“Did it hurt?”
My left arm is outstretched, the shirt sleeve rolled up and sitting on my shoulder, artwork showcased on my inner bicep. It’s all in black ink, approximately 7 inches wide, and took 90 minutes to permanently draw on my arm.
“A little. More so towards the shoulder; that area’s really sensitive.”
Since I met my fiancé in 2007, I’ve been telling her about the next tattoo I wanted. I’ve spent my life writing and playing video games, and Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series has been a staple in my life since I was a baby. Its fourth major edition, The Ocarina of Time, is hailed as the best game ever made. I’ve wanted to get an insignia from Ocarina, the Triforce, tattooed on me for several years.
The idea came to me when I was 20 and my friend Kenny and I were driving around suburban Atlanta. He wanted a sleeve – a tattoo that starts at the shoulder and goes to the elbow or wrist – of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies on one arm, and a ring around his other bicep of the Elven inscription of the One Ring from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.
Other ideas we’d discussed were Master Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the words “Surf’s Up!” in the font used for Chinese food to-go boxes and a “Do Not Enter” sign on the smalls of our backs. Years later, he settled on an original piece of zombies tearing their way out of his calf and I stuck with the Triforce.
In early August, Kristy and I walked into The Body Gallery in downtown Leesburg to inquire about getting an appointment. While we were waiting to be helped, we browsed through the portfolios by each artist sitting on the coffee table in the lounge. There must have been ten books, but after the second artist’s I knew I didn’t have to look any further.
Jedediah Von Horror has some of the most intricate, detailed work I’ve ever seen and I demanded he book me. Unfortunately, the rest of Leesburg had done the same before I could, so his schedule was full for the next month. We spoke briefly, and his attitude and professionalism reinforced my decision. He gave me a reminder card for the date and, after seeing a print-out of my Triforce, said he was really looking forward to it. The card read “You’ve got an appointment to get ZAPPED! on Sept. 3 “ and Kristy clipped it to our refrigerator.
Four weeks crawled by, during which time I Googled some of my favorite American sideshow oddities - Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy, John Merrick (The Elephant Man) and so on. During my research I found that a hundred years ago, extensively-tattooed people held a very different stigma than they do today. Rather than be seen as just motorcycle owners or sailors or prostitutes or heavy metal disciples, folks like Conundrum (whose entire body is tattooed like a jigsaw puzzle) were placed in cages and given live chickens to eat, and for just a nickel, or, later, a quarter, people could walk through a tent where they could point and laugh at amputees, conjoined twins, little people and those with full-body skin conditions.
My appointment came and I met Jedediah in the parlor, where he spent a quick minute setting up an iPod to a speaker set so we could enjoy music while we talked and he worked. Following this, he spent a few more minutes – with a surgeon’s precision – cleaning and sterilizing his equipment, opening a fresh unused needle and carefully placing it into his gun.
He pristinely traced the edges of the print-out I’d given him the month prior with a purple marker onto what looked like wax paper and placed it on my arm, where I’d told him.
“Go over and look at it in that mirror so you can get a general idea of how it’s gonna be. Does that look ok? Little bigger, little smaller maybe?”
“No no; it’s perfect.” I couldn’t contain a big, asinine grin.
“Are you sure? It’s no problem to resize or retrace it if you want.”
I was already on my way back to the raised bed – not unlike the one you lay on in the doctor’s office – without another word. Jedediah had put on surgical gloves by this point and placed a few sanitized paper towels where my arm should rest while he worked. He lathered and shaved my arm with a new straight razor. Bad Brains came out of the stereo and I breathed deeply.
“Alright man, you ready?”
“Yep.”
“Ok; here we go.”
Then I heard the buzz, and felt the needle of the gun, and shut my eyes and relaxed.
The trick is to keep your body limp. If you tense up, tattoos hurt like Hell. I don’t know why; it’s something about nerves or your skin or muscles bunching up, but you have to keep limber. As we talked, my mind wandered, to my other tattoos and my circus freaks.
My first tattoos have been on my back since 2001. I’d just started college and wanted to get inked to symbolize such a monumental occasion, and with something universal. Some people have a yin-yang, others the Christian cross; I chose two empty circles.
