A Koi on the 3 Train (Tattoosday Plays the Alphabet Game)

The Alphabet Game took a twist when I had to postpone my trip on a Z train until it started up during rush hour. So, for fun, I started going through the numbers, at least until I could make it to a Z. If you don't know what I'm talking about, start with this post here.

I hopped off the 2 train at 34th Street/Penn Station and boarded a downtown 3 train. I stayed on the 3 until I got to Fulton Street, and then ran, at 3:30 PM across that platform to get an uptown 3 train, rather than heading further downtown.

This proved a good move, as I met Wendy, who was kind enough to share the following koi tattoo swimming over her shoulder:

Wendy credited this to Diego Mannino (@diegovmannino) over at Daredevil Tattoo (@daredeviltattoo) in Manhattan.

Thanks to Wendy for sharing her cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Adam Clay & Ashbery (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Adam Clay, who shared this colorful literary tattoo:

How is this a literary tattoo? We'll let Adam explain:

"My tattoo was done by Stephanie White (@stephanietattoos) at Deluxe Tattoo (@deluxetattoochicago) in Chicago. I’ve always loved John Ashbery’s Three Poems and decided to adapt a tattoo from the cover art by Trevor Winkfield. 

At first it felt strange to only use part of the work, but I was reminded of the opening from Ashbery’s 'The New Spirit': I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out, would be another, and truer, way. The partial omission seemed right in line with Ashbery.

Adam also shared the opening poem from his latest book, Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He told us the poem "speaks directly to Ashbery's poem 'The Room."

To Take Note of Where We Are

Plainly spoken, I am responding to you.

Despite our best efforts to will it shut,

the proof of the world’s existence

can best be seen in its insistence,

in its opening up. Should we get lost,

let us be lost in a familiar space, surrounded

by every motion of the unnamed and unseen

until the moment they appear. With the sofa

in a slightly different place this morning,

the room resembles a dream of the room:

the details remain present and realistic

while everything bends toward one wall

in particular. I know what you want,

but the wind will not concern itself with us.

~ ~ ~

Adam Clay’s most recent book is Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016). A fourth book, To Make Room for the Sea, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Tin House, Boston Review, jubilat, The Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He is editor-in-chief of Mississippi Review, a co-editor of TYPO Magazine, and a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern Mississippi. His website is http://www.adamclay.org

Thanks to Adam for sharing his tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday and the Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.net and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Risa Denenberg, Two Fish, and a Yellow Star (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet is Risa Deneberg, who shared this astrological tattoo:

Risa tells us:

"My single permanent tattoo is on my right inner arm and is a Pisces (two fish). The story of that tattoo goes back to the 90's in the East Village, when the cops finally managed to evict a drug dealer from the store beneath my apartment. The new tenant was a tat artist. I wanted to welcome him to the neighborhood, so I was his first customer. I love tattoos, but am reluctant to get more on my now aging skin."

Risa also shared the following photo of a temporary tattoo that she uses as her profile picture and also hands out at book fairs:

I saved Risa's post for today because the poem she submitted is appropriate for the observance of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts at sundwon. The poem was originally published in Lavender Review in 2011:

Yellow Star

In my case, the yellow star
will be made of two perfect pink triangles
cut from cheap dry goods at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
where the women
sew stars on at the ready
hunched over their Singers
and, not wasting time on stairs,
work right up to closing time, then jump.

They didn’t want to die so young
and neither did the gay boys who died in droves
at the close of the last century. I would be one
who would beg you to shoot me
who would know that borders lie
that I could not endure the march through the woods
in the snow to the trains at the end.

We who say never forget
also know that it could happen again
to us
and we do not know more now
than we did then
how to make it stop.

The stitching never ends. For practice,
I have sutured my arm to my sleeve
with triangles made from pages torn
from the Book of Job.

