When it comes to near-death experiences, Alan Macias has had a few. Well, when we say ‘near-death’, we mean more like being in close proximity to it. When your father studies embalming, and then opens a funeral home, you quickly get used to being around corpses.

“I was just a kid when my dad moved us all from California to San Francisco to set up his funeral business,” says Alan. “But when I got older, I used to drive the company van to pick up dead bodies. I even used to do it on the way to picking up a date for the evening. I’d have a girl in the front, and a stiff in the back!”

But when he wasn’t lugging cadavers around for his old man or charming the ladies, Alan discovered a real passion for motorbikes. “I’ve always been a pretty active guy, and I just really enjoyed riding bikes,” he explains. “I had sports motorbikes of all sizes in my garage, and I also taught people how to ride. It was something I was really into.”

Despite having an understanding of death and mortality from a young age, nothing really prepared Alan for the day it slapped him right in the face. It happened, as it always seems to, on a nice day. Out motorbiking with two of his buddies, heading through the sunny Napa Valley, Alan suddenly lost control of his bike.

“I wasn’t doing anything silly,” he recalls. “I’d been down this same road many times before. I just wasn’t paying attention and I fell down, hitting the ground really hard. My bike slid under an oncoming pick-up truck that’d stopped when it saw me having problems. It got bent into a ‘U’ shape, because it was travelling that fast.”

Airlifted to hospital, Alan died a couple of times on the table as surgeons worked tirelessly to keep him alive. “My legs were broken, my liver and spine were damaged, I had severe concussion, and I swelled up like a big balloon-man,” he says, as if he’s ticking off a check list. “They cut 30in of intestine out of me, too. I was in a coma for three weeks, so I don’t remember anything.”

It took 40 operations and eight months in hospital to literally put Alan back together again. However, severe damage to his left arm meant he had to make a difficult choice. “My arm felt like a dead weight attached to my body,” he says. “They tried transplanting a nerve taken from my lower right leg into the arm, but it didn’t work. I figured I still had a lot of living to do, so I asked to have it amputated. Normally, someone with my injuries would have had the whole shoulder removed and fitted with a prosthetic arm. But, having grown up with Star Trek and Star Wars, I knew that prosthetic limbs weren’t as good as the ones in movies. So, I told them to trim it to above the elbow so it looked OK when I wore T-shirts.”

THE ROAD TO INK

While waiting for techniques in prosthetics to advance, Alan has wasted no time in going down other avenues to change his appearance. Although he acquired a Blade Runner tattoo on his right arm and a couple of toe bands before the accident, his ink coverage was pretty minimal. A reluctant visit to Burning Man in 2001 changed all that.

“I thought the event was just an excuse for a bunch of hippies to get together,” admits Alan. “A friend who’d been suggested I couldn’t comment unless I’d gone along myself, so I did. People accepted me for who I was, and I ended up walking around naked for most it! It was so liberating and the last boundary to accepting myself. When I got home, I had the Burning Man symbol tattooed on my right buttock.”

And the ink certainly didn’t stop there. Alan’s tattooed ‘shorts’ evolved gradually, incorporating different themes and personal experiences. When he started to run out of space, his genitals went under the needle, too. “We started out adding little diamonds to the penis, then over time added more ink. Now it looks like a rocket!” he says, laughing. “It sure did hurt, but I used numbing cream, which helped me to stop squirming about so much. It also enabled the tattoo artist to do neat lines on the head of my penis.”

LIFE AND LIMB

Alan is the first to admit he likes attention. When he had hair, he’d dye it green and wasn’t afraid to stand out from the crowd. The tattoos, he says, are an extension of this side of his personality. “I like being noticed, but in a good way,” he admits. “I don’t throw tantrums to get attention, but after I had the perforated line and scissors tattooed around my arm stump, people seemed to love the comical angle of it, despite the reality that I’d lost a limb. Since then, the design has appeared in a couple of books and had lots of positive responses.”

Alan’s also honest about taking the rap for the accident, and he’s positive about the future. “A lot of Americans would think, ‘Who can I sue? It wasn’t my fault!” but I believe if you play the game, you take the chances, and it’s your responsibility,” he says frankly. “The minute I was able to think clearly after the accident I accepted it immediately. Now, if I see people staring at me, I could ask, ‘Are people looking at me because of my tattoos, or because I’m bald or because I’m missingan arm?’ It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m really quite a happy guy and just try and make the best of the situation. I was told I might not walk again, so things have turned out OK, considering – plus I have some awesome ink, too.”