Mama’s got a new tattoo
Chris’ brother is a tattoo artist, so when he was down (or up here at 7,000 ft.) this week, I finally got my ankle tattoo “finished”.
My last boyfriend, Charlie, and I had a pretty magical mushroom trip when we were 17. It was just the two of us. We’d camped beside a stream which fell down a waterfall into a pool below situated at the start of canyon, and we woke up drinking a gallon of grapefruit juice and chomping mushrooms. The trip turned into a scene that was mixed between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Natural Born Killers… and it felt as though we were in hell– but a good hell. There were bugs crawling all over the river rocks, flies crawling over our skin, and birds swooping down on us. The birds came from a cave near the start of the canyon, but the way they flew out of the cave in swarms made it look like they were bats. By the time the birds made it to us and began swooping, they seemed to resemble swallows. Through our teary eyes and the distracting flies buzzing about our heads, we decided that we better not try to solve the mystery of whether the birds were birds or if the bats were bats… so we took a bunch of pictures with a disposable camera.
When we got the film developed a week later, there wasn’t a single bird/bat in the sky, nor any flying out of the cave. I showed the pictures to my dad and told him about our hallucination. He said something that confirmed my suspicion, and really changed my outlook on the universe. He said, “There are things that are in other dimensions we are unable to see in our day-to-day consciousness. Sounds like the mushrooms opened your mind to another dimension!”
Ever since then I’ve been fascinated with the theories of metaphysics, and my belief system has become completely open-ended.
So… my tattoo represents the unknown, and the things we cannot see.
