What 20+ Years of Tattooing Has Taught Me About Pain

I’ve been tattooing people for more than 20 years, which means I’ve spent a lot of my life sitting across from people who are in pain.

Physical pain, obviously. Tattoos hurt.

But I’ve also sat across from people going through loss, divorce, heartbreak, new beginnings, endings, and entire changes in who they are.

And after all these years, I’ve realized something.

Pain isn’t always a bad thing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when people are going through something really difficult emotionally, they can almost welcome the physical pain of getting tattooed. I see it especially with people who are experiencing grief or loss.

There’s something different about physical pain. You know where it hurts. You know why it hurts. And when you’re getting tattooed, you know that eventually it’s going to end.

Emotional pain isn’t always like that.

You can’t always point to where it hurts. You don’t know how long it’s going to last. Sometimes you don’t even understand why something is affecting you as much as it is.

Emotional pain can be a much heavier burden for people than physical pain.

I’ve watched people cry in my chair. I’ve watched them talk. I’ve watched them get quiet. And sometimes it feels like the physical experience gives them somewhere to release some of what they’ve been carrying emotionally.

I’ve also had the opportunity to tattoo people through entire transitions in their lives.

Someone will come in for the first session while they’re going through something incredibly difficult. Then they come back a few weeks or months later, and something about them has changed.

Then they come back again.

And they’ve changed a little more.

Over multiple sessions, I get to watch people change and grow while the tattoo itself is changing and growing too.

I think that’s one of the most beautiful parts of what I do.

It has also made me think a lot about our relationship with pain.

People can sit in my chair for hours experiencing physical pain because they’ve already accepted that the pain is part of the process. They don’t necessarily think something has gone wrong just because something hurts.

But we don’t always treat emotional pain the same way.

When something hurts emotionally, we want it gone.

We run from it. Distract ourselves from it. Try to fix it. Try to understand it. Blame someone else for it. Blame ourselves for it.

I’ve done that too.

And what I’ve learned in my own life is that the pain I continue to run from tends to be the pain that continues to hurt me.

When I stop resisting it, something changes.

The pain can start to become information.

It can show me where I’m holding on. It can show me what I need to grieve. It can show me what isn’t working anymore. It can show me where I need to grow.

The pain can actually help guide the change.

That doesn’t mean everything painful is good for us. And it doesn’t mean we should stay in situations that continue to harm us.

It just means that pain itself doesn’t have to be the enemy.

Maybe the tattoo chair has been teaching me that for the last 20 years.

When you’re getting tattooed, you don’t have to enjoy the pain.

You just stop fighting the fact that it’s there.

You breathe. You sit with it. You allow yourself to experience it.

And eventually, it passes.

Then you stand up and look in the mirror, and something is different.

Maybe the goal in life isn’t to create a life where nothing ever hurts.

Maybe the goal is to stop believing that pain means something has gone wrong.

Sometimes pain tells us to stop. Sometimes it tells us something needs our attention.

And sometimes pain is simply part of becoming someone new.

I’ve watched that happen in my tattoo chair more times than I can count.

And I’ve experienced it in my own life too.

Pain isn’t always a bad thing.

Sometimes it’s part of the transformation.