Tattoos
Something that has gradually revealed itself to me over time is: you can learn literally anything (as long as it's legal, that is).
Over the years, I have learned how to make a knifeblade from an old rasp, I learned how to make coin rings from loose change (as in, old loose change; older coins had the coolest craftmanship), I tried my hand at scrimshaw. More recently, I have learned enough electrical engineering and about embedded software to to make a neat thing or two with microcontrollers. I even had to learn most of everything I know about coding while on the job, and such learning is something that will continue as long as I am in the software industry.
The point is: after a while, unknowns change to knowns; frontiers become familiar. Things just settle into place and "hard-to-grasp" becomes "second nature".
I'll be honest with you, I don't even particularly like whales. I couldn't tell you why I did a tattoo of one.
Tattooing began as something I wanted to do, but didn't know how. I also had healthy amount of fear (rationally so, I'd argue) about trying it on myself.
If you haven't been to Munich, the skyline is absolutely gorgeous! So gorgeous that Paulaner put it on their beer labels and I put it on my arm.
For the first couple of them, I drew them but had someone else do them on me. Then, I discovered the stick and poke technique and went to town. It's quite easy to get the right supplies and try it yourself (but I recommend reading up on proper cleaning and procedure) since you just use normal tattooing needles and ink. Also, for the record, I found it to be much less of a painful process than machine tattoos!
Then I graduated to a machine once I get tired of the long hours a single line of a stick and poke tattoo requires. It cut down the time took to complete one by several orders of magnitude.
Tattooing is on the long list of things that I have found is learnable autodidactically: you can do it on your own by watching some good old fashioned YouTube tutorials (or reading a book, through trial and error, etc). It's something I worked up to and at the start, much like hiking to the top of a mountain, it seems like you have a lot of ground to cover. If you put your head down and just start with some achievable small initial steps (like stick and poke on practice skin), eventually you'll look up and realize you're most of the way to the summit.