~ ~ ~

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is an editor at Headmistress Press, an independent publisher of poetry by lesbians. She has published three chapbooks, and two full length books, most recently, Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016). Her collection “A Slight Faith” is forthcoming in 2018 from MoonPath Press. She blogs at http://risadenenberg.weebly.com.

Thanks to Risa for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2017 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Burt Kimmelman's Fish (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet is Burt Kimmelman. Check it out:

Here's a closer look:

Burt tells us how this fish came to swim down his arm:

"I got the tattoo in early 1972, at Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor in San Francisco—the only place in the entire city then to get a tattoo professionally done with a machine; it was located near the bus station.

I was sitting around with some other people smoking weed and drinking bourbon in our house out near Seal Rock. We were all very drunk when someone said, as a kind of announcement, let’s go get tattoos!

We piled into a very old (late forties?) Plymouth (I think) and drove to the tattoo parlor. The other guys (no women came with us—but a couple of weeks later I took an ex-girlfriend of mine who was visiting from NYC, where I was from, to get a lovely tattoo of a rose on her wrist) were lined up to get something each from the one tattoo artist who was working at the time; his name was Pat.

[Editor's note: This was legendary artist Pat 'The Picture Machine' Martynuik (1937-1989), who went on to found Picture Machine Tattoo in 1976]

There were samples of tattoos on all the walls in the parlor, on paper pinned there—the usual sorts of things—and the people I was with were choosing from them. (One of us, the one who was driving, got his wife’s name put on his upper arm, while the rest of the group but for me were getting images like a red devil or a motorcycle with wings bursting out of a cloud, or something like that.) I didn’t like any of the images I saw.

Then I recalled Arthur Conan Doyle’s inaugural story of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, A Study in Scarlet. In it, Holmes looks out of his window and points to a man walking up the street below (who later appears at the apartment door for help). Watson, the foil, is taken aback and is highly skeptical of this new acquaintance. The man, Holmes claims, is a sailor just back from Shanghai. Eventually Holmes will explain to Watson that he knew that was who the man was because he had a rather new looking tattoo of pink fish bones on his forearm, and had a sunburn; apparently, when they docked in Shanghai, British sailors in the mid nineteenth century would get this one tattoo.

So I asked Pat for pink fish bones. He said he didn’t have pink, but how about blue? I said that that would be fine.

Pat was a real pro, and he tended to work very quickly. He shaved my forearm and rubbed on some alcohol and then set to work. Aside from the shock of the machine inflicting more pain on me than I had expected, I was mesmerized by the image he was creating. He drew the spine and then, very quickly, drew in the other bones, having put a head on; the very thin, fine lines of the bones radiating out from the spine were gorgeous in their delicacy. He drew in the tail fin and the lines there were almost as nice, but a bit stronger for a solid contrast, and to me were beautiful.

Then, without a pause, suddenly, he drew in a dorsal fin. I was appalled. What had he done? Whoever heard of fish bones, head and tail attached, with a dorsal fin as well? He had instantly made the fish skeleton come alive or at least whole with that back fin. I quickly demanded that he had in some way to fix this. He hadn't understood what I was trying for.

After a quick negotiation he shaded in most of the beautifully detailed work he had done, those bones coming out from the spine on either side. In this way he turned the skeleton into a quasi abstracted whole fish. The tiny hint of a smile in the fish's head had to be left as it was (he added that with a very quick flourish too.) I then, as a finale, asked him to put a red dot in the eye.

Over the years the dot has faded completely, but I'm happy with the way the blue lines have held up, now in late middle age and remembering back to my early adulthood."

Burt sent us the following poem:

Late February Sun

Jane, Age Seven

The sunlight startles us awake,
loosens the ground whose shoots and buds -
their traces of red and blue — stand

against the odds. A squirrel makes
for her cache. The first woodpecker
rattles on, wrong yet beautiful —

no sense to the light, how we cleave
to its persistence. This morning
I also make for my cache of

papers, a pile of fallen leaves
on my desk, and instinctively
dig up this past autumn memo

from Jane: “cats birds dogs fish monkeys
whales dolphins.” Her hand suddenly
sure and bright — why, though, no snakes?

