Liz's Resilient Palm

Back in June, at a doctor's appointment, I met Liz, who shared her really cool palm tree tattoo:

She got this because she loves "the resilience of palm trees," alluding, in part, to how they are able to withstand the worst storms when other trees splinter and blow away.

She credited the work to Baris Yesilbas (@barisyesilbas), who works out of Gristle Tattoo (@gristletattoo) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Liz showed me her palm tree after I commented on the Roman numerals on the outside of her arm, which she got to commemorate the year (2017) when she got married:

Thanks to Liz for sharing her tattoos 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.

Caitlin Roach and the Letter J (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet is Caitlin Roach, who shared this very simple tattoo:

Caitlin tells us about her ink:

"When I first met my husband, transcendent essayist José Orduña, we fell fast and hard in love. A couple weeks in he told me he wanted me to tattoo him–something boundless and chaotic, whatever I thought of in the moment–an infatuated request of pure impulse. The only calculated part of the plan was that we would tattoo one another. We had a no. 2 pencil, a sewing needle, thread, and some India ink, and Bill Callahan played from tinny laptop speakers as I scribbled something on his arm as an outline. The tattoo I started that night (it really was a scribble, a non-thing) didn’t get finished. The popping sound of the needle entering his skin with each poke nauseated us both. We never switched turns, and we decided we would finish another time. 

Four years later we were married, his tattoo still unfinished and mine yet started. The night of our one-year wedding anniversary, in Albuquerque where we were living at the time, on another impulsive whim, we sat at our kitchen table with a needle, a pencil, some thread, and the same bottle of ink. We would finish the job we started and add something additional to mark our first year of marriage. I ended up with a small, lower-case j on my wrist, he with a c on his. I never completed his scribble, and it’s still unfinished. 

A friend of ours noticed them once and asked if we 'paid about 50 cents' for them, noting they looked like they’d fallen off the table and landed in our laps. Mine’s gritty and inexact and looks more like a fish hook than a j. But it’s a permanent artifact of that night and I love that. It’s like its own little voice on my wrist, always calling my attention and getting it because I notice it several times a day. I love that, amidst all the rational calculation that directs so much of our lives, there’s still an impulsive spontaneity that surfaces up between us. My husband swears he’s done with homemade tattoos, but I’m not so certain. I just need to upgrade on materials–maybe learn how to make a proper (still homemade) tattoo gun."

Caitlin shared the following poem, as well:

Dirge for ice sheets receding

Everything bends to you. Even the creeping

sedum slows to apprehend you, splitting cracks

more open at your passing to wrest what notice
might still exist inside you. The last living box

elder, hunkered resolute in the corner, flickers
in its moldy hull like a twitch, knowing nothing

but awaits you. Somewhere yarrow readies itself
to stanch the blood you’ll let from it and airs its

sweetness still to solicit even your indifference.
All those Julys spent damp in the fern room

where the egg fruit swelled and swung adjacent
to the drunkard’s dream, dancing bones glutting

deep yellow bells swinging, kept me on my knees.
The weeping fig never clapped a tear from its glossy

stem then. Still you bent to stroke forth shame from
the touch-me-not to see the plant’s spines rise,

to watch it live up its name round your finger.
Haven’t I been this sensitive. I’ve seen black

blacken in the center of you. I’m not trying to
capture light. I’m after the dark bit dumbed by

the brightness flanking all sides but still whirls
around its own dark heart, purging impractical

fractions. That, or the velvet ice slats slipping
away from their silver throats so surely I cannot

buck the thawing, I can never remember. Anything
but the clasp. But the bells’ wet din.

Copyright (c) 2018 by Caitlin Roach; first appeared on TinHouse.com.

~ ~ ~

Caitlin Roach earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems appear or are
forthcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Poetry Northwest, Tin House, Colorado Review, The Journal, West Branch, Copper Nickel, Prelude, Handsome, and The Iowa Review. You can find her at caitlinroach.com.

Thanks to Caitlin for sharing her poem and tattoo 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.

Yvonne's Tiny Tattoo: Carpe This Diem

Last weekend in Miami, I was talking to Yvonne, a dear friend of one of my wife's cousins and now, my friend too. I just had to ask her about this tattoo on her ring finger:

That's "Carpe Diem," Latin for "seize the day" on her ring finger.

When I asked her about it, she explained that, twenty years ago, she was married and was exasperated with her husband, because she felt that he rarely paid attention to her.

To prove a point, she removed her wedding ring and went out and got the tattoo, just to see if he would notice.

Not surprisingly, she said it took months before he asked her what was on her hand. Her suspicions had already long been confirmed, but the fact that it took him so long to notice only solidified her concerns.

Needless to say, the marriage ended. But, as they say, tattoos are forever. Yvonne has a constant reminder to seize the day and a cautionary tale for men everywhere - better pay attention, guys!

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

This entry is ©2017 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.

Married Together, Buried Together

I met Geri last month on Wall Street. This tattoo jumped out of me, so I had to ask her about it:

Geri explained this represents her and her husband:

"We've been together for five years ... when we first met, we used to joke that we were gonna get buried together and when I decided I wanted to get married, I don't really believe in divorce, if I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it once, so ... below it is our names [on heart-shaped headstones] ... At the time I had short hair and he has really long hair, so [the one with short hair] is me."

Geri was visiting from Pittsburgh and she credited this work to Mike from In Your Skin Tattooing in Oakdale, Pennsylvania.

