When you’re young, it’s hard to feel as if you’re doing anything more than seeking passage within your body, and we find all kinds of ways of taking control, of trying to make the body stay. It took me a long time to learn that good tattooing, like all good art, is less about a yearning for permanence than about the desire to capture change. Not to arrest, but to see in the way of remembrance: Change is real.

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