More Background Healing

It's been a couple of weeks since the sessions where we finished basically all of the background and put green into some of the leaves (a few still to go). Time for a healing update, and then, as promised, some thoughts on where the suit goes from here.

Healing first, and it's pretty straightforward now. The routine is dialled in, and having switched to second skin, which I've only ever healed without once, I can say it's a real game changer.

The process: take off the cling film wrap from the studio, wash the leg with plain soap (the brand is actually called Simple), pat it dry with a paper towel, then let it air dry. Then the second skin. I've got a big roll of it, about seventeen pounds from Amazon, and I cut it into sections. First time round, covering a whole leg with it was not good. It creased, it was stiff, it was hard to move. What I've found now is that small sheets work far better than big ones, and direction matters: applied left to right around the leg rather than up and down. Unless you've used the stuff it's hard to describe, but it's flexible almost immediately that way, with only the slightest tightness.

So if I'm tattooed on the Friday, it comes off on the Tuesday. In the shower, peel a small corner, then let the water do the rest. Rub soap over it afterwards. There's always a bit of glue residue but it's no big deal. And the strange thing is I don't really get any itching. The outline was far itchier during healing than any of the shading has been.

You can see in the photos what it looks like straight after removal. The black has healed really well, really good saturation. There's a bit of flaky skin, not itchy at all, and each time I'm in the shower I rub small circles with my hand and some of it comes away. Never force it. Never pick it. Never peel. The green is taking longer than the black, which is normal for the pigment.

It's looking amazing. I'm properly happy with it. That simple complexity we've talked about is right there in the design, and what's struck me is how much thought has gone into all the different views: sitting down, standing up, in shorts, moving, squatting. There are so many angles from which it flows, and all of them work. It's setting up an incredible base for the rest of the body.

Which is a good segue to the future.

Before the last session I emailed over some of my thoughts. In the background, I've always wanted a really bold design, and that's what drew me to Deneka in the first place. It's not that I don't love intricate work with lots of motifs and elements. But bold, dark, high-contrast composition is what I wanted.

Impatiently, I'd wondered whether it made sense to go straight to the back and do it alongside the left leg. Talking it through, though, both legs first makes more sense, for balance. So the left leg is next. Then the back, which has to come before the arms and the front because it wraps around the ribs and onto the chest. Then arms, then front.

We also talked about the upper half. The lower half is water now, with the two koi, and the question was whether to keep the whole suit as water or transition to wind. A full water suit can look incredibly cohesive, carrying the same flow right through. But it limits the motifs available, and there's something I've had in the back of my mind for years. I've gone back and forth between a huge koi on my back and a dragon, but it has to be the dragon. The whole suit needs to tell the story of the Dragon Gate.

So I've decided: the upper half transitions to wind, with a caveat or two still to work out. A huge dragon on the back. The arms either flowers or hebi, snakes, one open-mouthed and one closed on alternating sides. And on the front, what I'm really drawn to is a king koi taking the whole torso.

Read the suit standing up and it goes like this. It starts on the right leg, where the koi is swimming up. On the front, that koi has become a huge, powerful king koi, right on the edge of the Dragon Gate, just about to transform. On the back, it's made it: the koi has become the dragon. And on the left leg, the koi is swimming down, its journey completed. The snakes on the arms are complementary. In irezumi they're about transformation too: shedding, regeneration.

That's where I see the whole bodysuit ending up. It'll be measured in years, and I'm sure some of it will change. But that's the basic premise going forward.

One more session on the right leg, then we start the left. Keeping up the momentum.