Circles are atoms, planets, vinyls and cd’s, and geometrically represent the equalized nature of the give-and-take of most relationships. Much like Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio/Rectangle/Spiral, circles constitute most of the universe. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, as well.
I had them done at a parlor in the Rondout, on the Hudson River in upstate New York, on a fall afternoon. The owners of the shop had a two-year-old son who I talked to the whole time his mother committed my circles to me. They both eased the tension and I’m glad I got to meet them. I remember telling the girl I was with, “Every tattoo I get, I wanna come back here.” It was hard to reach back and rub the lotion on them to keep them from drying out – scent-free, dye-free lotion, they always told me – but in the end they came out fine.
As Jedediah traced the Triforce outline – this time forever, on my arm, with steady hands – I noticed the alternating black-and-white stripes of the wing-like structures on either side of it. Naturally, then, my train of thought led to Ota Benga and the time he spent living at the Bronx Zoo.
An Mbuti tribesman of meager stature, Benga found many of his people killed by soldiers of Belgian King Leopold II in the 1890s. Discovered by two Americans – a businessman and scientist seeking evidence for an exhibit detailing inequalities of ethnicity – he was brought first to St. Louis. There he and some of his other clan were displayed alongside Geronimo and others as a sort of live museum exhibit where people marveled at Benga’s size, teeth – which he had filed down to sharp points – and behavior.
Ota Benga’s living conditions worsened when he was brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1904 and displayed in the Monkey House alongside orangutans and chimpanzees. After meeting much protest from African-American clergymen James H. Gordon, the zookeepers allowed Benga to roam around the zoo freely until he was finally released into the care of Gordon, then to an orphanage under Gordon’s supervision and finally to a home of his own in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The world did what it could to mask Ota Benga’s misfortune – dressing him in suits and capping his customized teeth. As he was finally acclimated to American culture, the way he’d hoped for at his initial meeting with the men who brought him to St. Louis, he started a normal American life. He attended school for many years and then worked on a tobacco farm as he saved money and planned his return to the Congo. As international relations worsened in the 1910s, his trip back to Africa slipped from his grasp. All that he had left of his early life were his stories, which he told his co-workers in exchange for food and drink, and the permanent work to his teeth, which were now “corrected.”
I relayed this story to Jedediah as he worked on me. “I could never get my teeth filed down like that though,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, his arm completely covered in tattoos, drawing with the needle on mine. “Some people are just lookin’ for pain.”
We shook our heads; he reached the end of a line and pointed at my arm. “Hey man, you wanna take a break?”
“Nah, not yet.”
My third tattoo I got the summer after my first two. This was in July 2002, on the way to a Weezer concert. Their fourth album, Maladroit, had just hit shelves and despite not finding as big a place in my heart as their sophomore release, Pinkerton, two friends and I found ourselves hauling ass to Atlanta’s Hi-Fi Buys Amphitheater (at the time, Lakewood Amphitheater) anyway to catch Rivers Cuomo and the gang spit out “Buddy Holly” and some other favorites.
I’d been obsessed with Tool’s fourth album, Lateralus, since its release in 2001, and spent more time than I should have poring over Alex Grey’s artwork for it. An unmistakable mixture of anatomical and spiritual subjects (think med-school diagrams with chakras, but cool) dominated his portfolio, and his work for Tool was no different.
It was five or six transparent pages for the liner notes, each page displaying a different layer of the male human anatomy from head to chest. The muscular system, nervous system, skeletal system – all were represented with varying coiled spirals and flaming eyes politely floating about.
Tool’s lyrics have always been open to interpretation – lyrics sheets are never printed in their albums, and the band have openly expressed their disdain for telling their audience what meaning to take from their music. One song contains the symbol of the “third eye” to better perceive the world, and I feel like aiming to improve oneself is as good a practice as any.
In my own search for manual evolution, I went to a tattoo parlor on the way to Weezer.
I’d just started taking some college classes, working full-time to pay for them and weaning myself away from living off my parents, after a bout of mono that took me out of college for a semester. I committed to independence, wrote the first pieces for my first novel and booked my appointment with my flaming eye in hand.
I don’t remember exactly what the guy looked like who put Alex Grey’s piece on my hip, but in my head I remember him as a caricature, a mixture of Zach Galiafinakis and W.C. Fields. I dropped my pants down and the buddies I was with, Nick and Brian, poked fun at my pale ass sticking out for most of the time I was under the gun. The guy inking me was worse.
