Richard Georges' Two Goddesses (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet is Richard Georges, who is our first contributor ever from the British Virgin Islands. He is sharing some amazing tattoos with us:

Richard tells us:

"I have Saraswati - Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, wisdom, and learning inside my left forearm, and Lakshmi - Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, and prosperity on my right. They were both done (as well as their corresponding sleeves) by Federico Ferroni (@federicoferroni) of Love/Hate Tattoo (@miamiinklovehate) in Miami. I haven't had anything done recently, but I'd definitely go back to him if I decide to get any more work."

Richard also gave us the poem "Exorcism/Freeport," which appeared previously in Cordite Poetry Review in May 2017:

Exorcism / Freeport

when I was eight, a priest came and flicked holy water
into the four corners of this wooden house


that kept my parents, two sons, a daughter,
and a darkening forest in its mouth.


The priest muttered in Latin, crossed us all
with odorous oils, his thumb pausing on


on the bottom of each cross, on the small
space of our foreheads where Christ was hung from.


but the spirits came every night until
my father opened the fowl’s throat like a bible,


the glint of metal washed away in blood,
a beating of black, white and red feather


his hands, the knife, performed their own recital
to feed with one hand, with the other, kill.

~ ~ ~

Richard Georges is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and GIANT (Platypus Press). He is the recipient of the 2016 Marvin E. Williams Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer, and has been shortlisted for The Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Small Axe Literary Prize, The Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. You can find him at www.richardgeorges.com.

Thanks to Richard for sharing his tattoos and poetry with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

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.

David's Winged Tattoos

I met David on Broadway last month and asked him about his tattoos, two of which rested colorfully on his inner forearms:

"I wanted a knight," David told me, "and I found an image of a knight with wings and thought that was cool."

And on the other arm, some snakes, the Eye of Horus and a goddess:

"This is the Egyptian goddess, Isis, and she's got wings," he noted, remarking that the two pieces and their wings provide a certain symmetry.

David credited Kris Magnotti (@krismagnotti) at New York Adorned with these tattoos.

Thanks to David for sharing his winged body art with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2016 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.

It's a Small World: Steve Shares Some Amazing Tim Kern Handiwork

Last June (yes, you read that correctly - I've been sitting on this post a while!), I attended a book release party at Sacred Gallery in Manhattan.

While perusing the art hanging on the walls, I noticed a fellow attendee who had a lot of tattoos. To be honest, that pretty much described everyone in attendance, but what jumped out at me was a familiar-looking piece on this gentleman's leg:

photo by Janet Loder-Berthelon

What was surprising about this tattoo is that I had seen it before - just not in person. It had, however, appeared on Tattoosday, two years earlier in this post, courtesy of my friend Janet, who spotted the host on the subway and unwittingly submitted one of the few "guest spots" we have ever had.

I introduced myself and learned that the gentleman's name is Steve Prue, a very talented photographer (click through his name to see some amazing work). Needless to say, he remembered meeting Janet, and offered up to me some of his amazing work on his left sleeve:

These wonderful tattoos are the handiwork of Tim Kern of Tribulation Tattoo. The robot face (above) and what Steve called his "robo-Kali" (below) are truly phenomenal and it is almost criminal that I have been sitting on these photos for so long.

This "small world" story ended up letting us experience segments of  two "out of this world" tattoos.

Thanks to Steve for sharing them with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday.

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: Lisa Gill

Today's tattoo comes to us courtesy of Lisa Gill:

Lisa tells us:

"Last September, I got a rattlesnake in my living room. (I live rural outside the small town Moriarty, NM). I spent over two hours in close proximity to the snake, and ultimately ended up calling the sheriff's department and getting a deputy to help me catch it and release it off my property. After the encounter I spent months and months writing direct address poems to the snake and ended up with a play where the snake speaks back. The Relenting is both "true story" and archetypal and imagined journey, paralleling the transformation the snake sparked. The encounter, and the writing where I tried to process the encounter, changed my life, and because my life had changed (and is still changing), I wanted a tattoo to symbolize the transformation.

The only tattoo image I considered was the Minoan Snake Goddess.

I understood her intuitively in a way I'm still working to express with words. I worked with tattoo artist Serena Lander. I knew Serena's work on visual artist Suzanne Sbarge, who regularly helps bring Serena to New Mexico from Seattle. I trusted Suzanne and was right to. I had a great experience with Serena, the right kind of energy and contemplative exchange. I wanted line work, one color, kind of ruddy toned. She took images I sent her from archeological digs at the Palace of Knossos and transformed them into the image now on my arm.

I consider the image both a prayer and a mark of a turning point in my life. (I have three earlier tattoos, two black, one white, all smaller, from a decade prior, sparked by a different significant recognition.) The subtext for the new one is this: right before the encounter with the rattler, I'd just made it out of a wheelchair I'd been in for five months due to multiple sclerosis. Arms are not something I take for granted any longer... and the tattoo in that respect is simply about gratitude and facing disability with resilience, as much as I can muster..."

Please venture on over to BillyBlog to read an excerpt from the aforementioned The Relenting here.

New Mexico poet Lisa Gill is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2010 New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award, and just earned her MFA from the University of New Mexico this April. She is a literary arts activist, currently booking poets for "Church of Beethoven," and the author of three books of poetry, Red as a Lotus, Mortar & Pestle, and Dark Enough. A fourth book, The Relenting, is forthcoming with New Rivers Press (June 2010) and can be considered either a play or a poem scripted for two voices, rattler and woman. She'll be touring the play in the upcoming year, starting with a staged reading with Tricklock's Kevin Elder at 516 Arts in Albuquerque in June and then onward to Minnesota, LA, hopefully even to NY.

Thanks to Lisa for sharing her amazing tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!