Artist and art therapist Carl Arroyo, from therapy provider Chroma, shares the story of brain injury survivor Ricky, whose interest in tattoo art began a path towards a life with more possibilities.
I’ve been an art therapist for more than a decade now, and it’s an incredible way of drawing people out and allowing them to express themselves.
I started working with Ricky (not his real name) in the Spring of 2020, about a year and a half after his injury. He already had a multidisciplinary team around him, and it was felt that he needed something else to support him in adjusting to his experience and his injuries.
To be honest, Ricky wasn’t particularly interested in art as a whole, but he had a specific desire to design some tattoos based on his experience of his injury.
And that’s very much one of the skills that you have to have as an art therapist; that means of making a connection at some level and seeing where it takes you.
Tattoos are culturally acceptable and accessible – most towns have got tattoo parlours – so people of a certain generation find them appealing, and that certainly was the case with Ricky.
Initially, it was all about reflection, talking about the artwork, what that might relate to and then towards the end, we were looking at where he wanted to go and what he could do with his life.
And through all this was threaded the idea was that he was going to take the design he produced to a tattoo parlour and have it made into a tattoo.
One of the fascinating things that came through the design process was how he was relating it to his life, his injuries, and also his new place in the world.
His design was a skull with a crown on it, which was significant to Ricky both physically and emotionally. For example, as part of his immediate treatment following his accident, he had to have the top of his skull removed, because the brain was so swollen.
He was telling me about having this plate and the materials that they were using, and from that we had the idea to place a crown on there. And then that segued into talking about what the crown represents, in terms of Ricky being in charge of his own kingdom, and how his injury had changed how people viewed him.
One of the aspects of his injury he found hardest to deal with was being the centre of attention, surrounded by carers all the time, because in his life, in his family, he’d never had that attention. He’d not been listened to.
While he found it frustrating at times, paradoxically he came to accept that he was a king of this world and the attention was on him. The idea of the crown allowed Ricky to focus on some of the less tangible effects of his condition.
In the end, we had about 15 sessions, but, with lockdown, we were never able to meet physically and, sadly, by the time we could, he’d somewhat disengaged from the process.
However, prior to that, he was getting to the point where he could see that, if he wanted to create this new life, he was going to have to be more assertive and actually start asking for what he wanted.
And that wasn’t going to be an easy process. That’s what art therapy does; it’s about encouraging the creative process to give the patient a voice, and helping them find ways to cope with their new way of life.
www.wearechroma.com