blackout · 2 years, 3 months
Daniel's Diary
Near-total blackout with sacred geometry negative space
I'm Daniel, I design sound for games, and before all this I had seventeen tattoos that had absolutely nothing to say to each other. A rose here, a skull there, a quote I cringe at now. The blackout wasn't about covering up regrets exactly — it was about turning the volume down so the few things I actually care about could be heard. This is the blog of slowly turning most of my body black. People think it's intense. It mostly just took a really long time.
Deciding to go black
I'd been chewing on this for two years. Every time I looked at my arms I just saw noise — seventeen separate decisions made by seventeen slightly different versions of me, none of them talking. Then Katya's work showed up on my Instagram: whole bodies in solid black with these impossibly thin channels of bare skin forming sacred geometry. I had an actual physical reaction to it. That's it. Not more images. Less. Almost nothing, just geometry coming out of the dark.
Mood: First time in years I felt sure about anything.
Planning it with Katya (white paint everywhere)
Three consults. Katya painted the negative-space map onto me in white — a web of thin lines: Flower of Life across the torso, Metatron's Cube on the back, little Seed of Life nodes at the joints. Once it dried and I saw it in the mirror, I got it. Those white lines stay bare skin; everything else goes black. The clever part is she pre-distorts the geometry so it still reads as correct on a curved body — a straight line on paper becomes a curve on a ribcage. She kept saying most people get this bit wrong, and after seeing the planning I believe her.
Mood: Handing my whole body over to someone else's plan. Trust exercise.
First leg fill — packing solid black is a vibe
Packing solid black sounds nothing like outline work — it's slower, deeper, this big mag shader just laying down maximum ink per pass. The feeling isn't sharp, it's a relentless grinding heat that never really lets up. Three sessions on the left leg, six hours each. By the end my leg's swollen to about twice its size, black from ankle to hip with these thin clean rivers of skin running through it. The contrast is genuinely violent in the best way. Black ink also weeps for days, so RIP that set of sheets.
Pain: 6/10 — no spikes, but no breaks either. Just constant.
Healing: Big swelling for ~5 days, ink weeping everywhere, living in Saniderm.
Mood: All in now. You can't exactly half-undo solid black.
Both legs done — don't recognise my own shower
Both legs finished. Standing in the shower watching water sheet off legs that are basically all black except for the geometry channels is genuinely strange — they don't read as 'my legs' anymore, more like an object. The old rose on my calf, the compass on my shin: gone, swallowed. And weirdly I feel nothing about losing them. They'd stopped being mine ages ago. This actually feels like mine.
Healing: Legs fully healed, black settled deep and even, no patchy bits.
Mood: Letting go of the old stuff, no nostalgia.
The back — Metatron's Cube and the worst of the bone pain
The back holds the centrepiece — a massive Metatron's Cube spanning shoulder to shoulder. Katya cuts custom vinyl stencils to mask the geometry, then floods everything around it black. Lines under 2mm wide, kept perfect against total black. Six sessions. Worst part was over the spine — you can feel the needle hit bone and there's no talking yourself out of that one. I put headphones in, played drone music, and genuinely checked out for chunks of it. Came back to a black back with this glowing geometric web in bare skin. Sacred geometry looks a bit naff on paper. On a body, against black, it does not.
Pain: 8/10 — spine and shoulder blades. Deep bone-buzz pain.
Healing: Back takes the longest. Weeks of face-down sleeping. Switched to silk sheets to cut the friction.
Mood: Somewhere else entirely during sessions, flattened afterwards.
Arms — and the session my body said no
Arms go faster than legs, less surface, easier to reach. But the inner arms are hell — elbow ditch, inner bicep, wrists. Katya batches them into long sessions; she'd rather do an arm in 4 than drag it over 8 and I'm with her, rip the plaster off. The channels link up to the back and torso, with a little Seed of Life node at each junction. Left arm: 4 sessions. Right arm: 5, because one got cut short when I started shaking — not crying, just full involuntary shaking, body going 'absolutely not.' Katya stopped instantly, zero judgement, and we picked it up two weeks later.
Pain: 9/10 — inner arm near the wrist and elbow ditch is the line for me.
Healing: Heal fast but the swelling makes normal life annoying — couldn't grip a coffee cup properly for days.
Mood: Humbled. Good reminder the body gets a vote.
Torso — watching my own chest go black
Chest, stomach, sides — the torso ties the whole system together and you can finally see it: geometry flowing unbroken from legs to torso to arms, one continuous network. The chest got to me a bit, watching the area over my heart turn black and feeling the needle drag across my sternum. The Flower of Life over my solar plexus is the piece I'm proudest of, it looks like it's lit from inside. Ribs were exactly as bad as advertised; Katya just works fast and doesn't linger. "Efficiency is mercy," she said, which is the most Katya sentence possible.
Pain: 8/10 — ribs and sternum. Chest was less awful than I'd built up.
Healing: Torso heals unevenly — needed one touch-up on the right side.
Mood: Can see the finish line now. Picturing the whole thing when I close my eyes.
Saturation passes — chasing true black
Going over everything a second time to get proper density. Some spots didn't hold ink perfectly first time — knees, elbows, lower back, the 'stubborn zones' as Katya calls them. The touch-up sessions are shorter, 3 hours tops, but somehow hurt more because you're working over already-healed tattoo. Worth it though — under any light now there's no patchiness, no grey ghosting. Just flat, deep, matte black.
Healing: Way easier than the first pass. Body knows the drill by now.
Mood: Nerdy perfectionism. Chasing the last 2%.
Last session. That's it.
Final session, one hour, a couple of lines on my right shoulder blade that needed cleaning up. Katya finished, stepped back, said "that's it." Two years three months, forty-eight sessions. I'm now roughly 95% solid black with a continuous run of sacred geometry channels from my ankles to my collarbones in bare skin. In the dark you basically see nothing. Under light the whole network appears. Went home, stood in front of the mirror for a good twenty minutes, and for the first time in ages my brain was completely quiet.
Mood: Still. Properly still.
“Everyone calls it extreme. To me it was the calmest decision I've ever made — less stuff, not more.”
Looking back
Someone at a club asked why I'd 'ruined' my body. I told them I didn't ruin anything — I edited it. Everything that was there before is still under the black; it's just not the headline anymore. The geometry is. And the honest takeaway after two years of this: it's less about pain tolerance and more about patience and trusting one artist completely. If you're considering a blackout, find someone whose negative space already makes you feel something, then let them drive. The 'less is more' thing is a cliché because it's true — turns out it also takes about 240 hours under a needle.
Summary
Total sessions
48
Total hours in chair
~240
Duration
2 years 3 months
Coverage
~95% solid black
Technique
Machine (mag shader)
Negative space
Sacred geometry channels
Previous tattoos covered
17
Most painful area
Inner arms — 9/10
