rain and rant

night rain at omiya, originally uploaded by seventeenstars.

Rain!
It's absolutely alright to be up late late late when it's RAINING!

I am a night owl (not a day owl) and I thrive in the wee hours. I like the warm-lit lamps and the rugs laying all rumpled on the wooden floors of the house, and the sound of the trains going past out there in the rainy wet fields. Every few moments I hear tottering high heels out in the leafy-strewn sidewalk and hear drunk conversations, long-legged bedraggled girls winding home from a Halloween party.

what I haven't done (and now it's two):
Make a Halloween costume
(this is inexcusable. Halloween is my FAVORITE holiday)

What I have done:
Written two long emails and watched a 20/20 special on transgendered children, piece by piece on Youtube.

Tonight I tattooed someone who was very much still a teen. I had sort of forgotten what it's like to be around them, and now I think I am different in their eyes, as in: OLD.
Being that I was a person of authority, a business person in this girl's eyes, I suddenly realized that she saw me as an adult and therefore, the enemy, even though she was the one paying for me to do this torture*/art to her. She had hired me, but she was being weird and sullen, like I was her mother forcing her to wear some shirt she did not like or something. She mumbled and had sudden bratty outbursts (that no other tattoo artist in the entire universe would have put up with) that were rude, immediately made our interaction into a overbearing parent/petulant child model, and showed quite clearly that I was someone to be rebelled against. Also, she was a squirmer.

It literally fills me with terror and dread when I have the gorgeous pearlescent virgin skin of a 1990's baby (18 yr old) stretched out before me, and I have a feeling that there is no way in hell that this tattoo is gonna go on easy, what with the twisting and random jerking and the sudden inexplicable hair-fixing that some people feel is important to do right in the middle of getting a perfect circle tattooed in the middle of your spine. As much as I love tattoos, I feel like I am desecrating something holy sometimes, especially if their MOM is there, watching you mark their moaning child and wincing. Which hers was.


I was quite close to crying and felt like I was goimg insane because I get connected to these people! I care about every client and I want every person to look in the mirror after the tattoo was finished and be overjoyed and dancing around and heady with satisfaction! When someone gives their tattoo a cursory glance and then says, "what now?" I feel dread and I can't help it. I have never had anyone tell me they didn't like something and I hope they WOULD.

My client tonight, after writhing and trembling in pain (she was a tiny elfin slip of a thing too, and looked about 14, so that didn't help. My motherly feelings were in high gear.) for 3 + hours, looked in the mirror afterwards, her face breaking into an amazing overjoyed smile and said "THANK YOU SO MUCH!!" My job is so bizarre.


(Siderant: I know this is horribly taboo put I don't think the world of body art would suffer if the tattoo age was raised to 21. The asthetic choices people make as teenagers seem have a shelf-life of about 2 years. Most people undergo an enormous shift in their early 20's, and stop thinking certain things are really important, namely astrology.
I got one tattoo before I was 21, and it was the kanji for "love". While now I would critique getting a langauge tattooed that I have no cultural ties to and can't speak (ahem), I feel like I lucked out. I see teen tattoos come in that have to do with BMX racing, or a metal band that wears clown masks, or their highschool trashy girlfriends name on their forearm, and I.....I.....I don't think it would make anyone suffer. The melodramatic kids with still get their tattoo from Mr. Sketchy in a garage or back alley. And then when they're a bit older they can come to me and I'll fix it! Ha ha.)

More rain.
I still haven't made my costume.

For Halloween: a Corpse Flower!

Is Greater Than

I have somewhat re-edited my post from a while back entitled "Why I am Tattooed" and Paul Davis published it in his excellent online magazine "Is Greater Than".Is Greater Than: I am a Tattooed Lady

I am consistently sort of baffled that I sometimes write stuff online that I do not publish myself (like I do in this blog)and that other people that I don't know will read it. I got the statistics from Is Greater Than for the months from April (when my story came out) to July, and they told me that there were 288 unique page views of my personal essay on The Magnetic Fields ( The Magnetic Fields/Santa Cruz article is here) and that the average time people spent with my essay was 12 minutes!!!!! In internet time that is an eternity, especially considering the ADD most people (including myself) instantly develop when they go online! Perhaps a couple people were reading my essay and fell asleep at their keyboards because they were so bored?? Ha ha Seriously, both these stats are heartening to say the least.

I used to write a lot, but haven't written except in personal journals for years. I don't harbor any illusions that complete strangers are going to be interested in my life (which is why I started this blog for my mom, and which ever friends wanted to keep up with me), but I have a very interesting and exotic job, which is why I started writing for Paul and Is Greater Than. There are not many people in the tattoo industry that write about it. Tattoo culture has been studied by academics (I am reading an excellent book of academic essays right now put out by Princeton University Press called "Written on the Body"* which I highly recommend) and anthropologists, but when looking for anything written by people inside the profession they are few and far between. I get so overcome with inspiration every day that this is amazing to me. I can't really shut up about it, so I decided to start writing about it. Which I should do more. Now, if I can only find the time between tattoos!



*Someday I'll be writing like this:
"The tattoo has long hovered in a space between the cosmetic and the punitive. Throughout its history, the status of the tattoo has been complicated by its dual association with slavery and penal practices on the one hand and exotic or forbidden sexuality on the other. The tattoo appears often as an involuntary stigma, sometimes as a self-imposed marker of identity, and occasionally as a beautiful corporal decoration.

Octopi and Peacocks

-I am incredibly lucky as far as the tattoo designs I get to draw. Spoiled, I'd say;)
I got another request for another art nouveau peacock (online, from Chicago) today, as well as a walk-in appointment for a single peacock feather. I finished up my large drawing for the octopus with mendhi-style paisley swirling 'round beneath it, and am about to start a Artemis piece (she's a Greek goddess with a bow- look her up) and an ankle tattoo of woodcut Mandarin ducks. So exciting!

-On a whim I just Google image-searched "art nouveau peacock tattoo". Do it and check out the FIRST image that comes up!!! I am so silly to appreciate stuff like that, but I do. Hopefully Michelle doesn't have a million clones walking around with peacock sleeves. I know it would bother her! Luckily, it is pretty impossible to replicate, since the detail is small and pictures don't really do it justice. You can't see the whole design all at once.




Sometimes I think I could do pretty good predictions as to the new "it" animal in popular design and fashion. I could call it the "spirit animal of the collective subconscious". Hah. For instance we recently went through a big owl and deer phase. Owl and deer were on everything; t-shirts and album covers and wallpaper and TATTOOS. Now octopi and peacocks are super super popular, and tattoo culture is reflecting this. Both are extremely beautiful animals, some of the most interesting especially in terms of pattern. Both seem to me as having an exotic aura, rather than the deer and owls- whom were cool in a sort of folksy, graceful, quiet 70's era redux kind of way. (Watch while I relate this to people right now wanting something new and flashy and beautiful and intelligent, something WAY off the norm, and therefore predicting the election of OBAMA. HAHAHAHAHA!)I could see both hedgehogs and coral coming into style, maybe just cause they are instyle with ME, but seriously I did do a hedgehog tattoo last week..........

Also rising in popularity (not animal): cherry branch and feather rib tattoos for girls. I have recently given SO MANY first tattoos on the ribs. I always tell the brave girl that "any tattoo you get from now on will be a piece of cake!"


*That painting of the bird woman is a work by Fernand Khopff (1858-1921). It is called "Sleeping Medusa". So beautiful, right? I was either going to get it or the Aurthur Rackham Tempest piece (that I go) on my left upper arm.

kai and ob hill

kai and ob hill, originally uploaded by sandwichgirl.

every once in a while , Antarctica comes back to haunt my thoughts......