Tattoosday (A Tattoo Blog)

Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Sue Swartz

Today's tattooed poet, Sue Swartz, hails from Bloomington, Indiana, and offers up her forearm for all the world to see:

Photo by John Narmontas

Sue explains:

This is a 2-part tattoo story. On my 54^th birthday, I had the Hebrew word for truth (emet) imprinted on my right (i.e., writing) forearm in traditional black Torah script. I wanted a useful reminder for my art; also the word contains one letter that is a stand-in for life/God and two others that spell out the word “dead”. Okay, it was a little heavy. Two years later, this past November, when I couldn’t take looking at the damn truth anymore, Dina Verplank of Voluta Tattoo in Indianapolis beautified the baldness of the lone word with a branch from the Tree of Life and a spiral/root system.

Photo by John Narmontas

And Sue offers up this poem:

MID-LIFE

Damn. Another 3 a.m. flying dream.

This time I’m on a cement slab hurtling toward over-grown lawns

covered with large plastic pigs and spiked coat hangers.

This is not what normal people dream.

Awake, I tilt (normal, not normal) on a giant seesaw of guilt

by association and realize:

I might not really know what normal is—

My dead – crazy bastards every one – left far too many clues,

though not one legible note of navigational instruction.

Minds overtaken by spirals and whirligigs, Greek letters

and the rising price of toilet paper, they wore the warp & weave

of their affliction stoically.

Seamlessly, one might say, and with understated finesse.

Running off to Florida on a Tuesday-morning whim:

In the realm of normal.

Snapped-on pills for breakfast:

Mildly normal.

Washing, washing again, again, again. Refusing to shake

the hand of strangers:

Undeniably normal (well, yeah – you never know

who’s got what).

With garments torn & heads made bare, they bob in and out

of traffic, sit close to me in restaurants, carefully chewing

with their electrode mouths.

My dead have secrets. That much is abundantly clear.

I listen for whispers of their generous madness, find

they’ve come while I’m asleep. Bad timing is all I’ve got.

That, and fingerprints left on the towels.

No, I don’t shush them away: then I’d lose the true nature

of everything. If I don’t know what normal is, why not

claim these people as kin?

How else to name my own impurities and small derangements?

~ ~ ~

Sue Swartz is a poet, hired-gun-political writer, amateur ballroom dancer, favored grandparent, social justice activist, occasional yogini, and creator of alternative Jewish ritual. Her work has been published in Cutthroat Magazine, Lilith, 5 a.m., SmartishPace, and elsewhere. She wishes she had a book you could buy. You can find her blog Awkward Offerings at http://swartzsue.wordpress.com/. She makes her home in Bloomington, Indiana and believes that Leviticus (You are not to make gashes in your flesh for the dead nor incise marks on yourself.) goes a bit overboard.

Thanks to Sue for sharing her truthful tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

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.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Noemi Soto

Today's tattooed poet is Noemi Soto, who sent us this lovely, colorful photo of her tattoo:

Photo Courtesy of Noemi Soto

Noemi explains:

"I designed the tattoo for myself during a pretty rough period after a major breakup about 6 years ago. I wanted it to represent the heartbreak that I was feeling at the time but still hold hope for the future. The artist who tattooed me was Danielle Distefano while she was working out of Dare DevilTattoo on Ludlow Street in Manhattan."

Danielle is currently tattooing out of Only You Tattoo in Atlanta, Georgia.

Noemi offers up this poem:

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Back when I was younger
My mother tried to protect my heart
Always telling me to never bare my insides for a man
to never let him in fully so that he may devour what I hold dear
to not let a man do to me what had been done to her

Her backbone used to show signs of strength but now lacks the stamina to withstand the battle
She was once a woman so strong in her will
but with every man in her life taking pieces of her for themselves
she has now become a mere shell of herself
The stink of her childhood still lingering in her hair

I was witness to the tug of war my father and her used to play
saw the push and pull of their hearts
there was nothing unconditional about their love
not even when it came to me
there is nothing sentimental and heartfelt in the throwing of pots, pans and fists
“I love you” cannot be said through the gnashing of one’s teeth

So when it came time for my will to be tested
I acted on what I saw and not what I was told
What I was shown was that to be a woman meant having to bend your spine so far back to please your man that you broke yourself in two
To stretch those parts of yourself out so that you may give him the smoothest of surfaces in which he may stomp your hopes and dreams into
To ignore his faults and accept them as your own
How dare you even think otherwise?

