By request: My tattoos. TMI, TL:DR
propaddict asked me to post about my tattoos, in exchange for his Bowling For Rhinos donation. Truth is, I've considered making such a post several times in the past, but never got past taking a picture or two before feeling foolish and self-absorbed. Well, you asked for it, so let's get it out of the way.
There will be stories. The first inkling (I get it!) that I wanted some ink (oh, NOW I get it) was after seeing a friend who had just gotten a couple little pieces in white ink. They looked like pre-Columbian pictographs made by tiny Indians that lived on her skin. Or something. It changed my idea of what tattoos were, and made me want to get one.
This was back in 1989 or 1990, when tattoos were still illegal in Massachusetts. They were legal in most of the surrounding states, so it was easy for my art school friends to obtain tattoo guns and supplies. My friend Ian (as an aside, I hadn't really talked to him in 20 years, and now thanks to facebook we 'talk' all the time) decided to hold a tattoo party. He would tattoo whoever wanted one, for ridiculously low money. He would get practice, we would tattoos for same price as a couple record albums.
Unfortunately (I swear the others don't have stories this long) he didn't have white ink--most tattoo artists only use it for highlights on photoreproduction tattoos and stuff like that. I couldn't get the image I wanted in white, and I didn't want it in any other color. At the same time, all the party guests started getting cold feet. I felt an opportunity slipping away, and started trying to think of something I would be happy with on my body forever, on the spur of the moment. As luck would have it, my friend Ron Rege, a cartoonist whose work I admire, came up the stairs into the party.
I said "Ron! Can you design me a tattoo?" He said sure, what do you want? I have forgotten what my rationale was at the time but what I described was "A coffee cup, and the steam rising off the coffee cup is turning into some kind of monster."
This is on my right calf. For some reason people ask me about it more than any of the others, and I have to launch into that whole story every time. Like I said, you asked for it.
Okay, so I eventually got the white tattoo, it's so faint these days that Alexis didn't even save the photo she took of it. Suffice it to say, it's the icon I used for this post, done in single lines: Eight arrows pointing in different directions, in a wheel. I wanted to make my own church or spiritual movement or something, that only I was a member of. The symbol combined the chaos symbol from Michael Moorcock with a spiral. Essentially a double swastika. It stands for the organization of seemingly random events, order out of chaos, that sort of thing. It's on my right arm, which therefore looks like my only untattooed limb. Ian did this one too.
I forget the order of the next ones, so I'm arbitrarily going to choose my left arm.
That there is a fledgling crow and an ammonite fossil. I like crows (whole post on corvids is next) and showing a baby one says something to me about the state of developing intelligence, having an open mind and whatnot. The ammonite combines contradictory ideas: a spiral of life stopped forever as stone; the image of eternity captured in an extinct animal. The spiral is a pagan symbol and a pantheist symbol. These were done by my friend Sue Jieven, who was apprenticing to be a tattoo artist, when it was still illegal in Mass, but the wind was blowing toward legalization.
Did somebody say pagan symbol? This is on my left forearm covering a burn scar earned by forgetting there was a wok full of oil on the stove, setting off the smoke alarm. The Green Man has been adopted by the neopagans as a representation of the Horned God. It was a fairly common architectural motif used in churches and other buildings in the British Isles. Maybe it was a memory of nature god "domesticated" and put into Christian Churches, but more likely it was just a way of combining the plant world and the human world, symbolizing regeneration (resurrection?). Its "real" meaning is lost to us. To me it is a symbol of the interconnectedness of man and nature. This one hurt the most, since there are several overlapping colors; the artist, Suzie (I forget her last name) had to drag that needle through already raw bloody skin to get the next colors in. I have to cover it at work, because normal (short sleeve) clothes don't cover it, and the dress code prohibits "large, visible" tattoos. Ankle butterflies are still okay, I guess.
This is on my left calf. Sue Jieven tattooed it, but it was designed to my specs by my friend Joe (who used to go by Joey from Somerville, and now blogs as Giuseppe). I enlisted Joey, a product of Catholic upbringing, to create intentionally bad Latin grammar for this one. I wanted it to say "In the city, two wheels is best." Other Latin speakers have told me that it's pretty close. It's a bicycle wheel (note the quick release) and those are pigeon wings. For symbology fans, it's a triskele. I love rotational symmetry, what can I say. Sometimes people think it's a motorcycle thing, but it's about bike commuting.
