8. Skin Is Mine - Lyrics

Title: UNiCORN - Track 7 of GORGEOUS album
Artist: Loui Crow
Streaming: All platforms
📱 TikTok/FB/Youtube/IG: @louicrow

🖤 ABOUT THE SONG — SKIN IS MINE
I cover myself in blackout not because I like pain, but because trauma wired my body to expect it. My nervous system lived in “always on.” Tattoo gave me a way to shift the circuit. The needle hums, I set the pace, I can stop. Predictable hurt is different than ambush—it teaches my alarm system to stand down.

Tattoo is how I took the pen back. Assault wrote on me without permission. Bodies are archives, and I refused to leave mine blank with ghosts. Strong sensation reopens the file—if I pair it with breath and choice, the brain rewrites: from pain = freeze to pain = stay. Every blackout panel is memory reconsolidation carved in ink.

Blackout isn’t hiding. It’s encryption. It erases the captions they left and denies easy reading of me. No more open access. No more scanning my skin for meaning that isn’t theirs to take. Outward it says “not for you.” Inward it says “I choose what’s legible now.”

Tattoo also pulls me back into my edges. Trauma made me drift. Strong, steady sensation marks out my map again: this is my arm, my shoulder, my ribcage, my back. Big black fields feel like bold lines on a drawing—they make the body clear.

And when pain is chosen, the chemistry flips. Endorphins rise, cannabinoids flow, vagus nerve kicks in, attention narrows. The hurt doesn’t steal me—it anchors me. I stay. That’s what makes blackout sacred: it turns hurt into a tether instead of a trap.

So yes, it hurts. That’s the point. It’s honest, it asks, it stops when I say. That difference is the whole song. Every line of ink answers what I couldn’t say out loud: Skin is mine.

🔥 What Blackout Really Is
Blackout is a firewall. A refusal of gaze. A refusal of captions. It isn’t erasure—it’s authorship.

🗣️ Crow Affirmation
“Pain with choice rewires. Every mark is mine.”

🖤 CROW TRUTH
They wrote in bruises. I wrote in blackout.
The needle was my pen.
My body is not open source.
This archive belongs to me.

🩸 ABOUT THE ALBUM — GORGEOUS
This is Track 8 of my debut album:
GORGEOUS — sixteen songs, each a wound pressed into sound. Some are me harmed. Some are me harming. I don’t separate them. This album lives in that tension.

It covers everything I swallowed: coercion, grooming, roofies, panic loops, scars inked in my arms, suicidal nights, sex work, the harm I caused, the harm I endured.

🎤 Lyrics — Skin Is Mine

[intro]

I wake in the dark and the body remembers.
Not who I was—but where I was tender.
They took my body like it was theirs to define—
But every line I ink now says: this skin is mine.

[Verse 1]
Didn’t report what they did in the dark—
I mapped the touches they branded like marks.
Tattoo blackout lines, let the silence shout.

Etched my story in skin, I wear it out loud
Stacked black where the bruises bloomed,
 Now it’s armor, not a wound.
Hated this body—raped and used already,
Tipping point hit, artist drew the lines steady
Nobody asked—so I answered in skin.
No thief in the night, no break back in.
Used to flinch at hands, now I sit with the sting,
Let the needle speak what I couldn’t bring.
This pain draws maps where the past once climbed,
"Does it hurt?" — yes, but it heals in time.
This pain brings me back — that ache still stalks.
Didn’t get justice — so the needle talks.

[Pre chorus]

Hyper-vigilance scans the room; I don’t float away.
The damage was done but I mark my way.

I tattoo silence where the flashbacks scream.
Skin is mine—I black out the bad dreams.

Sirens in my blood, echoes in my skull
The needle is honest, and I’m in control.

Trauma’s a loop that my brain can’t skip,
So I dip my truth in a needle’s tip.

[chorus]
Skin is mine—the past doesn’t script me.
I wake with a ghost where my breath should be.
Skin is mine—cologne ghost clings; green soap stings,
Flashbacks grip, but I breathe like a fighter.
Skin is mine—I’m the ghost’s ghostwriter.
They wrote in bruises—I rewrote the line.
Skin is mine—Trauma’s a house where the mirrors lie.
Skin is mine—I black out the frame where I used to cry.

[verse 2]

Curl my toes when the needle penetrates.
My body’s an archive—survived, reclaim the gate.
Grip, then release—needle hums with a holy spin.
Pain slips in clean—it’s sharp, but I let it begin.
Unchosen pain tried to make me hide,
Chosen pain trains me to stay inside.
PTSD wakes me early—tight chest, no plan.
Tattoo waits for my “yes,” then opens its hand.
This pain has edges—it doesn’t pretend.
This time, the ache arrives as a friend.
If pain comes with choice, the body relearns
That safety is something the nervous system earns.
Trauma made me drift—now I ink with conviction.
Before: hands took. Now: gloves, ask—jurisdiction.
Boundaries beat the gaze—blackout encryption.
Needle is ritual. Truth traced in dermis, not their fiction.

[chorus]
Skin is mine—the past doesn’t script me.
I wake with a ghost where my breath should be.
Skin is mine—cologne ghost clings; green soap stings,
Flashbacks grip, but I breathe like a fighter.
Skin is mine—I’m the ghost’s ghostwriter.
They wrote in bruises—I rewrote the line.
Skin is mine—Trauma’s a house where the mirrors lie.
Skin is mine—I black out the frame where I used to cry.

[Verse 3] 

I didn’t pick that night, but I pick this sting—
“Does it hurt?” Yeah. But it doesn’t steal anything.

PTSD wired like a trip-line spine,

But I sit for the buzz and I breathe this time.

Yes, it bleeds red, but it brings me alive,
Anchors me back to edges where I survived.

When “hurt” is consent, every nerve re-learns,
How pain can rebuild and joy can return.
Each pass of the needle unspools the fight—
I black out the scene so I sleep at night.

My skin’s not a page they can underline—

No highlight reel. No access. This Skin is mine.

“Does it hurt?” — Hell yeah, but it holds me still.
It reminds me I'm more than the hurt I feel

This sting’s a tether, not a threat in disguise,
I stay in my body when the needle replies.

[chorus]
Skin is mine—the past doesn’t script me.
I wake with a ghost where my breath should be.
Skin is mine—cologne ghost clings; green soap stings,
Flashbacks grip, but I breathe like a fighter.
Skin is mine—I’m the ghost’s ghostwriter.
They wrote in bruises—I rewrote the line.
Skin is mine—Trauma’s a house where the mirrors lie.
Skin is mine—I black out the frame where I used to cry.

[Outro]
I didn’t get to choose what carved me first.
But I choose what stays. I choose what hurts.
Ghosts don’t own me. The mirror’s mine.
And every mark says: This body’s by design.
“Does it hurt?”
Yeah. And I stay.

[whisper]
This skin is mine