A skilled artist never uses an eraser. This is not because they never make mistakes - although they rarely do. The reason that artists don’t use erasers is because drawing is about making marks on paper, and erasing a mark negates that process and interrupts the artist’s flow. If you make a mark that turns out to be wrong, move on and make a better mark. Over time, a picture emerges from the all the marks on the paper - and every mark tells part of the story of the drawing process.
To make great drawings, artists require the courage of their convictions, making each mark with confidence, and visualizing the path that the pen will take. A great mark is confident and flowing - the artist makes generous movements from the upper arm. By freeing their minds of the fear of making mistakes, artists tend to not to make them. With the eraser removed from the artists’ tool box, they no longer search for mistakes to erase. Instead each stroke forms a legitimate part of the whole.
In this sense, tattoos are the ultimate form of drawing. Before I had cancer, I didn’t understand tattoos. I couldn’t understand how anyone would want to indelibly mark their own bodies. Why make an irreversible decision that you may live to regret? I now realize that my thinking was flawed. Each and every decision that we make is irreversible. It’s an indelible mark on time. There are no erasers in life, and we each have a finite amount of time in this world. Like a tattoo artist, we must make our marks with confidence, and embrace the truth in every mark that we make.
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