TATTOO

"You should have a tattoo. It is beautiful and the experience is...what should I say... therapeutic. I have a tattoo. I could show you if you want." "Yeah sure why not?" I said' and noticed how carefully he moved his chair back before he pulled his T-shirt up, pulled it up higher than Christ would have done to show the wound, pulled it up so far that his lean, white, and hairless torso was exposed all the way from his his belt to his throat.

I saw a fantastic beast. Its left arm slung over his shoulder, the claws of its right hand sunk in the flesh of his breast. The body of the thing, neither lizard nor snake, rolled down his rib cage decreasing in diameter until it came to an end in a delicate tail that hung from his bottom rib like a stocking on a towel rail.

Ah Ha, I thought, The Animal Style, as my head exploded with images of the ancestors of this pop cliche. From The Lindsfarne Gospels, the prows of Viking ships, strong fighting beasts bred of a mix of Celtic and Germanic influences, nostrils flaring, gums bared, rows of teeth curved like scimitars, and bodies. Bodies covered with lines in geometric pattern betraying the contempt, or was it fear, of their makers for empty spaces.

(pause) "I'm going to have another one done." He put his clothes and his chair carefully back in place and sat down. Time for another Go line. "Doesn't it hurt?" Sometimes you just give them what they want. "Of course it hurts." (The snarl, leitmotif for the men of Berlin.) "Of course it hurts. That is why one does it. Do you understand? One must have the experience of pain which is the design going into the flesh. This experience is total. You and your body and the pain are one. One must embrace this to come away clean." (pause) While he was talking I noticed his mouth resembled a sphincter. (pause) He was tall even sitting down. 9slow down) A mind at work on top of a pole.

"Perhaps what I am saying is difficult for you to understand. The ability to see beauty in pain is something very German. We Germans see the beauty, and the truth that is in pain and only in pain. You North Americans give greater value to comfort. You see pain as something to be avoided, as for example by taking a tablet.

We in Germany give value to the experience of feeling. Whether it is pleasure or pain is not so important as feeling something. And there is more in the feeling of pain. I mean to say, more in the sense of intensity, more substance, more, I think one could say spiritual value, in pain than in other feelings. (pause) But this, I know, is difficult for you to understand."