Isobel O'Hare Shares Two Tattoos (and a Poem) on the Tattooed Poets Project

Our next poet, Isobel O'Hare, is sharing two tattoos for Tattoosday.

First up is this cool black and gray piece:

Isobel explains:

"The hare on my right forearm was both a well-planned tattoo and an impulse tattoo. I had fantasized about it for a couple years before getting it done, and one day when I was feeling particularly anxious and in need of a cathartic outlet, I called a tattoo parlor and asked if they had time to fit me in for a custom tat. I walked in, described what I wanted, and a visiting artist from Los Angeles drew it up and my leaping hare was born.

The hare for me means many different things. Obviously, it is related to my last name, but the wild hare has always been an animal to which I have felt a kinship, as well as rabbits. I've had several house rabbits as pets, and I'm sure I will again someday. It was important to me that the hare appear lively and contented without seeming too cartoonish, and I think the artist did a good job making that happen. Every time I look at him, I smile.

The tattoo is definitely also a nod to Watership Down, which affected me deeply as a child. Sometimes when people ask about the tattoo they'll mention that book and I'll say something about adding some blood to it to make the connection more apparent. I like my hare happy, though.

The hare is named Taliesin after the figure in Welsh folklore who, after transforming into various creatures (including a hare) was consumed by the goddess Ceridwen and reborn through her. There is a lot more to the tale, but you'll have to read the Welsh Mabinogion if you want more than I can fit here.

The hare was done by a visiting artist from Los Angeles (whose name I can't remember) at Temple Tattoo (@templetattoo13) in Oakland, California."

Isobel also shared this other tattoo:

Isobel explains:

"The Celtic Trinity Knot on my left wrist was an idea two of my sisters and I had when we were visiting our mother in Virginia. We wanted something to honor our sisterhood, and so we chose this symbol. For me it means a couple other things as well: I went to a Catholic women's college called Trinity, where all of the students referred to one another as sisters, and I belong to a pagan spiritual sisterhood that is rooted in my Welsh, Scottish, and Irish ancestry.

Several people have pointed it out in public and wanted to talk about their Celtic background, too, but my favorite interaction regarding this tattoo occurred in college. I was sitting outside my academic advisor's office waiting to be calling in for an appointment, and a friend walked down the hall and sat next to me. We started chatting and she glanced down at my wrist, saw my tattoo, and asked, 'Are you a witch?'

The knot was tattooed by an artist at Body Art Tattoo Studio in Berryville, Virginia."

Isobel also sent us the following poem, called  "His Flaming Sister," ehich first appeared in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review in 2013.

His Flaming Sister


Her mother found her in the kitchen

          a knife in her belly        and her head

wedged between the branches of an oak chair.

In this way     one day in the 1960s

           she became an exhibit in this museum of trauma

                        we call family

a craze-dancing    red-haired         blood-bellied girl

          behind this flap with the little round knob

          that reads: Lift Here to See Tragedy.

Lift here to see an eighteen-year-old girl

          shunned by her mother

                     lying in a hospital bed

          sick with blame for what has happened

                     to her body.

Lift here to see the self            divided

          and the crevasse that separates            what they want

                     from her physiology.

Lift here to see the kindness of neighbors

         who     having keys to the house

                     cleaned the kitchen           of all its darkest spots

         washed the white towels and returned

                     everything to the air
                     that held its breath.

~ ~ ~

Isobel O’Hare is a Pushcart-nominated poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials (Zoo Cake Press, 2015) and The Garden Inside Her (Ladybox Books, 2016). Two of her poems appeared in the anthology A Shadow Map, published in 2017 by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press. You can find her at isobelohare.com or on Twitter @isobelohare.

Thanks to Isobel for sharing her two tattoos and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2017 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos 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.

Brian Shares a Freddy Corbin Sugar Skull

As snow was falling on the Northeast Friday evening, I was gathered with friends at 5 Ninth in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan, celebrating our friend Nadyne's birthday.

It didn't take me long to notice that our bartender, Brian, had quite a few tattoos and it was only a matter of time before I drummed up a conversation.

