It was kinda funny, because, like, in order to make sure the diagram was accurate, I had to let my assistant take pictures of every inch of my body. I mean, some of the tattoos are really small, so I wanted the diagram to have all these blown-up sections, you know, like a biology textbook or something, where we zero in on just one little patch and like, get a super-close-up view of all the various tats there, and so we spent like, an hour or two in my living room a few weeks back with me just like, completely naked and her circling around me with a camera. I don’t even think she knew about all of them, you know? Like, usually I show her every new tat when I get one—I’ll send her a pic from the parlor or whatever while the ink is still settling in—but a few times during the photo shoot, she was just like: Whoa, really? And I was like: Yeah, you didn’t know about that one?

I think the one that surprised her most was this little devil guy I have tattooed in between my big toe and my pointer toe on my right foot. It’s just this super-terrifying demon guy that I got in Indonesia when we were stopped over there with the HERE we Go tour. One of our technicians had this absolutely terrifying, like, traditional devil mask tattooed on his neck, and I was just like: Oh my god, that’s the dopest thing I’ve ever seen. And he was like: Oh, thanks, my friend did it. And I was like: Do you think he could do one for me? And the guy was like: Of course! Let me call him up. And the tattoo artist was super-excited to do it. I mean, he was a fan, and he was super-talented, and I was just like: I want it in my toes. I want to crush the devil with my toes. And he was like: Okay, cool, but I’m just warning you: That’s gonna hurt a lot. And I was like: Whatever, man, let’s fucking roll. And it REALLY fucking hurt. LOL. The whole time during the show the next day, I was like, limping around the stage and shit, trying to hold it together.

On the diagram, there’s two main images of me just standing there with my arms out—there’s a front view and a back view—and then there’s all these smaller sections, and it’s like, the graphic designer got every inch. She didn’t miss anything. It’s actually really fucking beautiful, you know, to see yourself like that—to see yourself so fully rendered. I’ll include the whole thing in the final version when they publish it and it’ll be like one of those glossy sections, you know, with a key and everything—like, when you pick up the book, you’ll see that there’s just this section in the middle with this different-colored, different-textured paper, and then when you finally get to it, you’ll be like: Whoa! Cool!—but for now, I’ll just write down the little descriptions every once in a while whenever I have the time. She already labeled all the tattoos with numbers and everything on the diagram, so all I have to do is write down the descriptions and the little stories that go along with each of them. It’s WAY too much work to do it all in one go—if I tried to do it right now, it’d take me, like, five hours at a minimum—so I’ll have to just chip away at it gradually.