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I haven’t sat in four days, not since we began work on my butt spirals. I stand, mostly, or kneel, or I’m on my hands and knees, or in child’s pose.

I never usually lie on my stomach, and my back doesn’t like the enforced small back bend when I do. I can lie on my stomach across the bed, a thin pillow under my belly, a thicker one under my chest, my head hanging off the edge of the bed. Then I can prop my computer on the floor, angled back so the screen in parallel to my face, and I can stream movies and TV, can just reach the track pad.

Fortunately, I’m still able to sleep on my side, as long as I roll a bit towards my belly to keep both butt cheeks off the bed.

My butt still hurts, and I think it’ll be at least a few more days before I want to sit on it!

I went to urgent care here on Thursday evening (9/28), just to check on a bit of pinkness on my right butt, which was just irritation, not an infection. The doctor’s first words were: “You should be taking antibiotics prophylactically while you’re getting tattooed,” and he immediately wrote me a prescription for two weeks worth of flucloxicillin, which is what I took for the infection the last time I was here.

He wanted me to wait 48 hours before more tattooing, to make sure the flucloxicillin was at full strength in my blood stream. So we begin again on Sunday, October 1.

When we finished the first, left butt cheek, Kariei asked Phil how many pakati lines it took. Phil said “I have no idea,” but then he counted off a section, then counted off how many sections in my left butt spirals. “It looks like about 1,000 lines,” he said.

One thousand short pakati lines for one butt cheek. And three and a half hours for the outlines and the pakati shading lines on one butt cheek.

Seven hours of pain and two thousand pakati lines for my full butt!

Butt so worth it!

Here are some photos Mark Dwyer took on my iPhone this afternoon: