It's Been Awhile
by Casey McKinney
This’ll
date me…
I
got my first tattoo when I was eighteen. The year was 1991, the summer
after I graduated from high school. My uncle, who had spent a couple of
years in Berlin as an Army medic during the Cold War, wanted me to see
Europe. So he paid for a trip. I spent many days intoxicated on trains,
(accidentally) ate dolphin brains and (purposefully) ran with the bulls
in Spain (sorry for the alliteration). I drank steins of lager in Munich
and lay around fountains in Rome watching the girls go by on the backs
of their boyfriend’s Vespas. I also saw a hell of a lot of art,
and wound down the last week in Amsterdam, learning how to roll hash cigarettes.
A
few days before I left for home, I walked into Hanky Panky’s Tattoo
Museum in the basement of a red light district biker bar and asked if
he had the time to do a piece on me.
"Come
back at 5 and don’t show up drunk. I don’t want you bleeding
all over the place.”
Hanky (officially Henk Schiffmacher) had made a name for himself in certain circles as the guy who tattooed the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His artwork also donned the cover of their breakthrough album Blood Sex Sugar Magic. 1991 was the summer of the first Lollapalooza concert, and it was kind of the bleeding edge thing then to get a tribal tattoo.
Like I said, I was eighteen.
I flipped through several books of classic American flash tattoo art,
Maori Ta Moko designs,
intricate Celtic ornamental work, etc, and finally settled on an American
Indian design––a circular maze of bold black lines. I thought
the shape would look good on my bicep, but didn’t give a whole lot
of thought to it’s meaning. (Years later, in college, I was shocked
to see a professor hold up a book of Mimbres pottery art and explain the
significance of the work. Apparently, in the Mimbres culture of the Southwest,
each newborn is given a bowl with specific design at birth. The bowl is
used for everything, eating, drinking, bathing. When the person dies the
bowl is smashed and buried with the body, so that it will never be used
again….I felt like a thief.)
Though famous, Hanky was not the most attentive tattoo artist. He spent much of the time on the phone, yanking my arm back into place whenever I grimaced or flinched from the pain. After about an hour it was over. I lay in bed the next couple of nights scratching at my arm as the top layer of skin worked its way off.
By the time I got home the tattoo was pretty much healed. One morning––actually
it was the morning of the Atlanta stop of the Lollapalooza concert tour––I
ran up the stairs without my shirt looking for a towel and heard my mother
gasp.
“Is that real?”
“I don’t have time to go into it.”
“I’m calling the doctor right now. We’re getting that
removed.”
Things died down after a while. And I didn’t get another tattoo
for years. But for some reason, I’ve got the bug again.
It’s a good thing to get the bug in a place like the Bay Area. From
Oakland to Berkeley to San Rafael and San Francisco, this region has probably
the highest concentration of first class tattoo artists in the world.
A bit of explanation:
A good friend of mine from back in Atlanta, Grant Weber, lived in San
Francisco for a while and came back with two intricate sleeves of tattoos.
Like me, he was first tattooed when he was eighteen. And also like me,
his first tattoo was more about getting the tattoo, then putting a lot
of thought into the design, or its significance (he later got that first
piece––a somewhat tribal looking lizard––covered
over with another). His new tattoos took on a California look, having
been inscribed by all of the great artists here––from Tennessee
Dave in Los Angeles, to Grime, Tim Lehi, Scott Sylvia, and Jef Whitehead
in San Francisco, and Freddy Corbin in Oakland. His sleeves were what
Ed Hardy would describe as postmodern, in that they combined styles of
different eras. Most of the work was a mix of Japanese murals (Grant speaks
Japanese and spent a year in Tokyo too) and American maritime designs,
with the occasional super original work a la Grime.
It was the old American Flash art on his arms that intrigued me. Whenever
someone gets a tattoo these days, they are also getting a piece of history
injected into their body. For me, seeing the beauty in the old designs
of people like Sailor Jerry, meant that one could have a sense of history
in their tattoos, without feeling guilty about robbing someone else’s
culture. But then again, maybe you’re just robbing sailor culture.
Anyway, Grant gave me the dibs on the best tattooers in the Bay, and I
owe him for that.
More soon on getting my last tattoo at Temple Tattoo in the next installment.
In the meantime, check out Ed Hardy talking about of the classic flash
designs in his shop.
For submissions to the Tattoo Story Forum (stories, fact or fiction, interviews,
gripes about this website) write: info@threedeadmice.com
Also check out this book, good collection of fiction about tattoos, Dorthy Parker's Elbow