I have over 25 tattoos...I've lost count as to how many hours I've actually been tattooed...I also have 12 piercings....I actually love the feeling of getting tattooed. To me it relaxing. I've even fallen asleep while getting tattooed.

I love tattooing as an art form. Some of my tattoos I got for specific reasons and they have meaning...others I just got because I loved the art work. I have a lot of tattoo artist friends and my ex was a tattoo artist. I wouldn't say that most people get tattoos because they have meaning. You'd be astounded how many people will walk into a tattoo shop and say things like 'I have $30 what can I get for that'. It's shocking. A lot of people get them because they think they're cool if they get them, some get them because they have some sort of significance to the wearer and others get them because they see it as an art form. (Which IMO it is). But id say a large majority of tattoos on people out there don't really have any meaning attached to them. I think the million girls who turned 18 in the early 2000s that all have the same tribal lower back tattoo prove my point.

Looking back I've always gotten a large piece of art after all of my manic episodes. I didn't make that correlation until just recently when I got diagnosed. There is definitely a high that comes with tattooing because of the release of endorphins and adrenaline that occurs as a result of the pain. A lot of heavily tattooed people like myself often say they get addicted to getting tattoos....some of them like the pain, others hate it but get tattooed anyways. I think even though some people like the pain this 'addiction' is more about collecting art than experiencing pain. Now, I am a masochist. I like pain. I'm in a BDSM relationship with my husband where pain play is a regular occurrence, so the pain part for me is a plus.

I started getting tattooed as a reaction to body dysmorphic disorder. It was my way of reclaiming my body and turning into something I found beautiful. It was a sort of therapy for me. Maybe there's a reason I ended up getting large tattoos after my manias, maybe it was an unconscious reaction to having lived through something so horrible. I'll probably never know.

I had more thoughts on this but my brain is running so fast I can't keep up enough to write it down.