Jennie's Rabbit (from the Archives)

Way back in 2018, Jennie, a friend of my daughter's, came back to New York from Chicago, rocking this leporine tattoo:

I photographed it - it was maybe Jennie's third or fourth tattoo - and never posted it, but let’s just say I figured I'd let it "age." Jennie has gone on to fill her arm with some great work, but I thought it was time to give this rabbit it's due. Check out another one of Jennie's cool tattoos (also from '18) here.

Jennie credited the work to a tattoo artist she remembers as "Wolfy." The four stars recall the flag of Chicago, where Jennie was finishing up school. 

She notes: “The stars are for Chicago, but he thought the actual Chicago flag stars were ugly, so he made them normal stars instead and I was too meek to correct him.” 

And why the rabbit? 

Jennie explains: 

“I got the rabbit because, on my walk at the ass crack of dawn every day, I would see a million rabbits! They’re a leftover product of Chicago’s meatpacking history! I think there are more of them than there are squirrels. 

I think I went [to get the tattoo] on a whim that day. I definitely went with my friend Lily … Wolfy called himself that because he had multiple wolf tattoos [and] kept asking if we were lesbians and then [kept] assuring me there was nothing wrong with that if we were … he had a very strong Chicago accent.” 

More about the Chicago rabbit situation here.

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

This entry is ©2021 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: Ruth Awad

In 2012, the poet Traci Brimhall said I had to talk to Ruth Awad. Ruth has a lot of tattoos and she is a damn fine poet. Ruth and I have emailed back and forth for four years (and in the mean time, at least a dozen other poets said, "Ruth is tattooed!"). Well, the planets finally aligned in 2016 and I am happy to have Ruth and her work appearing on The Tattooed Poets Project.

We don't get a lot of fully-sleeved poets, so let's just take a moment and look at all of the details in this work:

Ruth calls this her "poppy fox bunny sleeve" and credits Roger Ziegler, owner of  Bomber Crew Tattoo in Carbondale, Illinois. She adds that Roger "has a real talent for creating depth and detail with color, and he's one of the few artists who isn't my mother who has tattooed me."

Now, check out this lovely tattoo:

This is Ruth's "disco watercolor bear." She elaborates:

"Like nearly all of my tattoos, this one was done by my mother Deborah Stevenson. She used to run her own tattoo shop and art gallery in East Nashville, Tennessee, and I hope she opens another shop one day. She's incredible, and I'm not just saying that because I'm her daughter."

I'd have to agree her work is remarkable.

Next up are these swallows:

Ruth tell us:

"These are about a decade old now and could use a touch up. Anyway, Marty, the tattoo artist who trained my mom, did the swallow under my right collarbone as a kind of test for her when she was an apprentice – she had to make the left one match his (she did a fine job, too). Marty died a few years ago – it's interesting to think about a tattoo artist's work outliving them in this very literal way in someone's skin."

Readers following the site this month may recall that Katie Riegel's tattoo (here) was done by Ruth. A poet and a tattooist! Well check these cardinals out:

Ruth tells us:

"I tattooed these birds on my own ankle a few years ago. I was probably bored, and I immediately regretted the decision after I tattooed the first line – it was a hard pose to maintain! Wouldn't do that again, but I'm pretty happy with the result." 

Not bad for tattooing oneself, I must admit.

Ruth also chose to share the following poem, which isn't tattoo-related, but she's "still particularly fond of" it. It previously appeared in Diode:

Shame, Abridged 

Walk a circle of salt
around the bed. A handful 
of leaves or feathers.
This is how we hide 
every moment we lived in the ground.

~

When shame becomes your phantom hand that digs its nails into its fist.
When you move it like a muscle just to feel your skin tighten.
I was thirteen. I stood calf-high in meadow grass. Two high school boys,
counting each pixel of flesh as I peeled the fabric from my body.
Become a worse animal. Let your quills pin their eager hands to the dirt.

~

Here, my armor: a plate of bone beneath my breasts
and your weight on top of it. Your wife and kid waited at home.
But I could feel them, too.
The ceiling fan, turning and turning over,
always above you.

~

I am the yarrow at your heel, leave your starved with me.

~

Your chest rising the way a bow draws an arrow.
I want to teach this song
to the children we won’t make.