“Tool fucking sucks; why don’t you get something that’s important to you?” the artist said.
“Uh…I like ‘em ok, and this is pretty important to me.” I was nervous to start an argument with someone holding a pen that wrote on me for the rest of my life.
“Psh. Whatever. You should get something cool instead. Check this shit out.”
He picked up the legs of his shorts and on one shin he had an 18” tattoo of Darth Vader with a lightsaber, and on the other he had Gene Simmons in his KISS attire, tongue sticking out, playing his bass.
I dealt with his flak just long enough to finish up and not tip him. It remains the only tattoo I have that didn’t heal right and needs touching up, but since I’m the only one who sees my naked hip a lot, I’m holding off until I just find the spare $20 or $40 in the street it will cost to get it redone.
“OK, now I’m ready for a break,” I told Jedediah. He’d outlined my Triforce and used a broader needle to fill it in, and as he neared my armpit the skin became more and more sensitive.
“No problem man; you’re doing great. I’m gonna stretch out a bit, you take your time and we’ll get back to it when you’re ready.”
I went out back and sat in a wire frame black metal chair, one of four around a matching table on Body Gallery’s back porch, the golden and beige leaves falling from their trees around me, blanketing the brick porch. I sent a few text messages – for some reason I didn’t get service in the shop – and after ten minutes or so, came back in to let him finish the job. My skin was pink and tender, the tattoo was half-filled (or half-empty) and I craved completion.
The Feejee Mermaid was sought by P.T. Barnum (along with the decomposing body of outlaw Jesse James) for his Greatest Show on Earth. A creature born half-human and half-fish, it was claimed, swam in the waters of Fiji and was caught by sailors just before their return to these great United States for the viewing pleasure of you, a fine and lovely audience.
If you want to make a Feejee Mermaid, you need a monkey, a fish, glue and a bone saw.
You may guess where this is headed.
Saw the first two in half. Throw out the bottom half of the monkey and the top half of the fish, unless you can find something else to do with them. Affix, with the glue, the top half of the monkey onto the bottom half of the fish. You may, in this day and age, want to use Nair to get all the hair off that monkey torso. Then, you just have to let the glue dry.
They came by the hundreds to see Barnum’s Mermaid. There are no mermaids, of course, or at least none that mankind has discovered, so what P.T. yearned for – knowingly or unknowingly – was a nightmare of taxidermy and shop class. Even still, it became so popular that a half-dozen sources have stepped forward so far claiming to have the original Feejee, another of God’s creations born half-finished, half-spectacular to be seen by the eye, alongside Ota Benga and the Conundrum, Geronimo and John Merrick and Jojo.
“Alright man; you’re all set.”
My wedding and birth of our first child are within a six-month period of each other, and I got the Triforce on my arm in dedication and celebration.
I talked to Jedediah and we discussed all the after-care instructions. These include washing my hands with unscented antibacterial soap before touching the tattoo and washing the tattoo gently with the same and applying unscented, dye-free lotion to the tattooed skin and letting nature take its course.
When getting tattooed, the skin is penetrated by the ink gun and a dab of blood occasionally fights its way to the surface. The man or woman with the gun politely wipes away the blood with a moist towelette or wet-nap held by a latex glove on a clean hand and continues his or her work. After a few days, the tattoo scabs over, as bleeding wounds do, and if you pick and peel and pull at the scabs they mess up your tattoo. If you continue to moisturize and leave it alone, however, eventually the scabs fall away and your tattoo is forever a part of your body, as the glue dries on the Feejee Mermaid and she is forever made a creature of mythos.
So what’s the end result? John Merrick died in a hospital, riddled with tumors and physical disfigurations. Ota Benga chipped all of his teeth’s caps, returning to his dentally-tattooed self before cashing his check early with a stolen revolver in front of a bonfire. People beg oddities obsessives to come and stare at one half of a fish and another half of a monkey in their garage, glued together and collecting dust, pieces of it rotting off under the same watchful eye people reserve for magicians.
We, with tattoos, wash, moisturize and repeat until the old skin falls away like autumn leaves off a tree and our new, customized flesh lays vibrant and commemorative underneath.