I was taught that… to be a woman meant having to pick up the pieces that were left behind from his war path
making sure only your feet bled in the process to save his
Being a woman always meant never asking any questions
to let him roam and if he comes back … well… what more do you want?

I followed all of these lessons very carefully
made sure I folded the laundry just right
had dinner ready when he came home
and always made sure to give him his space
only to find myself face down on the floor, arms pinned behind me, with all of his weight pressing his right knee into my back
I waited until he left the room to get up

I stayed in silence
still willing to be the woman behind the man
Still willing to be the glass which he slammed his fist against
shattering any sense of self worth I had just for him
I began to wonder if this really was what it meant to be a woman or just the kind of woman who was so lost in herself that she was willing to let a man tell her what she should be
and if it did …. Then I had to learn to become my own woman
and I couldn’t do that by being underneath his thumb

So I bent back each one of his fingers till they snapped at the joints to show him how serious I was
It was the only way to break free
and while he screamed in pain and cursed me for having been born

I cleared a way for myself through the broken home which I was sure would last forever
letting him know that he no longer had a hold on me

~~~

Noemi Soto is a Brooklyn, New York native who was born and raised in Coney Island and is a recent transplant to Queens. Her poetry has been featured in a variety of publications such as The Acentos Review, The Literary Burlesque, LitUp Magazine & South Jersey Underground. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and is currently working on her first book. You can read more of her work at her website here.

Thanks to Noemi for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Stephen Roger Powers

Today's tattooed poet is Stephen Roger Powers, who is sharing this tattoo of an iconic figure from the music industry:

Photo by James Morton

Stephen explains:

I've been a Dolly Parton fan since my family took a road trip to Tennessee in 1987. We stopped at Dollywood, and I fell in love. When I was in college I wanted a Dolly tattoo, but I never went through with getting one. I kept the thought of it in the back of my mind for years, and when I started writing poems about Dolly and my frequent trips to Dollywood to see her perform benefit concerts for the Dollywood Foundation, the idea slowly crept forward again. Then my book of Dolly poems came out in 2009, and I knew it would soon be time. One day last year my friend Liz, who has 14 tattoos herself, told me to stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, and just do it. Sounded reasonable to me. So Liz drove me to Liberty Tattoo in Atlanta and introduced me to Michael "Shack" Shackelford, the artist who'd done most of hers. Shack drew up a stylized, cartoonized version of Dolly from the cover of her 1977 album Here You Come Again, taking some creative license by adding pokey nipples, which was fine with me.

Liz kept saying she wasn't going to let me back out of it now that she'd driven me there and gotten pulled over for an illegal u-turn on the way, so Shack sat me down, we got started, and today I have Dolly Parton inked on my forearm. While the tattoo is based on a full body shot of Dolly and it runs down my entire right forearm from elbow to wrist, the photo here is a close-up of just her face and torso, which I think makes Shack's details easier to see.

Accompanying this Dolly tattoo is Stephen's poem, "Dolly and the Frog Strangler," which appeared originally in Shenadoah and can be found in his book The Follower's Tale (available here):

Dolly and the Frog Strangler

I was writing a song with Dolly when we ran out of gas

near exit 201 going south through a sudden downpour in Indiana.

The first verse was something about how hay bales grow

darker in the rain and the sides of barns turn from red to brown.

We were also hauling a Dolly Parton pinball machine by Bally.

The backglass was in the backseat. The playfield, with rubber

flippers intact, cartoon Dolly barefoot in denim shorts, was too big to go

in the trunk all the way. It hung over the bumper by bungee cords. Every bump,

my worn-out shocks groaned and banged like rickety roller coasters.

We waited for a trucker to bring us a gallon. Hail popped on the roof

like too many warped records playing at the same time. We were bored,

looking for ways to amuse ourselves. Dolly tapped her dragon lady nails

on the dashboard. I used my sleeve to wipe away windshield fog.

After we hummed a middle C we wrote the second verse,

something about long hair between your lips and mountain berry shampoo

scent in your nose when you kiss someone in the wind.

We rolled down the windows to let the storm heat evaporate

some of the air conditioning. Dolly’s wig got tangled and wet.

The strangest thing was happening: The pinball machine

kept flashing hot pink and lavender.

Maybe lightning hit the cord trailing behind. Or else something lit it

up from our mind’s eye that saw corn tassels rolling in this gully washer

over the fields as applauding hands of cheering crowds.

Our chorus was something about how you look out

your rearview mirror and it’s still visible after a mile

passes, maybe two if the countryside is flat, but then it fades

away and is gone, and you can’t remember anymore what mile

marker it was by when you passed it.