Thanks to Geri for sharing her tattoo with us 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.

Sean's Rubber Ducky, Down to the Bones

I met Sean back in June at the 5th Avenue Street Fair in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

My wife, Melanie, had been wanting me to meet him, as he is the husband of a co-worker. He has a dozen tattoos and shared this, which has extra special meaning:

The tattoo on his ribs commemorates how Sean proposed to his wife Linda.

Sean explained, "I tied a ring with a ribbon around the neck of the ducky ... she thought I was running a bubble bath for her and I dropped the rubber ducky with the ring in the bathtub."

And why is it a skeleton duck? It represents "the depth of our relationship ... down to the bones...".

This happy couple met online. Sean is from Alberta, Canada, and they had a long-distance relationship for three years. He commemorated the proposal with this tattoo he had done by an artist in Alberta.

Thanks to Sean for sharing this cool 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.



 

Anna's Marriage Tattoo

With inkspotting, timing is an essential part of the luck in finding interesting tattoos.

I was about to leave the James Farley Post Office when Melanie called me on my cell. During the several minutes that we spoke, a woman named Anna walked up next to me and started preparing an envelope for mailing. Had Melanie not called, I would have been out on the street, completely missing her.

Anna has a remarkable tattoo that travels up her arm, over her shoulder, onto her back, and down her side. Representing a species of kelp, the tattoo which honors her father, a marine biologist, was both too large and partially covered, for her to share with us here at Tattoosday.

Rather, she allowed me to photograph this tattoo on her right biceps:

This tattoo, which looks a lot like a woodcut, is a representation of an ink drawing of a farmer in the city which, in turn, was inspired by the Scott Walker song "Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)" from his album Tilt.

Take a listen:



Rather than exchange wedding bands, Anna and her husband instead got matching tattoos. "Farmer in the City" is their song, and the tattoos are matrimonial bonds that are in their flesh, rather than on their hands.

It's quite a lovely idea and reminds me of what our friend Carrie and her husband did (read about it here) after their wedding.

This tattoo was inked by Zee at Studio Zee in New Haven, Connecticut.

Thanks to Anna for sharing her matrimonial tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Carrie Returns with Some Matrimonial Ink

As this blog has evolved from a weekly installment over at BillyBlog into a full-time appreciation of the Tattoo, I have gained an immense appreciation of the way Mexican folk art has been absorbed into the medium.

The celebration of Dio de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) is a perfect match for tattooing, as it is associated with bright colors and what I call a "pleasant morbidity," in the form of skeletons and skulls.


Some of my favorite posts here at Tattoosday have been related to the Day of the Dead (see here and here).

So it was with great pleasure that I learned that Carrie, of the amazing ship tattoo, was sending me new ink photos, and moreso when I saw they were in the Dio de los Muertos theme.

Carrie sent a slew of photos relating to two tattoos she and her new husband, Ryan, received as a wedding gift from their friend, Evan Lindemann, who is a tattoo artist at Revolver Tattoo in New Brunswick, NJ. This is the same shop where her pirate ship was (and continues to be) inked.

The couple were married on Halloween of 2008, and honeymooned the following week, which coincided with the Day of the Dead celebrations:

"We had a masquerade ball for our Halloween wedding...our cake topper was a Day of he Dead skeleton bride and groom folk art bride and groom


and our toasting flutes were hand painted from Mexico and had day of the dead bride and groom skulls as well [see photo above]....Going to Mexico was the icing on the cake to finish out our awesome wedding....In Mexico we went to Playa del Carmen, shopped like crazy on 5th ave and ... found some beautiful Day of the Dead figurines and shadow boxes.....

For our wedding gift, ...Evan...wanted to give us a tattoo each.

We love tattoos, so it was one hell of an offer....so...we decided that I would get the Day of the Dead figurine that is the skeleton in the tux representing the groom


and Ryan would get the Day of the Dead woman figurine which represents the bride:


So, we have a piece together and they are beautiful!"

Carrie concludes, that these tattoos "symbolize our love, marriage and honeymoon".

She added that this may "sound kind of corny," but she is right when she says they are beautiful.

A belated congratulations to Carrie (and Ryan) for the marriage, and their incredibly cool (and romantic) his-and-hers tattoos. In a day and age when so many married couples tattoo each others' names on their bodies, it is heart-warming from an artistic perspective to see the level of creativity and thought that went into these pieces.

And a hearty thank you to Carrie (and Ryan) for sharing their work here on Tattoosday!

Building Their Own Nation

At the tail end of my discussion with John about his tattoo (see the post above), he revealed that he was here in New York with his new wife Liz. Ah, a honeymoon in the Big Apple!

Liz and John posed the above tattoos for the occasion. I generally don't go on and on about the photos I take, but I just love how this photo came out: John's wrist nesting lightly in Liz's hand. The matter-of-fact delicacy and naturalness of their two arms connecting just makes the photo that much more compelling.

Anyway, Liz explained that this was the logo for the Young Pioneers, and that their slogan "Build your own nation," or "Make your own country," seemed an appropriate visual metaphor for a new life together.

And, I completely agree.

But, as a disclaimer, I had difficulty locating this exact emblem and connecting it to the youth organization in the former Soviet Union. But, my being able to do so is moot. The logo is striking and it's symbolism is brilliant.

Thanks to Liz and John for sharing their nuptial ink on Tattoosday. Here's wishing them a long, happy life together!