkness breathed in and exhaled a purple fog, and I was suspended in timelessness.

“You had a question?” she said.

The gentle confident sound stopped my breathing. I thought I had a question, but her voice infused chaos in my already altered state of mind. I focused what little energy remained on the only sound I had heard for hours. The ancients in the forest sighed waiting for at least some feeble response.

I choked out whispered words, afraid I might hear myself speak. “Have you always been with me?”

The purple cloud thickened with nature’s exhale. Silence held the answer I expected to hear. I kept walking. The trail flattened out and I picked up my pace as a way of distraction for my aching soul. The pregnant air was broken by a laughing raven high above. The Pilgrim walked on while the painting on the wall began to question me. And I foolishly answered back.

I must be the Pilgrim’s Fool. Grail’s cocktail of self-disgust and realization. Or maybe not? I don’t know. Would that make the Christ the Magician? Must be. But Jesus could be the Fool. I think I’ve seen that in a deck somewhere before. No, no. Christ is the Magician. Because that would make a transmigration of Brigid Dubh, the Anam Cara, and the Soror Mystica the High Priestess? Of course. Then Mother Mary, Magdalene, and the other Mary would be the Empress. And the Lover, the Beloved, and the Spirit would be the Emperor. The Empress and the Emperor would be the pair of opposites, two sides of the same coin, the Hermaphrodite. The Pilgrim, the Magician, the Priestess, the Empress are woven into the World of the One. The unified world, the Unus Mundus, everywhere but nowhere. We’re living in it, but we are not. The interior has become the exterior, the unseen—the seen.

“What’s happening to me?”

She said, “Opposites in tension create transmutation; a new reality.”

Cat said. “You okay? You need a break?”
“Oh, I think I’m okay.”
“You got another thirty minutes in ya?”
“Yeah. How long have we been at it?”
“Almost four hours,” she said.