~~~

Stephen Roger Powers is the author of TheFollower's Tale, available from Salmon Poetry. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Dislocate, and Margie. He divides his time between Wisconsin, Georgia, and Dollywood.

A sincere thanks to Stephen for sharing his poem, tattoo and his love of Dolly Parton here with us on Tattoosday!

Monday, April 4, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Martha Serpas

On this, our fourth day of the third annual Tattooed Poets Project, we are honored to have work from Martha Serpas.

Readers may wonder where we find all these tattooed poets. Most come our way by word of mouth, but a small handful, like in Martha's case, agree to participate after we send out e-mail inquiries, without even knowing if a poet is inked or not. Most poets don't even respond, a handful do, but are not tattooed, and once in a blue moon, we find a tattooed poet who is happy to participate.

Anyway, here's one of Martha's tattoos:

Martha explains:

This tattoo is a montage over 20 or so years in the making. First work, Willie [at Willie's Island Tattoos] on Staten Island; Dan [Williams at the Bridgeport Tattoo Shop] in Bridgeport, CT; Bonnie Jean in Yachats, OR at [Tattoo by Design]; and a guy in Houston I never should have let reline it. Bonnie Jean ~~was~~ is old school and taught me that tattooing is like coloring in a book: anybody can do it if the lines are really thick.

The tattoo’s a chronicle of a tumultuous time in my life. The wind/water symbol (my design) traversing the image was first. It felt like a spiritual emblem. The bird represents a goal of peace (brought it in from somewhere). The moliere/Celtic cross (graphic artist friend, Carla Januska designed) is modeled after the one on the chapel at my divinity school and doubles as a setting sun. It is my graduation ring, of sorts. The feathery flame shapes (Bonnie Jean’s freehand) within the wings and tail came last—my attempt to soften up the image when my life became more tranquil.

I have a small tattoo on my ankle that precedes this one(s); a memorial to my best friend on my thigh; a reverse hurricane symbol on my thumb (post-Katrina); and a symbol of perichoresis (divine revolution) on my forearm. I’ve been told I look like a doodle pad. I get tattooed about every 5 years. If I ever become content with life, I’ll stop trying to achieve the ideal personal emblem. For now, I doodle.

•••••••

Martha also contributed the following poem which, she explained, "was inspired by a photograph on the cover of Tattoo." One note, Martha adds, is that "Suzanne owned the shop in Ann Arbor where I got my first ankle tattoo: Creative Tattoo by Suzanne. Great T-shirt: Go forth and live as art. I heard she passed away: Her breast piece was amazing."

Tattoo

She knows being chosen means to choose herself
and seals upon her breasts the Sacred Heart—
a thorn-bound garnet against open lilies,
a pink-and-white ink triptych on her chest.

Every shadow, a creed professed by lines
from votive needles to her deepest cells.
Her body gives life to art, reflects the fade
of dying flesh, and honors God’s design.

No second thoughts, she thinks that pain
is easily a choice we make ourselves,
as is admiring her canvas skin
as it ages. Affirmed with words spelled

on a defiant ribbon across her chest,
her blazón: Even the blackest sheep are blessed.

[Appeared in Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002)]

•••••••

Martha Serpas’s two collections of poetry are Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002) and The Dirty Side of the Storm (Norton, 2007). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Southwest Review, and in anthologies such as Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image and the Library of America’s American Religious Poems. A native of Bayou Lafourche in south Louisiana, she is involved in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and is a hospital trauma chaplain.

You can learn more about Martha and her writing at her website, http://www.marthaserpas.com/.

