Tattoo Philosopher

The Philosophical Tattooist

 

The Tattooist Philosopher laughs at my tattoo idea. Why do I need the same tag a third time, he smiles. I explain my tattoo. I have the story down to a five minute riff and can do it in my sleep. I want it red. Red because it symbolizes good health in all four seasons. The Tattooist Philosopher is not impressed and continues to smile. He stands next to me; his size aping me. He is 6’ 6” and has a trim build for his thirty plus years. He has remarkably tidy and razor short hair which looks out of place above his black t-shirt and black jeans, his black sneakers. His hair is waxed into a left parting, like something from the 1950’s and there is a pencil thin black moustache to match. Every inch of his skin is covered in tattoos. I am nervous. I am expecting a stereotype. The heavy metal music on the stereo fits, his tattooed female assistant fits –she is in her early twenties, and has long mousy hair, wears black jeans and a white t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her tattoos look homemade, as if she’d picked up a needle herself and wrote words and sentences in black and in no particular order on her arms and hands. I wanted the tattooist to have long heavy metal hair or no hair at all. I wanted him to look like a biker in order to legitimize him in my mind. But one should never judge a book by its cover.

He photocopies the small brown piece of paper with carefully written Chinese characters of my name, one that was given to me by a gentle man at the Xian International Youth Hostel in China. He gives the paper back to me and picks up a piece of trace paper and rips it in half. He moves to a table and holds a ruler in one hand. I can not see what he is doing and I expect the worse. He is done after five minutes and walks over with the trace paper. I see it and I am surprised. The three Chinese characters are perfect and of a size I envisioned. “Is everything ok?” He says. I nod and smile and he walks back to his desk. His assistant tapes paper towel to a black armrest podium and she pulls a two inch wide by two foot long new cellophane bag over the needle cord, then walks upstairs where the music and constant hum of needle emanates. He sits in front of the two food tall podium and pours, first black ink and then red ink, in separate containers. I watch him and watch the street outside, alternating my view to appear cool and nonchalant about the pain I am about to edure. Then without warning he speaks. “Are you ready Ginger?” His voice is gentle, like a surgeon about to operate on a child. I get up and sit on the chair opposite him and the podium. I rest my right arm on the arm rest and he picks it up my arm and pushes it to the side. He takes out the trace paper, moistens it then presses it against the underside of my lower arm until the ink has connected to my skin. Satisfied, he pulls the paper away and tells me to stand up and have a look in the mirror to make sure the positioning of the ink is to my satisfaction. I am satisfied. I tell him it’s perfect and sit back down. He places my arm on the rest and picks up the needle. He asks me if I’m nervous and tells me that women can handle the pain better than men because women tell him to stop when the pain hits but men won’t admit to feeling the pain, because they see him with all his tattoos and are too intimidated. He says men will pass out but women never do. Then he reminded me that there was no denying the pain and it didn’t matter how many times you were tattooed, the pain was fresh and new. And then he began, first with the black outline. He was right about the pain. He said this was the hardest part, pain wise, the coloring in with red wouldn’t be so bad. I hoped he was right and almost at the moment of the first cut, I began asking him questions, anything to distract me from the needle cutting at the surface of my soft skin. So, I said, did you wake up one day and say “I want to be a tattoo artist?” His answer was not what I expected. He told me he dropped out of grad school to work at a tattoo parlour. He was from LA and his dad was a painter who had given up art to have a family, and moved into the upholstery business. He was destined to follow in his father’s business which was, as he put it, back breaking work were clients stuck their noses down at them. This kind of work was not for him so he went to college and studied philosophy. During college he worked in a tattoo parlor and ended up spending all his free time there. When he graduated, he stayed on. He entered grad school and decided that life wasn’t about writing papers and having your head buried in a book. Life was about living. So he apprenticed as a tattoo artist for two years and mostly swept the floor in the beginning. He earned $20 a day and laughs at the though of it. Once he’d served his time he got to tattoo for real. He said there was so much homework and research that people don’t equate with tattooing.

I asked him about the Bay Area. He moved here from LA six years ago and prefers the vibe in the bay even though there is a huge amount of competition in his industry. Did you have a nervous breakdown when you performed your first tattoo? I asked him. Oh yes, he said. He was nervous but he had built up good relationships and many future clients from his mentor’s studio. These people allowed him to practice his tattoos. He also practiced on his two brothers and his father and repeatedly on himself. His mother doesn’t like all his tattoos, especially the ones on his neck but he managed to soften her up when he tattooed the Albanian cross on his and his dad’s forearms. Does he still philosophize, I ask him? He then rattles off a list of philosophers and theories he admires and scoffs at those he does not.

We agree that you have to love what you do. He had paid his dues and now has a career out of it. He asks if I am from Australia, a usual mistake. I correct him and he tells me about his annual visits to York to stay with a good friend plus the many cities across the world he visits for tattoo conferences. Will he stay in Oakland? “More than likely,” he smiles, unless his father asks him to take over the upholstery business.