It’s scabbing and so it itches A LOT and I’m struggling a lot to not touch it... but it’s beautiful and perfect and everything I wanted.
Disclaimer: if you say a single word about ancient curses, I will rip your head off for your very Christian and Eurocentric approach toward ancient non-Western cultures. If you want to know more about my tattoo, the woman who had it close to two millennia before me, or my own reasons for the tattoo, I’m happy to answer those questions. If you tell me I’m cursed because you think everything ancient holds some magical and malevolent power, I will actually destroy you.
Dermatologists hate her! Achieve the complexion of a 1500 year old mummy with this one weird trick!
To everyone who’s asked about the tattoo specifically ( @goreoboros @midnight-blue-moon-princess @spartan127 @pagaea and probably some other people I’ve missed).
The tattoo is drawn from the Pazyryk Ice Maiden, an unintentional mummy that accidentally led to an absurd amount of knowledge about Scythian culture. I have a whole tag about her which should give you the basics - essentially, she was a priestess of some kind, she was disabled at a young age, she died of bone cancer. I intended to get my tattoo years earlier, but it doesn’t escape me that the tattoo was a present to myself on my 33rd birthday, which is probably the oldest the person who originally bore it was when she died.
If you can love a person across time, I love her. I love her humanity, the story we can infer from her bones - and, as I’m studying forensic anthropology, the story inferred from bones is particularly important to me. As a disabled person, her existence, and the fact that she was loved enough to bury her the way they would warriors, when there was no way this woman ever went to war... it’s important to me. We have always cared for one another. Disabled people have always been of great importance within their culture. And she and her grave have become our greatest evidence of what Scythian culture was actually like - this woman disabled from a fairly young age, dead of cancer young as well... she was loved and cared for and so important in that society that they built a burial mound for her that (unintentionally) stood the test of time better than any other.
...I got her tattoo not only because I love ancient art (I’m literally planning an entire sleeve of ancient art on my other arm), but because to me she’s a symbol of humanity. That humans are meant to care for each other, that even in ancient times, disabled people were able to be important and beloved in their community. That the worst right wing assholes are wrong about human nature, because I have proof from antiquity that our nature is to love and care for each other.
This woman survived a decade past when she should have, after that first fall that disabled her. This woman lived and became an important person in her culture. This woman had shoes where even the soles were beaded because they would never need to touch the ground. This woman was cared for, and loved, and revered, and she’d been disabled since she was a young teen. This is all important. This all matters.