What changed this week: your record, and nine straight answers

A big week, and most of it is the part of the site that is actually yours. **Your record got real.** A piece used to hold a photo, a title and a note. It now holds the whole thing — where it is and exactly where, who did it, whether it was a guest spot, the dates, how many sittings and how many hours, what it cost, what it covers up, who it is dedicated to, how much it hurt, what you put on it while it healed, and how it has aged. All optional. All private unless you say otherwise. **The story field is the one to look at.** In ten years it is the bit you will be glad you wrote down, and nobody else can write it for you. **A photo timeline per piece.** Design, stencil, fresh, healing, healed, years on — each one dated. Add a photo with a date and the site works out the day count for you, so "day 14" and "1.4 years on" write themselves. Healed work at three and five years is the thing this site is actually for, and now there is somewhere to put it. **A body map.** One screen showing everything you have recorded, where it is, and what is happening to it now. It opens with whatever needs attention — anything healing, anything planned, any downsize you have set a date for. It works with one piece as well as fifty. **A healing diary, and an honest "is this normal?" page.** You can log what you see, day by day, including whether you had someone look at it and what they said. What the page will not do is tell you whether you are all right. It cannot know, and nor can any website. It gives you the day count, what our own records say is typical for that kind of work, and your own notes read back — so if you do go and see someone, you can tell them exactly what happened and when. **Piercings got their own half of the record** — gauge, method, who did it, and the downsize. That date is yours: we ask where it came from, because there is no published schedule for it and we are not going to invent one. **Download everything, any time.** There is now a button in your settings that gives you a zip: your data as a readable file, plus your photographs as the original files. It opens anywhere. You do not need this site to read it, and you do not have to ask anyone or explain why you want it. If this place ever stops being worth your time, you leave with your history intact. --- **And something new that is not about your own record: the practical side.** Nine pages, public, anyone can read them: - Giving blood after a tattoo or piercing - MRI scans with tattoos and piercings - Moles under and around tattoos - Allergies and reactions, ink and jewelry - Tattoos at work, and what is actually enforceable - Swimming, the gym, sleeping and sex while healing - Travel, and getting work done abroad - The long term: fading, touch-ups and removal - Before you commit Every fact on those pages is traced to whoever actually sets the rule — the Red Cross, Canadian Blood Services, Héma-Québec, the Mexican standard, the FDA, the EEOC, the APP — quoted, linked, and stamped with the date we last checked it. Where the answer differs between the United States, Canada and Mexico, all of them are given, because a page written for one country is wrong for the others and most pages do not say which one they mean. A few things in there genuinely surprised us while we were checking: - In most of the United States there is **no waiting period at all** to give blood after a tattoo. In Mexico it is twelve months. - Tattoo-related MRI injuries are far rarer than the internet suggests — seventeen reported cases in the entire published literature, all fully recovered. The real problem is the piercing you will be asked to take out. - A **negative allergy patch test does not clear the ink**, because the thing you react to forms in your skin over time. - Laser removal clears completely about half the time, and on white or flesh-toned ink a laser can make it permanently worse. Where we could not find a straight answer, the page says so rather than guessing. There is a "what we could not establish" section on several of them, and we would rather it sat there empty and honest than filled in with something that sounds confident. --- **Answering from your own experience.** If a question is about a specific piercing, placement or style, and you have one of those healed and recorded, you can choose to attach that to your answer — "has a healed helix, three years on". It shows only what you have and how long you have had it. Never your story, your photos, what it cost or who did it. It is attached to that one answer, not to your profile, and it is off unless you pick it. The point is simple: an answer from someone who actually lived it is worth more than an answer from a stranger, and until now there was no way to tell the difference. --- **Fixes.** Studio maps work again. Studio profiles that could not be saved now save. Profile photos show in the top bar instead of your initials. Convention ticket prices were re-checked against every organizer — one wrote in to correct us, and they were right, so we checked all of them. A few were wrong and are now fixed. As always: if something looks broken, say so here. It gets fixed faster than you would think.