It started when I was nine. Sitting at the booth in front of the jewellery store, the sting of rubbing alcohol in my nostrils and my Nana's soothing, smoke-roughened voice floating above me, I shut my eyes. The punching clang of the gun echoed in my head, and then the nurse was holding a mirror telling me to look. What wonder! My small pink earlobe was now studded with gold. No pain, no blood. I didn't even notice when she did the other one. I vowed to never grow my hair long again. I didn't want to cover up my lovely and marvellous pierced ears.

By fifteen, I had graduated to the boiled safety pin and potato technique, and had transformed my lobes and cartilage into dainty webs of steel and silver, ringed from top to bottom. I felt gorgeous and brave and magical.

Then something happened when I was sixteen. The sun set on my childhood. Heavy drinking and drug use took the place of hopscotch and Barbies. Depression, anxiety, and panic attacks plagued me. I began slashing bloody seams into my arms with the kilt pin from my school uniform. I turned into a weeping vampire, sleeping all day and pacing all night. My beloved younger sisters were terrified of me; I used to chase them with knives.

Somewhere in the centre of that maelstrom, I got tattooed for the first time: a crack of light in a dusty room.

Over the next half a decade, I girded myself, stitched my broken self together with metal and ink. Got my nose pierced, got more more and more tattoos, got a ring stabbed through my navel. Feeling stronger every day, like a goddess. I began the clean-up. No more drugs. Tried to control the drinking (ha!). Sloughed off the abusers, the liars, the demons that surrounded me. Got into therapy.

Ooops. No one told me that stirring the old cauldron would bring the long-settled offal to the surface. I wasn't prepared for it. The drinking accelerated. Hallucinogenic nightmares chilled my sleep. The cutting resumed, and re-channelled itself into burning, bruising, trying to break bones and skin to let the agony out. The final depth was reached the morning I awoke, after a blind drunk, with my bloody legs stuck to my bedsheets. My husband took one look at the gaping, muscle-revealing slashes from knee to toe and all he could say was, "Oh, honey - why did you have to give yourself lifers?" My answer? Fuck, I didn't even remember doing it, much less why.

At the hospital I was told that I didn't seem to be "the type" that would practise self-mutilation. They laughed at me when I asked if the tetanus shot would hurt. They wrinkled their noses when my shock-wracked body gave up and I puked, shivering, into a bedpan. I was taped up, good as new, and sent upstairs to see my therapist.

So here I sit, nearly thirty years old, scarred, pierced, and gloriously tattooed. I'm happily married to a man with half his chest inked and pale white scars like bracelets across both wrists. Random, dirty chopping has left ugly keloids to remind me of my weakness. But my tattoos are beautiful, graceful, sexy...is it okay that they bleed and hurt too? There's such a fine line (no pun intended) between torment and triumph, between self-destruction and self-discipline. Have I replaced a pathological habit with something safer, cleaner, but still motivated by despair?

I don't know. And I think maybe I don't care. All I know is that I no longer feel like a smashed doll with an empty head. The nursery room door is wide open, and it's leading me into a sunshiny field full of flowers. And what's that buzzing sound? Maybe sweet honeybees. Maybe not...