Brian indicated that he has twenty-two tattoos, and when I told him about Tattoosday, he was happy to share.

He turned his arm to reveal this cool sugar skull on his outer left forearm:

Not only do I love sugar skulls (click the tag at the bottom of the post to see how many I've featured over the years), but this particular piece was tattooed on the west coast by the legendary Freddy Corbin at Temple Tattoo in Oakland. Freddy has been interviewed as an "Inked icon" here and has been featured on Vice's Tattoo Age series here.

Needless to say, I always feel fortunate to encounter a tattoo by one of the legends of tattooing.

A big thanks to Brian for sharing his awesome tattoo and to the good people at 5 Ninth for wonderful service as we celebrated Nadyne's birthday in the blizzard!

This entry is ©2013 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.

Ink on 45, Courtesy of Erica (Musician Monday!)

It has been a while since we celebrated "Musician Mondays" here on Tattoosday so, it is with pleasure that we return with a musical tattoo.

Last month I had the pleasure of meeting my wife's cousin Erica for the first time.

She and her girlfriend Moki came over to visit for a small gathering at our home set up to memorialize another cousin who had recently passed away overseas.

And, whereas Moki had significantly more tattoos (we'll see one tomorrow), Erica has only one, and she was kind enough to share it here:

People born in the CD age might not recognize this as a "spider," which was a piece of plastic inserted into the center of small 45-rpm records that allowed them to be played on the small spindles on record players. Records were those things that we, back in the Dark Ages, listened to music on.

Erica currently is the bass player for a band called Poof Pony. She has played in other acts as well, including Turbonegra (a San Francisco-based all-girl tribute band to Norwegian punk band Turbonegro) and punk stalwarts MDC (in the 1990's).

Erica explains how she came by this tattoo:

"I got it done at Temple Tattoo in Oakland - it may have been by Jonah Levin but I wouldn't swear by it ... My friend Kristen had twin hellions that must have been two or three at the time - she had an appointment at Temple and let me know in no uncertain terms that I had a choice - I could either babysit the monsters or go with her to get my own. That meant no choice to me! Since I was turning 45 and love records, the tattoo was a no-brainer. Perhaps I should have thought about it though because quite soon after the ink had settled it was pointed out to me that I had actually put the Spin Magazine logo on my arm and that was just about as cool as getting the Rolling Stones tongue logo (not). I have since seen another bass player with it in exactly the same spot, and it's been confused with being both a swastika and a hazardous waste symbol, which just proves that I don't always run with the brightest crowd."

Thanks to Erica for sharing this iconic tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 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.

Shana's Orange Tattoo - More Than Meets the Eye

I met Shana on the subway back in June. She shared this tattoo:

Shana explained that this is a navel orange from a botanical etching dating back to the 1700's. He explained that he found the illustration in a botanical text book.

Shana further elaborated by explaining that she associates oranges with times that she felt calm and safe and that, among the "thirteen-ish" tattoos, many are different versions of oranges and orange blossoms.

Furthermore, Shana identifies as a transgender individual, and he intimated that the oranges and accompanying blossoms balance out the masculine elements in his appearance.

This was inked by Jason McAfee at Temple Tattoo in Oakland, California.

One may have noted that I used both masculine and feminine pronouns when writing about Shana. I took my cues from Shana's biography on her website:

"Her visual art has been shown at The New York Center for Book Arts and Southern Exposure and is in the collections of the Walker Art Center and the University of California, Irvine, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Southern California libraries’ special collections.  His essays have appeared in Flow Magazine (flowtv.org) and Clamor Magazine, and she contributed a chapter addressing the role of the prison industrial complex in Hurricane Katrina inThrough the Eye of Katrina: Social Justice in the United States, published by Carolina Academic Press.  [Shana] has given talks on transgender representation and deconstructing “hate crime” in queer politics at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, Yale University, and Oberlin College.  She is also a long-time member of Critical Resistance, a grassroots organization fighting the use of the prison industrial complex to address social problems."

Thanks to Shana for sharing this fascinating tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 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.