And finally here's this thing again; I decided to have Sue Jieven put it on the back of my neck. I can't see it, so I forget it's there. Alexis says it needs a touch up, and it's much more visible than I remember. It's especially visible when I wear a scrub top. Boy I have a hairy neck.
There will be stories. The first inkling (I get it!) that I wanted some ink (oh, NOW I get it) was after seeing a friend who had just gotten a couple little pieces in white ink. They looked like pre-Columbian pictographs made by tiny Indians that lived on her skin. Or something. It changed my idea of what tattoos were, and made me want to get one.
This was back in 1989 or 1990, when tattoos were still illegal in Massachusetts. They were legal in most of the surrounding states, so it was easy for my art school friends to obtain tattoo guns and supplies. My friend Ian (as an aside, I hadn't really talked to him in 20 years, and now thanks to facebook we 'talk' all the time) decided to hold a tattoo party. He would tattoo whoever wanted one, for ridiculously low money. He would get practice, we would tattoos for same price as a couple record albums.
Unfortunately (I swear the others don't have stories this long) he didn't have white ink--most tattoo artists only use it for highlights on photoreproduction tattoos and stuff like that. I couldn't get the image I wanted in white, and I didn't want it in any other color. At the same time, all the party guests started getting cold feet. I felt an opportunity slipping away, and started trying to think of something I would be happy with on my body forever, on the spur of the moment. As luck would have it, my friend Ron Rege, a cartoonist whose work I admire, came up the stairs into the party.
I said "Ron! Can you design me a tattoo?" He said sure, what do you want? I have forgotten what my rationale was at the time but what I described was "A coffee cup, and the steam rising off the coffee cup is turning into some kind of monster."
This is on my right calf. For some reason people ask me about it more than any of the others, and I have to launch into that whole story every time. Like I said, you asked for it.
Okay, so I eventually got the white tattoo, it's so faint these days that Alexis didn't even save the photo she took of it. Suffice it to say, it's the icon I used for this post, done in single lines: Eight arrows pointing in different directions, in a wheel. I wanted to make my own church or spiritual movement or something, that only I was a member of. The symbol combined the chaos symbol from Michael Moorcock with a spiral. Essentially a double swastika. It stands for the organization of seemingly random events, order out of chaos, that sort of thing. It's on my right arm, which therefore looks like my only untattooed limb. Ian did this one too.
I forget the order of the next ones, so I'm arbitrarily going to choose my left arm.
That there is a fledgling crow and an ammonite fossil. I like crows (whole post on corvids is next) and showing a baby one says something to me about the state of developing intelligence, having an open mind and whatnot. The ammonite combines contradictory ideas: a spiral of life stopped forever as stone; the image of eternity captured in an extinct animal. The spiral is a pagan symbol and a pantheist symbol. These were done by my friend Sue Jieven, who was apprenticing to be a tattoo artist, when it was still illegal in Mass, but the wind was blowing toward legalization.
Did somebody say pagan symbol? This is on my left forearm covering a burn scar earned by forgetting there was a wok full of oil on the stove, setting off the smoke alarm. The Green Man has been adopted by the neopagans as a representation of the Horned God. It was a fairly common architectural motif used in churches and other buildings in the British Isles. Maybe it was a memory of nature god "domesticated" and put into Christian Churches, but more likely it was just a way of combining the plant world and the human world, symbolizing regeneration (resurrection?). Its "real" meaning is lost to us. To me it is a symbol of the interconnectedness of man and nature. This one hurt the most, since there are several overlapping colors; the artist, Suzie (I forget her last name) had to drag that needle through already raw bloody skin to get the next colors in. I have to cover it at work, because normal (short sleeve) clothes don't cover it, and the dress code prohibits "large, visible" tattoos. Ankle butterflies are still okay, I guess.
This is on my left calf. Sue Jieven tattooed it, but it was designed to my specs by my friend Joe (who used to go by Joey from Somerville, and now blogs as Giuseppe). I enlisted Joey, a product of Catholic upbringing, to create intentionally bad Latin grammar for this one. I wanted it to say "In the city, two wheels is best." Other Latin speakers have told me that it's pretty close. It's a bicycle wheel (note the quick release) and those are pigeon wings. For symbology fans, it's a triskele. I love rotational symmetry, what can I say. Sometimes people think it's a motorcycle thing, but it's about bike commuting.
And finally here's this thing again; I decided to have Sue Jieven put it on the back of my neck. I can't see it, so I forget it's there. Alexis says it needs a touch up, and it's much more visible than I remember. It's especially visible when I wear a scrub top. Boy I have a hairy neck.