Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (60 page)

Tattoos may represent an event in a person’s life, express one’s innermost desires, or symbolize a personal philosophy. Some may wear a tattoo as a distinct symbol of personal strength.

In recent years an ideal of many tattoo aficionados has been to make each tattoo unique. Because the tattoo is perceived both as art and as personal statement, great care and forethought go into its design.

For most enthusiasts, tattooing is a magical and spiritual process that energizes both the tattooist and the person being tattooed.

Those with D&S interests may also find that some of the elements of tattooing are inherently erotic.

For submissives the tattoo may be a meaningful symbol of ownership.

Further, enduring the pain may represent a token of devotion to the dominant, and in some cases the nudity required by a tattoo on a buttock, breast, or thigh may be enlivened by mild feelings of erotic humiliation.

I
NTERVIEWS

I’m a physician at a large urban medical center, an M.D. with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and board certified in internal medicine and anesthesiology. I would consider myself involved in the D&S world through my interest in bondage and some of the areas I have explored with my wife. We’ve been together now almost 18 years—married [for] 13—and we have children.

In looking at how I ended up where I am now, I find two basic fundamental dynamics inside of me. One is the drive towards survival; the other is the sexuality, and it’s a 50-50 cut. Most everything else has been trained into me. I recognize that sexuality is the engine, and the survival instinct tells me the direction and where that energy should go. Those two dynamics, which are the essence of my life and allow me to take risks, force me to reexamine a lot that I have been taught about relationships and a lot that I’ve been taught about sexuality and to come to different conclusions.

Not a lot of people in the medical community, particularly in the academic medical community, know any of the sexuality teaching. We are fairly flagrant with our sexuality and fairly outspoken. It’s caused us over time to develop a small inner core of people that are fiercely loyal to us and very supportive of us, but by the same token, [it has] exacted the price in some levels of isolation in this normally very conservative community.

[My wife] has leather outfits—considered by most people as reasonably outrageous for a traditional doctor’s wife—where her tattoos are very clearly visible. A number of my colleagues have kiddingly referred to us as being part of “the whip-and-chain crowd.” The observed response from this so-called professional community is interesting.

My particular interest is in tattooing. I [also] have interest in bondage and extended relationships and alternative lifestyles. I consider myself to be more of a top. The interest in D&S grew naturally out of the sexuality between my wife and me. I was raised in a very liberal environment and definitely found the idea of bondage very acceptable if it was pleasurable to the partner. But it’s not something I actually went out seeking. She was the one who introduced it to me.

I was exposed to tattooing when I was in the military. I was a physician in the Air Force for five years and became the chief of medicine at a 150-bed hospital. My wife met somebody who had an image of a woman chained to a wall tattooed on his back. She found it extraordinary and discussed it with
me. We slowly but surely became friends with this individual, who was involved with the biker community. It was fairly significant out in rural America, which is where we were located at the time. He introduced us to an excellent tattoo artist, who eventually ended up doing the work on my wife.

[She] was the impetus that got us into the tattooing. I had one or two magazines and found it interesting, but she was the one who decided to actually go out and get the first tattoo. I quickly discovered that it had a strong erotic appeal to me. I found the actual process of tattooing and then the beautiful images on the body to be extraordinarily erotic.

The main impact of tattooing on me was having to deal with my own mortality. I know that may sound a bit strange, but the realization that if you put a mark on your body, it’ll be there for the rest of your life takes you back for a moment. For example, one of the first comments made to my wife by a medical person when she had her first tattoo is, “Oh, my God, you’ll be 92 on a mortician’s slab, and they’ll be stretching your skin, trying to figure out what the tattoo once was.” This was the individual’s ultimate horror. My wife, on the other hand, giggled at the thought and liked the idea that at 92 and even past death she would be able to send some message that she had lived a different and stranger life than the average person.

When you begin to deal with tattooing, you have to think clearly about your own values—how transient or how permanent they are—as you choose images that you will live with. You wonder: Five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, what will be your response to the tattooing? Where will your life have changed? And then, of course, you have to review backwards: How much have I changed in the last 10 years? It is a very interesting process that you go through to decide on your tattooing art.