I praise all creatures, who as if
they had never known winter are
now, too soon, desperately alive.

(Copyright 2013 by Burt Kimmelman, from Gradually the World, BlazeVOX [books].)

~ ~ ~

Burt Kimmelman's eighth collection of poetry is Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1983 – 2013 (BlazeVOX, 2013). In addition to poetry he has published a number of books and articles of literary criticism, and several memoir-essays. He is often interviewed; his work is frequently anthologized, has been the subject of reviews and essays, and featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac. He teaches at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. More information about him, and samples of his poetry and prose, can be found at BurtKimmelman.com.

Thanks to Burt for sharing his poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Michael Mlekoday

Our first Monday poet in this year's Tattooed Poets Project is Michael Mlekoday, who shared a few pretty cool pieces.

Before sharing them, I want to thank Tara Betts (appearing later this month), who referred me to Michael last year, after spotting his ink at the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle:

Photo by Tara Betts

I reached out to Michael to get some clearer shots and some background about his work. He credited his work to one shop:

"All of my tattoos are designed and inked by my fam Ryan & Naama at Lucky Bear Tattoo. They used to run their queer, family-operated business in Brooklyn, but recently moved to Northern California and will start tattooing in San Francisco soon. They’ve got an Instagram @luckybeartattoo."

Let's take a closer look:

Photo by Doug Paul Case

Michael explains:

"The fish/skyline tattoo is a drawing Ryan made called 'Big Fish / Big Pond.' I had him change it to my home skyline, Minneapolis. I grew up fishing, and even living in the city proper there were plenty of lakes and water (Minnesota has more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined! sort of…), so it seemed fitting. The fish & skyline is a way of marking where my body comes from—August Wilson, after all, says that 'art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.' "

On his other arm:

Photo by Doug Paul Case

Photo by Doug Paul Case

Michael tells us:

"The other arm has a Mason jar with fireflies inside it, another homage to the Midwest, and a bear skull, which is an image from my first book of poems—The Dead Eat Everything. Though I’m a Midwest kid, born and raised, I’ve felt pulled towards the coasts for the past few years, which is the subject of my second poetry manuscript, currently titled Junk Turquoise, hence the oceanic background on my left arm."

Here's a poem Michael sent us:

HOME REMEDIES

Baba once cast a demon out of my brother.
She slapped him hard across the face
and left a glass of vodka
on the kitchen table overnight.
By morning, the glass was empty
and the rainclouds hung fat and fanged
over our block. Whenever it stormed,
she tongued her dentures out of her mouth
and sucked them back in, staring
out the window, and crossed herself,
cursing under her breath in Polish.

She taught us the old curses and the blessings,
brought us to the cemetery to practice both.
I was always better with the curses.
The way they had to be dragged
from the body, the odor
of sea salt stuck to the breath,
how they kicked the heart
like the pop of a burnt out bulb.

~ ~ ~

Michael Mlekoday is the author of The Dead Eat Everything (Kent State University Press, 2014). Mlekoday is a National Poetry Slam Champion, serves as Editor & Publisher of Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press, and has poems in Verse Daily, Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, The BreakBeat Poets, and other venues. More poems and stuff at michaelmlekoday.com.

Thanks to Michael Mlekoday for sharing his work with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Margot's Leg o' Liberty (at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade)

The best way to celebrate the 4th of July is some traditional American tattoos, no? How about an explosion of great ink on Margot's leg:

I love the bear trying to catch the red white and blue salmon. The roses add nice pops of color to the leg and the skulls are fun. The Go Vegan/Stay Vegan badge is cool and here's a better angle of Lady Justice:

Her sword rears Liberty and she's standing above a banner that warns "Snitches Get Stitches."