A sincere thanks to Martha for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alicia Adams

Alicia Adams is today's tattooed poet. She contacted me back in February and told me she was moving out to Brooklyn from Southern California in March. So, last week we met in a large Union Square flagship bookstore and I snapped a photo of her stunning tattoo:

I'll let Alicia explain the story behind this beautiful piece:

This tattoo was done by an artist named Shay Bredimus at Outer Limits Tattoo and Body Piercing in Long Beach, California, the city where I was raised and educated. I had always known I wanted a tattoo, but I could never settle on exactly what I wanted. When I went in to Outer Limits, I still didn’t know. I decided flowers were pretty and timeless and could mean whatever I wanted them to mean. I decided on a peony because I had just seen my first one and fallen in love with it. I didn’t know what peonies symbolized, and I didn’t want to know. I decided I had a lifetime to figure out what it meant to me.
I was getting my MFA in fiction writing, and when I met Shay he told me he had his MFA in painting. For hours we talked about art and literature and grad school and our lives. It was the best tattooing experience I could have hoped for, and I fell in love with the finished product immediately. As I was leaving he invited me to his gallery. I went when he wasn’t there. His pieces were huge, each one taking up the better part of a wall, and they were exquisite and done in black tattoo ink only. I wrote him an email telling him how amazing I thought his art was, and he asked me to come back in for touch ups, and that’s when he added the cherry blossoms.

I buy cherry blossom shampoo now and cherry blossom soap. It’s a silly thing maybe, but it makes me feel pretty and reminds me that I am part of a work of art.

In addition to this tattoo, Alicia is sharing the following poem, "Red Room," which was originally published in The Mas Tequila Review:

Red Room

By Alicia Adams

You wish you had been born from your father’s head.

Like Athena. When you picture Athena in the womb

of Zeus’s skull, you picture her in a hollow red room

with no corners. You picture her curled in a ball

and growing larger, fully clothed with battle gear, spear

stuck behind her father’s eye, a migraine pulsing. When you

picture your own father’s head, you picture it crowded.

But you could have curled around the deep-set grooves

of gray matter, your tiny hands pressed against his frontal

cortex and into his dreams. And when you were ready,

you could have stood on your shoed feet and pushed

up and hard with rhythmic contractions until your father,

unable to take it any longer, found a way to open

himself and let you out. You think about this often.