I carry the tattoo of a lion on my back. It’s taking up about a quarter of my back. It’s a piece designed by a very close friend over a six-month period. I’m now planning some additional pieces. For me, the tattoos are very much symbolic of passages of given time. I envision being tattooed slowly over a long period of time.

The amount of discomfort that’s involved with tattooing is significant enough so that I’ve been asked to enter the field to try to achieve certain levels of anesthesia to help people who are not interested in the pain. The pain can be described as an intense scratching. The difficulty comes from the length of the process. My tattoo required four hours of sitting absolutely still while a sewing-machine-type device is run over the skin repeatedly, time and time and time again. Slowly but surely the area begins to burn intensely.

The tattooing felt as I would imagine either a North American Indian
or African tribal initiation would feel, because it was intense [and] required concentration and focus to overcome the discomfort. In our society there’s no process during which one is supposed to feel discomfort. If one has an operation, one has anesthesia; if one is mentally in pain, one can take a pill. With tattooing, one is voluntarily subjecting himself to intense discomfort with full recognition that this is being done for the purpose of creating art on the body, the body being the ultimate canvas.

My wife seemed to be beyond it. A lot of experienced tattoo artists were astonished by her focus and concentration. I think this is partly where the passion of the tattooing comes from. For one to sit many hours while the images are placed on your body is a symbol of the amount of passion in that individual. The images in effect are as if burned into the soul and finally [emerging] onto the skin. As you go through this process, you become more and more obsessed with the images that you’re going to put on your body, until you must absolutely get tattooed, or you cannot continue with your daily life.

I know this is highly unusual for a professional—let alone most people in this society—but I view tattooing as the highest art form, considering the nature of the canvas. There is a small, growing core of tattoo artists who view it as the ultimate expression of the individual. Plastic surgery has been well accepted in our society for a long time. It’s a process, though, of conformity. One has the ideal nose in mind and tries to shape many noses into that one ideal image. I think that’s why extensive plastic surgery is found to be socially quite acceptable and tattooing is considered to be quite radical. Tattooing is the ultimate individual expression. By the time it is done, the person looks like no other individual in society.

In terms of fantasies, I do [have] a general one: setting up a modern-day tribe. I have this image of a multimillion-dollar complex with a lot of living space and a group of highly intense and charged individuals who are working and loving together. It’s the grand fantasy, in the “modern primitives” sense, a very self-reliant group. I see tattooing potentially as being a part of an extended relationship because tattooing gives a distinct tribal feel and I think creates within a group the sense of continuity.

What do I get out of all this? A number of things. It’s an expression of the fact that I am not necessarily what I seem. I am not the typical doctor’s wife, not the typical mother. There’s more to me than most people know. At this point it’s an external statement. I’ve always had a line: People either knew me or they didn’t. There were things they needed to know to be considered
friends or for me to be completely comfortable with them. And the tattoos are a kind of external expression of this. You don’t really know me if you haven’t seen my tattoos.

I get the tattoos for myself; that’s what they’re for—me. I also know that [The Doctor] likes them, and that’s very important. I’m not sure what would have happened if he had had a completely negative reaction. I don’t know if I would have gotten the first one. I might have. Now they express a link between [The Doctor] and myself. We’re both tattooed. When someone sees us walking down the street, very often he’ll have his tattoos showing, and I’ll have mine showing. I wasn’t sure he was going to get one when I first got it. But it has taken on that [meaning] for me, that feeling of commitment.

The tattoos speak of a kind of an intensity and a passion and a lack of [the] fear that most people have. The thing that most people back away from and are very afraid of is the fact that [tattoos] are permanent. When I first got them, that was the most interesting aspect to most people. It wasn’t what it was, or where it was, or even the art of it. People said, “How do you know you’ll want it there five years from now?” Well, nowadays you probably can change them, but when I got them, I was not aware they could be changed. In some ways it’s a willingness to commit to something, to making yourself different from the rest of the world, to acknowledge it.