I met Margot at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade last month and she credited Dave at Oddball Studios in Portland, Oregon. Dave has done every one of Margo's tattoos.

Thanks to Margot for sharing her leg o' tattoos with us here on Tattoosday! Have a safe and happy 4th of July everyone!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Jim Landwehr's Memorial Musky

Our next tattooed poet is Jim Landwehr, who shares this tattoo of a musky:

Jim tells us the story of why there is a Musky on his arm:

In 2010 my brother had a 10" tumor removed from his back. After 6 months of recovery, he had numbness in his foot. He was rushed to Mayo for emergency surgery and another golf-ball sized tumor was removed. 3 days later the oncologist said the cancer had spread to his lungs and he would have months, not years to live. After battling cancer for 9 months, he passed away on August 30th of 2011. He was 47 years old. 

My brother Rob and I were both avid fishermen. When he caught his first Musky in 2006, the fever hit me. Two months after his death, on what would have been his 48th birthday, I managed to catch a 34" musky in his honor while wearing a sweatshirt he had given me before he passed away. It was a very emotional day for me.

I got the a tattoo of a musky in his honor in April of 2013.

The date I caught the fish, 10/14/11 (his birthday) is worked into the spinner of the tattoo. In a related side-story, on the same day I got the tattoo, my wife and 80 year old mother both got their first tattoos as well, by Aaron at Anchors End Tattoo in Hudson, WI. My mother's was an anklet with 7 hearts for her 7 children, two of them hollow for my brother Rob (above) and sister Linda who died at age 5 of a Wilmes tumor. The artist said 'Well, not to be morbid, but what if you should lose another child, what would we do with the heart?' She replied, 'Oh don't worry about that, I'm jumping off a bridge if another one of my kids precedes my death.' That's my mom, 80 years and spunky.

So, the day I got this tattoo will always be a memorable one. My wife and mom were part of it and I love the tattoo. It's a part of me and brings me closer to my brother somehow.

Jim sent along this poem, which is a great companion piece to the tattoo: 

One Cast                                                                                

My daughter wanted to catch a Musky

With her dad

My family has a long fishing tradition

My brothers Tom, Rob, Paul and I

Each caught a Musky

And she wanted to be part of it;

The Musky part

Now, Rob was in heaven

God called him there at age 47

To help scout Smallmouth

Because He was having trouble Himself

But when Rob heard about Sarah,

He said to God, “Here’s the deal…

I’ll help you, if you help her.”

Then Rob said, “One cast.”

God dropped his jaw.

“But you know that just doesn’t happen.”

Rob wouldn’t budge

“One cast.”

“They’re the fish of 10,000 casts,” God argued.

“I caught three smallmouth yesterday…” Rob said.

“But she’s using the wrong line and no leader!”

“One cast.”

On the first cast

The wrong lure

Thrown with the wrong rod

Using the wrong line

And no leader (wrong again)

Hit the water with a splash

And immediately erupted

With heavenly musky thunder

Rob turned to God and winked.

~ ~ ~

Jim Landwehr enjoys writing creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. His book Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir was recently accepted for publishing and will be released on 6/17/2014 by eLectio Publishing. He has non-fiction stories published in BoundaryWaters Journal, Forge Journal and MidWestOutdoors Magazine. His poetry has been featured in Verse Wisconsin, Torrid Literature Journal, Echoes Poetry Journal, Wisconsin People and Ideas Magazine, the Wisconsin Poets Calendar and HeavyBear online magazine. Jim lives and works in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

His website is here and he blogs here.

Thanks to Jim for sharing his awesome tattoo, the emotional story behind it, and the lovely poem here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

April is Almost Here, and That Means Tattooed Poets!

On April 1, we will once more embark on a month-long celebration of tattooed poets, as part of the Tattooed Poets Project here on Tattoosday.

