I lived in Seoul in 07-09 and lived a double life as an English teacher and performance artist. My friend H was the proprietor of a gallery in Seoul and always was arranging shows and had a nice cast of characters hanging about there.

I went to the gallery one day and saw that H had a giant piece of styrofoam, a tattoo gun, and a big book of kinda cheesy oriental tattoo patterns. One of H's friends was a tattoo artist, and had left the gear there for him to use and have a look at while he was out of town. H had been practicing a series of psychedelic looking doodles on the styrofoam.

I basically would come in and beg H to give me a tattoo of the gallery logo every time I came in, but H would politely avoid it or change the subject, possibly because he'd wasn't very confident about his tattooing ability and because technically it was illegal for anyone in S Korea to give tattoos without a medical licence. So he gave me a tattoo needle after I'd bugged him a bit.

I'd given myself a tattoo of two dots on my left hand when I was 16 after I'd met this bad ass goth girl in Vienna at the U4 and she told me about how the three dots tattoo means that you are fucking awesome and you can trust anybody with three dots tattooed on their left hand. I wasn't sure if I was that cool, so I only gave myself two dots.

I figured it was about time for another, since I liked the process and permanence of it, and I couldn't wait around for H anymore. I bought some ink from the art store and when my bf saw what I was doing he insisted on taking pictures to document.