~

A lover said, You can’t make me fall in love with you
and just leave. It was like in the movies. What power
tastes like: knowing I could have him, even then.
How that one-room apartment with no AC
in the dead of summer made his skin wet,
made me want to see just how cold I could be.

~

I’m trying out what it means to be a woman
and take out the world with one bite.
Out of the garden and into the bog.

~

I am awake as any animal
under the star-wheeled night.

My skin a red slip
I could slick from my back
and start over

if I don’t get in my own way.

~

Behind the screen, vines cursive the names of ghosts,
the faucet beads into the basin.
Be the space between each drip.  

In the kitchen his calloused hand pins my thigh.  

I don’t want to be held that way,
but the body is already bones and dirt.
You can bury it anywhere.

~ ~ ~

Ruth Awad has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The NewRepublic, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Atticus Review, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Diode, Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Epiphany, The Drunken Boat, and in the anthologies The Hundred Years' War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015). She won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest, and she was a finalist for the 2013 Ruth Lily Fellowship. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and two Pomeranians.

Thanks to Ruth for sharing her poem and her amazing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2016 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.

Lynsey, With a Wolf in the Garden

I met Lynsey last week outside of  Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan. She shared this interesting tattoo:

Wrapping around her lower leg, this tattoo is credited to Jared Hayes, an artist in Salt Lake City.

Lynsey explained, “We did a collaborative effort on it – it’s original – so, it was based off of a song I have a particular fondness for and we kinda built it off that.”

"What song?" I asked.

"Wolves in the Garden" by The Deadly Syndrome. Here's the song in an unofficial video:

The whole piece took about nine hours to complete.

Thanks to Lynsey for sharing this cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

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: Iris Cushing

Today's tattooed poet is Iris Cushing. Iris sent us this photo:

Iris explains:

"This is a drawing by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, which I found in her Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn. It illustrates a dream that Bishop had while she was at Yaddo in 1950, about an owl riding on the back of a rabbit. I love that Bishop was a poet who drew, who rendered her inner and out experiences in diverse ways. I was reading a ton of her work when I got this tattoo in 2009. There were a lot of barn owls and jack rabbits in the country where I grew up in Northern California. Reclusive, mysterious creatures. I wanted to have the image in my life always--it's something I decided to live with, those animals, her simple drawing. I got it done at Inkstop Tattoo in the East Village." 

Iris sent us this poem:

Sequence

Together, we identify
a single tendril of smoke
above the prairie
and follow it to a teepee
disguised as a wedding gown.
Two puffed-sleeve
chimneys and a satin
bodice catch wind.
The white tulle train
is full of spiders.
You circle the teepee
six times before lifting
its hem from the long grass.
When you turn your face
to nod me under, your eyes
reflect a fire.

Inside, we find
a medicine man who can
transform AA batteries
into AAA batteries.
We empty our flashlight
for a demo.
He wears a spangled robe.
Says he sews a single sequin
on his garment every time
something important happens.
He calls it the Sequins of Events.
He can see we were born
under the sign of Michael
Jackson’s hair in flames.
Each hair on your head,
he says, is a little circuit,
a limp lightning rod.
He strums a ukulele
strung with copper wire.
But when asked
if our visit this evening
will merit a new sequin
on his sleeve,
or even on his collar,
he hands us our batteries
and stares into the fire.

 ~ ~ ~

Iris Marble Cushing was born in Tarzana, California in 1983. She is an editor for Argos Books and for Circumference: A Journal of Poetry in Translation, both based in Brooklyn. In 2011, Iris was a writer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and other places.

Thanks to Iris for her contribution to 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.

Andy's Watership Down Sleeve

I met Andy back in September in Penn Station and he shared this incredible sleeve:

 

When I asked him about the inspiration behind this incredible work, he indicated the rabbit, which is based on his pet Fiver:

I immediately recognized the name as one of the characters in Richard Adam's wonderful novel, Watership Down.

He basically wanted something that was nature-based and gave the artist, Keller at Classic Tattoos in Pinellas Park, Florida, free reign on the design, allowing him to pretty much free-form the sleeve.

 

The collage at the top of the post consists of my shots in Penn Station, but the detailed photos are based on the pictures Andy generously sent me after the fact. These detailed photos show the brilliant colors and exquisite detail that Keller put into the tattoo, which Andy estimates represents about 18-20 hours of work.

Thanks again to Andy for sharing this amazing sleeve with us here on Tattoosday!