In the back of your own mind, dark and polluted, you can feel

a tumor growing. One that will ripen and mutate,

killing you slowly, and with little effort.

~~~

Alicia Adams graduated from California State University: Long Beach’s Fiction MFA program in 2010. She co-hosted Prose and Cons Radio and is the co-founder of After the Carnival (Literary Events). Her work has been published in several magazines and anthologies, including most recently How Dirty Girls Get Clean and Beside the City of Angels.

Thanks so much to Alicia for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Patricia Carragon

Our second tattooed poet this month is Patricia Carragon, a New York City poet who was instrumental in helping send several other poets our way for the Tattooed Poets Project this year.

I was fortunate enough to meet Patricia back in February, where I shot this photo of her ink, at my local Borders store:

Patricia sent along this narrative about her Rose-Tattoo Bracelet:

It was a Saturday afternoon in October, 1997. I was finally going to get a sexy rose bracelet tattooed above my right ankle. I’ve already had a referral from my hairdresser to do it at New York Adorned on Second Avenue. I recalled having a henna design painted on my right wrist by a street artist in SoHo earlier that summer – and loved it. I was tired of wearing ankle bracelets that would snap off without notice. Since I didn’t have a picture with me, I searched for possibilities in the tattoo parlor’s books. Not one rose drawing fit the image engraved in my head. A tattoo artist would have the honor of fulfilling my request. Unfortunately, it was Saturday and it was busy. I knew I would not be home until after eight, and supper would have to be much later. I had no choice, but to call home. I wanted to surprise my mother without dealing with her pre-ink drama. But that was not meant to be.

“Oh… a rose-tattoo bracelet? Can lasers remove it?”

“Yes, Mom, but I’m not going to do that. I’ll be home in a few hours. Bye…"

My time arrived. I had coffee sweetened with sugar about an hour ago. Although I was warned that my body needed solid food and sugar to prevent passing out during the procedure, I still didn’t want to overeat because of supper. My artist drew on paper the bracelet that would be outlined above my ankle. I adored the rose-chain stencil on my body. I was ready for baptism by ink – peachy pink for the roses and yellow-green for the leaves.

Once propped up on the cot, the needle pierced my skin and began its journey along the artist’s outline. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel any pain. As minutes passed, the needle worked along the design’s path. About halfway through, the needle must have sent some negative signals to my brain. A sudden feeling of dizziness overcame me. The needle immediately stopped. My slender tattooist and his colleague, who resembled a burly motorcyclist, carried me to another room where I was fed Halloween candy. An ice pack was placed in back of my head. I rested for approximately twenty minutes. I recovered and was ready for the needle and my rose bracelet’s completion. I apologized for what had happened, knowing that, with low blood pressure, I should have been more careful. The heavy-set tattooist told me not to feel bad. Even the toughest-looking customers pass out under the needle.

Feeling better, I sat up on the cot and watched the needle complete the outline. Then came the application of the colors. My roses became part of my skin and self-expression.

Wrapped in Bacitracin and Saran Wrap, I got dressed. It was worth charging this bracelet on one of my plastic cards. I wish that I had saved the receipt. I think it probably cost me one-hundred-eighty dollars.

Later that night, Mom made a comment when I undid the Saran Wrap.

“Oh… you got a large tattoo. I thought you were going for one rose? Can lasers still remove it?”

“Yes, Mom, but I’m not going to do that. I spent money on this tattoo and I’m keeping it for life.”

What was a novelty back in the late ’90s is now the norm today. The roses above my right ankle, sadly, look faded after fourteen years. I wish I had the money to bring back their color. At least Mom stopped giving me prickly advice about getting laser treatment.

Patricia Carragon February 2011

Patricia also sent along the following prose piece. And, although it is not a poem, this is the Tattooed Poets Project, not the Tattooed Poems Project:

Cupcake Chronicles #9- Friday evening before midnight, February 13, 2009

It was the end of the world. All the cupcakes disappeared overnight. All the bakeshops stopped making them. All the recipes became blank pages in cookbooks. All pictures, photographs, ceramics and artifacts depicting cupcakes vanished. All memories died, except for mine. I cried all night until I fell asleep.

In the morning, I felt bloated as I rose from my bed. I passed the mirror and noticed how voluptuous my boobs looked. I headed for the fridge and invaded the pickle and peanut butter jars. I decided to add garlic and paprika on a scoop of vanilla ice cream. My appetite craved unusual combinations. My period was a month and a half late. It was time to call my gyn.

The sonogram showed multiple fetuses. They had arms and legs, hands and feet, but the rest of the picture was too bizarre for the doctor to describe.

She was quiet for a few seconds before getting up the courage to say, “Congratulations, you’re having a baker’s dozen.”

Patricia Carragon's publications include Big City Lit, Clockwise Cat, Danse Macabre, MÖBIUS, The Poetry Magazine, Mad Hatters’ Review, The Toronto Quarterly, and more. She is the author of Journey to the Center of My Mind (Rogue Scholars Press)and Urban Haiku and More (Fierce Grace Press). She curates the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor of the annual anthology.

Thanks to Patricia for sharing her rose-bracelet tattoo, the story behind it, as well as a sample of her writing. I am grateful, not only for her participation, but for her sending out the clarion call for more tattooed poets this year!

This entry is ©2011 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.

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Tattooed Poets Project: Vicki Iorio

We're kicking off this year's Tattooed Poets Project with a tattoo that seems, ahem, apropos-etic:

This poetic foot belongs to Vicki Iorio, a New York poet. She explains the tattoo:

"My group of Long Island poets have the pleasure of reading at the Wyld Chyld Cafe and Tattoo Parlor in Merrick, NY. I watched Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, the poet laureate of Suffolk County get "poet" tattooed across her shoulder blades. [Tammy will be appearing on the site later this month.] She recited poetry while her back was bleeding, I knew at that moment I would have to get one!

It was a cold January night, Sixx tattooed my right foot with a beautiful scripted "poet." It was a beautiful moment and I love my tat and all it signifies. A slew of woman poets have been tattooed by Sixx. A tattooed sisterhood, indeed."

Here is a poem from Vicki:

Tattoo 56

I will get a tattoo next birthday
no one will care
it won't be like birthday 13
when I dyed my hair purple on a shoplift heist
shaved off eyebrows
pierced frozen ears with a needle
hacked off bushy black fur under stockings

I will find an illustrated man
his head bald and shiny
eyes so blue I will see straight through
to his good heart, diamond stud in one ear
massive arms shocking to the touch.

My spider will go willingly to his fly.
I will tell him what I want
where I want it.

After validating plastic worth,
my pirate will lead me to his table
gift me with little hurts
celebrate me electrically
wrap me in gauze
sing the praises of Bacitracin
wish me a happy birthday.

Vicki Iorio is a Long Island poet who hangs around tattoo parlors. Her poems have been published in various publications including hell strung and crooked. She is saving up for another tattoo!

Thanks to Vicki for sharing her poetic tattoo and tattoo poem with us here on Tattoosday!