This year, we had over a hundred poets from four countries express an interest in participating and we've culled down the list, but I couldn't turn everyone away so we'll be posting twice daily, with a few exceptions.

One of the people who reached out to me was Anthony, "a rank and file family doctor who writes for his local newspaper." He told me "I have always been a prose writer but use my own name only for ... [a] poetry blog and newspaper," and added that he is working on publishing a chapbook.

He loves poetry so much, he's been inked with verse:

That's the first stanza of "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas:

And death shall have no dominion.   

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,   

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;   

Though they go mad they shall be sane,   

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;   

Though lovers be lost love shall not;   

And death shall have no dominion.

This was inked on his right thigh by an artist named CJay, formerly of Rising Dragon when the shop was still on 23rd street in Manhattan.

And on his left thigh:

That's the first stanza of Robert Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning:"

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Anthony told me this was tattooed

"at a juncture in life when I sought transcendence. And left thigh to serve as MY Fisher King Scar, Dad, the writer, had his own. This was my indelible commitment to creative thought, below it the Haida Salmon by Bill Reid.

The Robert Lowell stanza was done by an unknown tattoo artist in Flagstaff Arizona - he did it freehand. The Haida Salmon was done at Burly Fish in Flagstaff."

Thanks to Anthony for sharing his poetic tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Be sure to visit in the month of April to celebrate a full thirty days of tattoos and poetry!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Erica Mena

Among this year's Tattooed Poets' submissions, this is one of my favorite photos:

Photograph by Julie Chen

This was submitted by the poet Erica Mena, whose tattoo was inspired by the great Pablo Neruda.

Erica gives us the detail behind these wonderful tattoos:

 "This is my most intimate tattoo, my Neruda tattoo: 'Love is so short, forgetting is so long.' It's a full line (punctuation included) from Poem XX of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in translation by W.S. Merwin. The fish in concentric circles is the symbol printed on all of Neruda's books from mid-way through his career, and was drawn from the bronze statue at his most famous house in Isla Negra. The other two images were drawn by the tattoo artist, in response to two other lines from the same poem: 'The same night whitening the same trees. / We of that time are no longer the same.' and 'Write, for example: the night is shattered / and stars shiver blue in the distance.' The design and work were done by Ram at Fat Ram's Pumpkin Tattoo in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

I read Merwin's translation of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems when I was fifteen, and had that conversion experience, the moment when you realize this is what you want your life to be about. Not the sentiment, but the poetry. These poems, and this line in particular, convinced me that poetry can move between languages, times and places, freely and with no loss, when put into the right hands. When getting the tattoo, I considered getting the Spanish line: 'El amor es tan corto, el olvido es tan largo,' but chose the English because that was how I first encountered it. Out of all my tattoos it also hurt the most to get, fittingly I suppose--there was a moment where Ram was outlining the circles where it felt like my entire leg was on fire. Totally worth it."

I would add that I concur with Erica completely and offer up, as proof, my post over on BillyBlog in April 2008 here. I was running down my favorite poems for National Poetry Month and #28 was any of the poems in the book, and it just so happens I pointed to Poem XX as one shining example. The original edition translated by Merwin and illustrated by Jan Thompson is a must-have in anyone's library. But, I digress.

Erica offered us two poems, one of her own and one she translated. We'll share both:

(no subject) (spam poem #3)

good evening websit
Stop being a nervous wreck

I will like you to accept this token
So hard you can break an egg

hoping you will understand my point
this is not a myth

Every person dreams about meeting someone

~ ~ ~ 

Deus ex Machina

Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has come and it is winter. The trident is cornered, the mountains covered with a skin of ash. Lord, behold light’s song here, your due, in the stillness of the sea and the pure discretion of the endless night. Behold your son, Fire, burning the whole surface with his touch and seducing the water with his gilded tongue. Look here, Lord, his stepsister Dawn, liquid hierophant, maker of shape. In their terrible language they tell of celebrations, obedience, sin. This time, Lord, throw to us the seed and the male of the healthier species. Don’t announce him by chance, because he will become a cry and rise up with the warm murmur of pavement, and once again be lost to us, punished, denied. Let none but you, oh Lord, wield the butcher’s knife this time; mature a chord when life ceases and rain unexpectedly cleanses the lovers’ yoked hips. Throw the dice, Lord, your turn has inevitably come. Cast them without fear from your wide hand, because luck’s twelve sides won’t wait, and the sky points towards multitudes and disaster. Throw them, Lord, your turn has come and it is burning summer.

