A word for what it took

In older Japanese, a tattoo could simply be called gaman (我慢): endurance. The standard dictionary of the language traces that sense to the men who wore it. They bore the pain of being tattooed and showed they would not give in. The word did not describe the picture. It named what it took to receive it.

That part of a large tattoo rarely makes it into a photograph. A full sleeve or a back piece is an image, but it is also a process, and the process has a shape. The shape is older than tattooing.

The shape of a passage

Over a century ago the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep described what he called rites of passage: the ceremonies that carry a person from one state of life to another. He found the same three phases again and again. First separation from the former state, then a transitional period, then incorporation into the new one. Later anthropologists, among them Alan Morinis, noticed how often the middle phase is an ordeal, a hardship accepted voluntarily, and argued that the difficulty is not incidental. It is part of what changes the person.

Irezumi was not created as an initiation rite, and I don't claim it was. Other traditions on the Japanese archipelago did mark stages of life with tattooing, the Ainu for example, but that is a different history. What I see is simpler. A large Japanese tattoo, made the long way, has the same structure. Studies of tattooed people find many describing the painful process in much the same terms. What follows comes from what I see in my own studio.

Separation

It begins long before the needle. A client brings an idea, we talk it through, the design is agreed and a deposit is paid. On paper that is a booking. In practice it is the moment a person steps away from who they were before: they commit to something permanent, and to months or years of their own time, and they affirm that this matters to them.

Before the first session we sit down over tea and talk about what is about to begin: that it cannot be undone, that it will take long, that it will hurt. Sometimes the conversation stays brief. When I feel the person is ready to go further, it goes much further.

The long middle

Then comes the transitional period, the longest part: every session and every stretch of healing between them. This is where the ordeal lives. The pain returns each time, and each time it is accepted again, by choice. Not as a test of toughness. Pain is not a teacher, and it is not the goal. But it belongs to an experience that cannot be had any other way.

What changes in this period is perception. The relationship to pain changes first. Then the sense of responsibility for what is happening, to the body and through it. Sometimes even physical habits shift: how a person eats, how they train. Often there is a wish to put other parts of their life in order too. None of this is something I ask for. It is what I see. The quieter discipline of simply sitting through it belongs to the long arc of a large tattoo.

Incorporation

The last session closes the passage. The person who gets up from it carries a body that has physically changed, and usually knows that more than the skin has. What comes with it is a deeper understanding of oneself, and often a fresh look at one's place among other people: what they take on, what they stand for, how they are seen.

The tattoo is finished. The passage it marked has been crossed.

Not everyone crosses

There are exceptions, and an honest account includes them. Some people lose interest along the way and do not finish. The middle is long, and the passage can be left at any point. I don't count that against anyone. It only shows that the ordeal is real: a passage that could not be abandoned would not be a passage at all.

Named for endurance

The everyday virtue of patience, saving, waiting, sitting still for four hours, is its own subject in Gaman. The older use of the word says something sharper. The tattoo took its name from the endurance that made it, not from the image.

The picture is what other people see. The gaman is what the wearer keeps.