06 October 2010
Lucky’s
(Fake Tattoo in Hawaii, 2002. Photo Ormand courtesy Socotra.)
Donna and Bonds delivered me back to the lovely house on the bluff over the Connecticut River. The last rays of the sunset were stealing over the low hills to the west, and it made me think of a picture I had taken long ago. Lovely.
The bandage was starting to slip down over my left bicep, and I glanced at the Rolex and fished the instruction sheet out of my 501 jeans. “Five hours,” read the words. “Remove the bandage and gently wash area with anti-bacterial soap.”
I had not seen what was under the bandage since it went on, immediately after the blood was mopped up from the table and Kevin the Tattoo Artist pushed me toward the sink to wash my hands of the red fluid that pressed against my palm when I got off the table.
“You take aspirin daily, don’t you?” Kevin said with a tone of mild accusation.
I nodded. “For the ticker,” I said. “Supposed to thin the blood.”
“It does that,” he said with a frown. “And it affects the ink. Between that and your tan you are going to lose a lot of ink.”
I looked down at the design, more than a little light-headed. I wondered if it was the loss of blood or the throbbing of the needle that had been poking into my skin for the last hour and a half.
Well, it was done. I will carry the design on my body until the day I die. Hope I like it. The decision to get one had been made a long time ago. I was on one of those magical mystery tours that wound through mainland Asia, and there was a stopover in Oahu on the way back.
Ink was getting more common, and I liked the look- edgy. Of course, in my time the motto was: "Officers Don't Get Tattoos."
It was thought to be too sailor-like, and the guys who had come up from the ranks usually regretted having anything visible adorning their forearms, or anything else that was exposed on the body.
I asked my son what he thought about it, after I had decided to go ahead with it, and he said it was "sort of Blue Collar."
I didn’t agree. My associate who interned at State got a magnificent design on her hip, a real work of art, transferred from an original by a gifted artist she knew. I was impressed, and asked who she had selected to execute something so personal and permanent.
“Kevin,” she said. “He is one of the staff artists at Lucky’s in Northampton. He is really good, but you don’t want to get him irritated. I looked at the details of the fantastic design and decided right then that if I was going to do it, Kevin was the one who would ink me.
After depositing my son on the Grinder at Newport, and watched him approach the officer with the clipboard to seriously change his life, I drove off the base and headed north and west to Northampton. I had made an appointment with Kevin for two o’clock in the studio at 37 Main Street.
(Lucky’s Tattoo’s and Peircing Studio.)
Although I had put a deposit down, it wasn’t big enough not to walk away from, and I wondered if I was actually going to go through with it. Pain is not one of my interests, and I wondered if the design I had selected was really the way to go.
I had thought the one Jack Nicholson had in the film “The Last Detail” had a lot going for it. It was a serpent that wrapped around his arm and peered out alarmingly.
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that an original design was more in keeping with the spirit of the thing, and it occurred to me that I had captured a neat design completely by accident.
I was at Harvard’s JFK School of government at the time, the least blue collar place I have ever been, and was walking back to the dorm just at sunset. I was pacing out onto the pedestrian bridge across the Charles River and looked upstream to see the most remarkable sky.
Clouds swirled; the horizon was lit by the dying sun and the lights were coming on with darkness. I swung my digital camera up, pure dumb luck, and caught the moment. Completely by accident the flash went off, and illuminated a graffiti tag on the masonry of the bridge.
Here is what popped up:
(Bridge over Charles River at dusk, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Photo Socotra.)
When I looked at it later, I realized it was one of the nicest pictures I have ever taken, and of course I had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
An artist friend was quite enamored of it, and did a stunning poster-sized water color:
(Cambridge sunset. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved to artist.)
You can see that the tag has been altered in a subtle manner to accommodate my name. I really liked it, and decided that was the way to go.
Taking the bandage off my arm was going to provide a glimpse of four layers of art: the original tagger, whoever he was, the dumb circumstance of my photo, the talented hand of the artist, and finally Kevin’s skill at transferring it to my skin.
I wondered how it had turned out. Bonds looked on with mild interest as I tugged at the tape that held the bandage. I thought it was a little like the scenes in the movies when the plastic surgeon takes the wraps off someone’s face, a brand-new visage to be revealed...
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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