Translation of “Deus ex machina.” From La invención del día [The Invention of the Day]. © José Mármol. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by Erica Mena. All rights reserved.
Published in Words Without Borders, November, 2011


Erica Mena is a poet, translator and print designer, not necessarily in that order. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Vanitas, The Dos Passos Review, Pressed Wafer, Arrowsmith Press, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Asymptote, Two Lines and others. She is the coordinator and co-host of Reading the World Podcast, a monthly conversation about literary translation. She is the founding editor of Anomalous Press.

Thanks to Erica for contributing this wonderful entry of the tattooed Poets project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission. 


If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Tony's Celtic Fish, Swimming Up His Calf

Last month, I spotted Tony on the R train after leaving the 14th Street/Union Square station.

About thirteen years ago, his girlfriend was getting a Celtic dog tattoo, and he decided to get inked as well:

These works of art on his left leg derive, he told me, were inspired by illustrations from the Book of Kells.

Book/Manuscript: Book of Kells
VII Century, Ireland / ScotlandPage (Folio): 188v
initial letter I with lion and fish
(from http://www.art-imagery.com/)

Tony explained that he is a SCUBA instructor, so these fish from the mackerel family are a nice link to that vocation.

Not only have these tattoos held up over the years, they are noteworthy because they were inked by Pat Fish in Santa Barbara, who is regarded as one of the premiere artists working with Celtic designs.

I also love the coincidental nature of Fish by Fish.

Thanks to Tony for sharing these amazing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Mike's Incredible Aquatic Sleeve (and More!)

I had the good fortune of meeting Mike outside of Penn Station last week and, despite first noticing him because of his leg tattoos, he was extremely generous and unveiled an incredible sleeve that covered his right arm:


Mike is a fisherman and a loves the brightness, color and variety of oceanic life. Such things translate well to the body's canvas and make for some amazing tattoo work...


The giant octopus actually curls up over his shoulder and onto his chest, with one tentacle moving down his arm....


The deep sea diver punctuates the middle of his arm...


At the bottom of the arm are tropical motifs including a huge tiki god and a hibiscus....


On the inside of his inner bicep is this fish which is a cross between an anglerfish and a razorfish:


And we ended with this piece that was so fresh at the time, that Mike had to peel back the protective plastic covering this amazing blowfish:


The artist behind this amazing work is Steve Woison formerly of Electric Tiki Tattoo in Patchogue, and now at Studio 520 in Oakdale, on Long Island.

Thanks again to Mike for taking the time to share his amazing aquatic sleeve with us here on Tattoosday!

Josh Slices Up a Sturgeon on His Culinary Sleeve

At the beginning of the week, I ran into Josh, a chef at an upscale restaurant in Tribeca. He was actually showing his tattoos to a couple of people standing with him, so I felt in apropos to join in the conversation.

Josh is hard at work on a culinary sleeve on his left arm, which includes a langoustine, a Red Junglefowl, and the tattoo above, a sturgeon, complete with slicing knife and roe.

The tattoo, as well as his other work, was done by Mark Harada at East Side Ink in Manhattan.

Thanks to Josh for sharing his sturgeon with us here on Tattoosday. Here's hoping he'll return to show us more. The Red Junglefowl was not completed, otherwise I would have asked to feature that piece here. It's a sweet piece (you can see a fragment of claw above the sturgeon).