Question 18: Comfortably Numb
Lidocaine myself to a beautiful oblivion
What do you think about using numbing cream?
[Image: an emoji with its eyes closed, a package of Dr. Numb ointment superimposed over it with the words “I pretend I do not feel it.”]
Numbing cream used to be a rarity. I encountered it only a few times back in the day, and it was always something the client came in having prepped their skin with, sometimes catching me by surprise. I hadn’t had much experience with it until more recent years, and it took time to glean enough firsthand data points to form my own opinion of it.
Nowadays the market is predictably flooded with tattoo-specific numbing products, named with varying degrees of sexiness, corniness, and obviousness: Hush, Dr. Numb, Tattoo Soothe.
Just this week I had two clients use numbing products, and I’ve started keeping a lidocaine spray on hand to use mid-session when people start hitting a wall. Plenty of artists use plain Bactine-- a very mild topical numbing and antiseptic spray you might have used for childhood scrapes-- to help reduce pain and irritation during a tattoo. I describe its effect as “taking the edge off” once you’re at the point where a tattoo is inflamed and angry and any touch feels like activating a sunburn, and it does a lot for helping people through the very end of a session.
[Meme from @monday_malarkey]
The controversy around numbing creams can be divided into two main issues, practical and ideological.
The primary practical issue is that it can change the texture of the skin and affect the way ink goes into it, and at times, the way it heals. I’ve personally noticed the texture change and the way skin can sometimes be denser while numbed, with a rubbery feel to it. As a black and grey artist, I haven’t noticed much of a difference in the healing, but people who tattoo heavy color saturation anecdotally seem to have more issues in the results when using numbing products.
Numbing creams must also be applied in advance for maximum effect. This usually means slathering it on and covering yourself in plastic wrap about an hour before you begin getting tattooed. Not all numbing products are made alike— some contain multiple numbing ingredients, the percentage of actives varies, and some are only effective once the skin has been broken, so they won’t make much of a difference til the tattoo is well underway. The effect can also wear off partway through a longer session, at which point the pain is especially jarring.
The ideological issue is where things get more interesting. The physical challenge associated with getting a tattoo has long been associated with “earning” the final product. There’s pride in enduring something difficult in order to achieve a lifelong reward, and you’ll often hear people who are densely covered quantify the hours, sessions, travel, and dollars they’ve dedicated to the practice. We’ve likely all seen or heard the praise “sat like a rock” or gotten validation for being “so tough.” And that feels good. Tattoos hurt! They hurt on a scale of “not bad at all” to “I’m being filleted” or “someone is holding an open flame to my bare ass cheek.”
For some tattooers, using numbing cream evades the “earning” part of being tattooed. Some people view the pain as an inextricable ingredient in the process, a part of what makes tattooing a type of ritual or coming of age. There are even movements that engage in especially brutal tattooing for the sake of pain itself, with the aesthetic outcome being secondary. The knowledge that tattoos are a product of endurance creates a sense of camaraderie for some; a bonding over a sense of having survived something you’ve both chosen.
As with nearly anything else, disabled bodies and bodies of color are often overlooked in forming these philosophies. Relationships to pain change when the experience of it is constant and out of your control. Relationships to pain are different when one’s ancestors were subjected to systematic corporal punishment and torture. The process of receiving pain is charged with the power dynamic present in who is applying the tattoo, as well. All this is to say that pain can be healing and transformative, but those thresholds are highly individual. As someone who has dealt with chronic health issues, being able to look in the mirror and remind myself that my body was strong enough to get this many tattoos has been grounding and fortifying at times when my body was otherwise capable of very little.
Getting through a painful tattoo is a collaborative process. I’m rewarded when I can support someone through it, teaching them some breathing approaches or reminding them to prep with a good night’s sleep and a full meal. Only the client can know what their limit is, and it’s my job to listen to them in that. Having tools like numbing aids at your disposal can make all the difference between a tolerable session and an agonizing one, and if you can make everyone’s life a little easier, why not do that? It’s also a material fact that stillness and calmness in a client make it easier to apply a tattoo than it is on someone who is moving mid-line or incredibly tense. If numbing cream is what helps someone maintain that stillness, I’m supportive of their using it.
This question had me intending to write something about numbness as a whole. I will, for the most part, dissuade clients who are getting their first tattoo from using numbing cream. I believe it’s important to understand what the process feels like before deciding how you want to approach it. Most people are surprised at the first line of their first tattoo, saying it hurts less than they expected. Being tattooed is also a practice like anything else. You try it, you adjust your approach, you practice accessing breathing, mindfulness, replenishing with calories and water, and you learn your own individual limitations. Sometimes they’re not what we expect them to be.
There’s an obvious metaphor here for numbing ourselves to life at large. Believing we can cope by refusing to feel, by avoiding any discomfort, is unsustainable in the long term. I’ve noticed a numbness in myself over the last week, with the news of two mass shootings, the police murders of Tyre Nichols and Keenan Anderson, the killing by police of Atlanta forest defender Tortuguita. But the numbness is temporary, a strategy to get me through the rest of my day, or my subway ride home, or to be able to sleep. Eventually, whether it’s ten minutes or ten hours later, the feelings make themselves inevitable. I don’t want to numb myself to the conditions of the world around me, to my own oppression or to that of others. I must feel it to register what is tolerable and what is intolerable, to find my own threshold of preparation, coping, recovery and prevention. Last week, I conducted my first oral history interview for the Rikers Public Memory Project, meeting a narrator who has overcome so much and is now a fierce advocate for the closure of the jail. We both cried at multiple points in the interview. The pain there was a witnessing— a difficult one, but proof to myself that I had the capacity for it on behalf of another person. Likewise, in tattooing, I don’t believe the aim should be to avoid the experience of pain altogether, but to support ourselves and each other in taking on something with purpose.
[Image: a film still in which a man’s back is visible in a mirror. We see a fresh, still-red tattoo of a cross with a bull rider in the center.]
In Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, the protagonist Brady is recovering from a crushing rodeo accident that has left him unable to compete or to ride at all. He is at the mercy of his recovery process and visits his friend Lane, who was rendered paralyzed by a rodeo accident of his own. In one of the most beautiful tattoo scenes I’ve seen in a film, Brady has a tattooer come to his home and apply an image of a cross and Lane riding a bull across his back. In a moment where Brady’s body will not do what he wants it to do, he is able to access pain of his choosing, a testament to his own resiliency as well as an homage to his friend, whose body is even more limited.
A mentor of mine once told me “you learn a lot about yourself by getting tattooed.” I’ve found this to be true in some ways. I’ve learned that I’m stronger than I think I am. I’ve learned that I can access calm and grounding in the face of something extremely difficult. I’ve learned it can be hard to express when I’m reaching a limit, and at this point, I’ve learned I have little to prove about my own toughness. I’ve also learned that my capacity for pain and coping changes day to day, and can have a lot to do with whether or not I’m taking care of my basic needs like food and sleep. Having learned all this, the next time I get a large tattoo, I’ll probably use numbing cream.
You can donate to Tortuguita’s family here, and donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund here.
Please take some time to read about the proposed Cop City training facility and to understand its implications for the environment and for policing in this country and abroad.
My book, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work is available via Afterlife Press.