LOVE AND TATTOOS

Sitting Pretty in Nevada City

Anybody who knows me knows I am stupidly in love with tattoos.  I don’t have any, I don’t want any, but I love them.  Ever since I started painting in 2019, I have felt gleeful and giddy at the sight of a really beautiful tattoo — and they’re exploding all over Instagram. 

I learned a ton about drawing and painting by watching the TV reality/gameshow Ink Master, where tattoo artists compete in ridiculous art challenges to ultimately win a cash prize, bragging rights for the year, and enormous notoriety in the tattoo industry. Last year, season 14, was a kind of kismet zenith point — a virtual Renaissance of the tattoo medium. All-stars, geniuses and previous winners were competing against each other, and they pushed the entire medium into a sublime, rare airspace. In my opinion, more interesting art is being done in tattoo studios than art galleries, at the moment.  

 The Tattoo Artist’s Industry, as of 2022, took in a revenue of 1.5 billion dollars — the market also rose 13.2% in 2022;  something about the isolation of Covid19 seemed to bring out the primal need for traumatic blasts of permanent ink in a great many citizens. 

Fortune magazine projects the tattoo industry to grow into a $3.93 billion revenue by 2030.  Tattoos, no longer the brands of scofflaws, pirates and Hell’s Angels, are teetering on the edge of mainstream respectability, and the quality of tattoos is careening into a whole new orbit. 

My fabulous, ravishing friend Christine is a professional piercer, a “reformed Goth,” and a tatted-up Jezebel — fully sleeved and up the neck with Mehndi-style ink decorating her hands. Her ears are intricate works of art: her enlarged earlobe holes are ringed with dozens of fine gold hoops; on one ear, a tiny coffin swings from another cluster of gold on her upper ear cartilage.  

 I spontaneously accepted an invitation from Christine to come to the redwood-studded Gold Rush town of Nevada City, CA where she had an appointment to get new “blackwork” tattoos, which are all the rage these days — predominately black tattoos with white ink highlights, which work excellently as cover-ups over previous tattoos.  Christine was all set to obliterate the work on her shoulders from twenty years ago. 

“There are cover-ups over cover ups,” she said of her arms.  “Time for something new.” 

 I was only too thrilled to be a fly on the wall in the studio, as I had never seen a tattoo actually happen anywhere but TV, and I wanted to be around the ambiance and feel the blood in the air and whatever else it was like in the room when an inked needle was pushed into Christine’s skin to alter her appearance forever.  

“Are you getting a tattoo today?” another tattoo artist working in the shop where Christine was getting inked asked me.  “Heck no,” I responded, from my perch on the sofa.  “I love them but I can’t do it.  I have OCD.  I would find some microscopic flaw in it, and I would obsess about it constantly until I finally amputated my leg or something.” 

“Sounds like a customer I was just talking to earlier!” He said. “He got a cross thing in the middle of his chest, and he thinks it’s off like a fraction of a millimeter, and he says it’s ruining his life.”  This tattoo artist, “Ike”, was a wiry, impish little guy with bright blue eyes and a giant, toothy smile.  

“I didn’t masturbate for eight years,” he announced cheerfully, apropos of nothing. “I denied myself ejaculation and meditated constantly.  I was trying to figure out if love was the answer.  I’m not sure it is.  Maybe it’s hate. I’m not convinced of an over-arching spirit of benevolence.” 

“Well, it is a paradoxical universe,” I offered. “If you don’t think love is the answer, maybe you’re not doing enough mushrooms.” 

“Hah! I do LOADS of mushrooms,” he crowed. “Only I do them blindfolded in a completely dark room.  One time the archangel Michael came to me and took me to an ancient battlefield.” 

 One of Ike’s studio walls was covered with an exquisite, dazzling, violent abstract painting, imbued with a crazy dark spiritual energy. 

“That guy is super intense,” Ike said about the artist. “He did a painting of the Dark Mother for two years.” 

“What is the Dark Mother?” I asked. 

Ike thought for a moment. 

“She is the one who gives life, but she also takes it away. And she takes it away in the service of benevolence.” 

I thought about this.  

“He painted it on commission.  His family could hear him in his art studio shouting at it and throwing things at it the whole time.   When he was finished, he called the lady who commissioned it, and told her, ‘Well, I’m finished with the painting, but I feel obliged to tell you, I came all over it dozens of times.  There’s a whole lot of cum on that painting.’” 

Christine’s tattoo artist, Dave, was a lanky, serene fellow with dark eyes, a nose you can see straight through at some angles, earlobes stretched near his shoulders, and green tattoos crawling up his neck and all over his fingers, wearing cigarette-legged motorcycle jeans and various dark layers under a large hoodie.  His smile has a hole in it from a black-gold tooth — gold teeth being one of the hallmarks of a serious tattoo artist. 

On the second day, while Dave tattooed her second shoulder, Christine had to take a break for a little while when emotional trauma surfaced for her.  As a piercer, she was entirely familiar with the phenomenon — pain bringing up old pain.  I had seen it myself as a physical trainer in the nineties.  A woman I was training on the quadriceps machine suddenly burst into tears.  I hustled her into the locker room and she said “Look at me!  I had a breast-reduction surgery because I was sexually abused, and that butcher mutilated me!” She tore her top off and showed me her breasts, which had giant scars underneath them. I quit personal training the next day — I didn’t feel qualified.

Dave, however, was qualified. “Every time I reached my pain threshold, he’d suddenly tell me ‘OK, we’ve got ten more minutes.’ We’re so in sync,” Christine said admiringly of Dave’s beside manner, and general sensitivity.

After sitting for 2 days — approximately eight hours under the needle, Christine’s shoulders were finally symmetrically bedecked with Dave’s gorgeous dark peony design; almost like Victorian funeral epaulets.  Christine had sat like a rock. Back at our Air BnB she applied hot and cold compresses and scrubbed her new ink in the shower, to drain the lymph and blood out of it.  Her black shoulders glistened.  “I’ve been wanting this for over ten years,” she smiled, admiring her shiny new exoskeleton in the mirror.  “I think I’m going to get a heart shaped spiderweb in on the back of my neck.” 

I hope to watch it happen. 

Yeah, you SHOULD. And hire me as an editor: Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork:

Cat tattoo by Angel Rose, Ink Master Season 14

“Leviathan” by Ioseph Y. Echezquel

Photos of Dave and Christine by Cintra Wilson