what does your tattoo mean?
"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculpture."
Alexis Carrel
There is something risky about having artists within your inner circle. They can take inspiration from your life and you'll find yourself exposed to a world beyond your doorstep.
My family and friends consist of many artists with a myriad of artistic expression. This week I highlighted one of those artists, he is called "Northern Irish Craig" or "Chilli-Peppers" to his friends!
He is a tattoo artist in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland. His art wins awards nationally and is displayed with local acclaim. He inspires me! And yet his art studio also intrigues me.....
I have some ink upon my skin so I know the cost in pain to apply the paint to a canvas that is both sensitive and robust. Today my art work is fading, reflecting the fading nature of a time in my life when things were more basic. A basic color palette, basic ideas of right and wrong, and of belonging. Indelible ink 25 years ago had a deep sense of meaning to everyone. It might be a dark meaning but it was clear in its intent. For tattoos provoke identity questions and from the day the ink was painted upon my skin I was to discover a question that is inseparable from the art of inking identity upon your skin....
So many possible answers to such a simple question!
- It means suffering silently to produce a statement of significance.
- It means an attempt to counter the systemic poverty and violence that attempted to create insignificance.
- It means generational culpability.
- It means strength through solidarity.
- It means that I once lived beyond the pale, prowling dark places with dark people.
- It means fidelity.
- And sometimes it can seem so meaningless in the face of social upheaval.
There was a time a few years ago that I was profoundly offended by the fact that the art of the tattoo had become a part of mainstream society. Seminarians come to be painted with dark ink in dead languages. Middle aged matrons bring their delicate daughters to brand their secret skin with bits of beauty. The social outcast now looks askance at the tattoo parlor and wonders how these normal people had the temerity to take his place. Can he screw the courage up to sit with the normal people and wait his turn to be painted with the palette of pain? My brother-in-law tells the broken boy to go down the side street to the less talented artist, because that broken boy can't figure out how to gain enough courage to embrace sobriety and pacification for long enough to get painted by a more talented artist. For Craig must now rightly protect his normal and nicer costumer from the debris of a broken society trying to get painfully branded with dark beauty to gain some small semblance of significance. You must now be sober and safe to enter a tattoo parlor. The teenage me would never have found the capacity to get painted if he lived today.....
Painting with pain used to be the domain of society's debris and now it belongs to the hipster and her mother..... My ink used to mean something! Arggggg!!!! Then I take a deep breath and remember it still means something. I just get to share my original painted pain with a very unexpected collection of walking canvases. And the teenager who took my place on the broken streets of my neighborhood must delve into ever darker side streets to find someone to brand significance upon his skin for the bright and shiny places of the tattoo world are now filled with his high school Math teacher and her middle class daughter.
Progress is a very strange thing. But I'm delighted beyond words for my brother-in-law that his clientele are of the sober and safe variety and because of that his tattoo parlor can be a work of art in and off itself instead of feeling like an ante-room to hell!
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