Ink A Dink-a-Dink: A Little History
I've always liked the starkness, the simplicity, of black against white.
And I decided early on -- which is admittedly not uncommon -- that I wanted all my tattoos to be black ink only.
I love the story behind my first tattoo: When Beth and I broke up, she was determined to make what we were doing a positive thing, a good move deeper into ourselves but not further away from each other. So, to commemorate our "break-up", she agreed to pay for both our first tattoos. We went to Underground Art here in Midtown and got our first tattoos done at the same time, in the same room. She got an Oceanic, spreadlegged godess on the back of her neck, and I got this on my right shoulder:
Getting the tattoos was an interesting experience. I was sure I was going to see stars and pass out at first contact from the needle. Leaving the waiting room couch to go back to the room of the buzzing needles was a wobbly walk. But, a guest artist from the Seattle area (a little Buddy Holly-glassed, squat bear) gave me mine and I remember antically agreeing with Beth afterward that there was something clearly erotic about going under that ink-spitting needle, the rush, the body manipulation, the prone-ness, the "zone".
Obviously, at the time, I was reading a lot about Buddhism and was trying to personalize it. I was taken with the politicized concept of engaged Buddhism and wanted to convey something of my own take on that with the text under the seated Buddha figure: hands in cite. I wanted to capture in a simple, mangled phrase the idea of absolute honesty ("hands in sight") (especially since I was coming further out of the closet at this point, too), the importance of action ("hands incite"), and -- more obliquely, cornily even -- the added integrity of recognizing the traditions of your forms of honesty and action ("cite" as in citation).
In one ritualistic move, the transformation of my 10-year relationship with Beth was queered, connected to my emergent spirituality, politics, sexuality, and aesthetics. I was hooked.
I tried to return to Underground Art for my next tattoo but got pissed off in the process. The main tattoo artist and part owner there was at the height of his popularity and, I think, since I wasn't already covered in ink, didn't take my work very seriously. I made multiple appointments and he never had the drawings done or it was not at all what I asked for. I took off work one time in the summer, had a flat tire on the drive over, and walked over to meet my appointment anyway, leaving my car and becoming a sopping, sweaty mess on the way. He finally had the drawings done but said that his only open appointment time in the coming week was on a Friday night and there was a rock show he wanted to go to. I told him, "By all means, go to the rock show. But don't do my tattoo."
I then went to Ramsees Shadow tattoo at the suggestion of my dancer friend Zoe. I watched her get a realistic snake down her shoulder and arm by her tattooist Kevin. Kevin is a heavy-set, admitted redneck who doesn't drink and doesn't have a single tattoo of his own. He is really good-natured and friendly, does downtown work on a lot of cops, and prides himself on his arts background for his tattooing. Kevin gave me exactly the tattoo I wanted:
It's a spiralling half poem by one of my favorite poets, George Oppen. The poem is called "Daedalus: The Dirge" and this is the text that now appears coiling down my left arm:
The boy accepted them;
His whole childhood in them, his difference
From the others. The wings
Gold,
Gold for credence,
Every feather of them. He believed more in the things
Than I, and less. Familiar as speech,
The family tongue. ...
Since it is a mourning poem for Icarus from his father, Daedalus, I had the lines interspersed with a falling Icarus figure, trailing from -- in relief -- the sun on my shoulder to the unpictured water at my elbow. In the poem, Daedalus finds a way to express his regret over his son's death but also a jealousy at his son's trust in his own difference and the strangeness of the things of this world. After all, his son's fascination with the beautiful and strange sun is what led the wax in his wings to melt and his body to fall to the ocean. This tattoo was supposed to ground my love of experimental poetry in real life and emotion, on my body; it was supposed to make me feel good about my own queerness and fascination at the same time it gave me a sense of queer family.
Getting this tattoo hurt more than the earlier one, especially on the soft underskin of my arm:
And one of the things I like most about it is this:
Kevin forgot to put the little middle bar on the capital E of "Every", and I decided to leave it that way, as a reminder of the distinctive beauty of accident and the moment, a philosophy which is very much behind my love of tattoos anyway. A kind of embarrassing reason I like this tattoo so much is that I really can never recall the half-poem word for word, and do very much enjoy someone's twisting my arm (literally) to read it, if their interest is raised enough.
The next tattoo is the only one without text:
A satyr that I swear -- Kevin being a straight man -- has the body of a mudflap girl. (I kidded him and told him his mind went into the gutter when he got to the midriff of my goat-man.) The satyr kind of marks the beginning of my interest in the Faeries, satyrs being a particular subset of Faeries I was introduced to after I got my tattoo. The Icarus figure and the satyr also seal my interest in hybrid figures, "monsters" formed of various kinds of bodies; such creatures always seem to me to sit on the thresh-hold of beautiful change, and I like to think of myself (on my best days) similarly. And even though this tattoo has no words, what is remarkable about it is Kevin's shading. After getting it placed under the Buddha on my right arm, I went to Otherlands (the hippie-punk chick coffee shop) and the girl ringing me up just looked at the hooves peeking from under my sleeves and said, "Kevin." I said, "How'd you know?"
"He's the only one in town able to do that kind of shading."
So my satyr tattoo -- wordless -- speaks more, I like to think, to the richness of the visual and -- possibly -- the speechless. Sometimes. I'm still not sure about that, as you can probably imagine.
And then there's my last tattoo:
It's from the last two lines of a poem by Gary Snyder called "What You Should Know to be a Poet", which I later realized I had slightly mis-quoted:
the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, enstasy
real danger. gambles. ...
(I inverted the order of "gambles" and "real danger" and left off the "s" in "gambles" and purposefully left out the last phrase of the poem "and the edge of death" which I personally thought upped the ante on the macho and morbid too much; the earlier sentiments would suffice. Hehe: Sorry, Gary!)
The lines have been twisted on my right forearm to look like the entwined stems of a pair of black lillies. For some reason, I wanted to combine the masculinity of the language of this poem with the supposedly more feminine imagery of flowers. I wanted to emphasize both the private, introspective side of myself (enstasy) even as I also acknowledged my public side (exstasy) and this was particularly important to do with this tattoo because it was the first of my tattoos that would most often be publicly visible most of the time. (Even in winter, I usually wear my sleeves pushed up.) I liked the idea of reminding myself and others that we may think we know someone when we have "seen" them, but there is always another face just around the corner, just beneath the skin, waiting to emerge. That may address the kind of person we call a man or call a woman, the kind of person who would wear visible tattoos or who wouldn't, the poet or not -- maybe a visual artist--, the articulate animal or the supposedly "mute" vegetable.
I got that tattoo over 3 years ago. And my left forearm has continued to feel bare. Before taking on the change to move to Knoxville this summer, I want another tattoo. And it's strange how you can develop a relationship of a sort with your tattoo artist; after all s/he has, in some sense, helped make your body as you now know it, impressed a little shared history on it. So I want Kevin to do this tattoo on my left arm. It's something symbolically important enough for me to save up the money and commit to.
It's mostly a matter now of seeing the nature of the change my body's entering into at this moment, finding the imagery, and swallowing down the doubt to walk into Kevin's shop and have it done.