"Tattoos and Travels" Origin Story

So, the “Tattoos and Travels” origin story. This is not the first blog I’ve had with the name, but hopefully this will be the one that endures, the one that I see through. I’d love to be able to look this up 50 years from now, on whatever unimaginable device we use as a computer in the future, and be able to read back through these posts as if they were a diary. Which they are, but in a vaguely curated way. A diary with intention, I guess.

This entry is about the beginning of my tattoo obsession, and what led me to start this blog (several times) in the first place. I think it started with my uncle’s bar. It was called Topside, catered mainly to bikers, and was located in the town of Bristol, Rhode Island. Bristol has the longest running Fourth of July parade in the US, and they take it seriously. My uncle was no different, and as Topside just happened to be along the parade route, the 4th was one of the most important days of the year for him. I loved that holiday. Rows of lawn chairs set up outside the bar, salty breezes coming in off the ocean, people milling around and digging cold, dripping beers out of coolers, shouting to each other, watching the parade winding past slowly. It was always hot, sunny, and loud as fuck. Marching bands, motorcycle engines, my mom calling to my brother and I not to wade out into the ocean so far…I loved the energy of it all. Part of those memories, a big part, was the tattoos.

They were all different, and all mysterious to me. Scantily-clad women hitching rides on forearms, flowers wrapped around a wrist or ankle, the bold, dark lines of a tribal tattoo stretching across wide shoulders…I loved them all, couldn’t stop looking at them. My parents brought us to Topside this one day a year to watch the parade, but it was the parade of ink that really had me. Deeply tanned men and women, dressed for the heat, showing off their decorated skin with careless confidence. Something about that has always stuck with me, and I knew, even as the child I was then, that someday I’d be one of them. Tattooed as fuck, living in my own skin like I’d chosen it.

A decade or so later, I found myself attending the University of Maine at Farmington, in, you guessed it, Farmington, Maine. There was one tattoo artist in town. His name was Jeremiah, he was charming, and his shop was right down the street from my dorm. That fall, I got my first tattoo, two mermaids intertwined in a circle (inspired by a David Delamare painting). That was back in 2002, almost exactly 16 years ago. At the time, I remember telling him that it would be my only tattoo. I don’t know why I said that, because even as the words were coming out of my mouth I knew they weren’t true.

I loved hanging out at Jeremiah’s shop. I’d flip through one of his many books of flash or tattoo magazines, sometimes organizing his mini-library of body art for him. Or sometimes just sitting in his easy chair, sideways with my feet dangling, listening to him talk to his clients while his tattoo machine buzzed ceaselessly. I should remember the name of his shop, but I don’t. We always just referred to it as “Jeremiah’s”. My friends back then were cool, way cooler than me, and different from anyone I’d spent time around before. Tattooed, pierced, weed-smoking, truck-driving, semi-hicks, who knew about building fires in the woods to sit and drink around, and also knew about Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. Those four years at undergrad were amazing, mostly because of those friends, and because of the absolute passion for body art that they helped me cultivate.

It wasn’t just tattoos and tattoo art. Jeremiah was also into doing large-scale graffiti pieces around town, and his influence helped me appreciate all forms of the visual arts more than I ever had before. My UMF people encouraged me to take more art classes, draw more, and experiment with body modification on a level I might not have without them. We used to take roadtrips to Brewer, Maine for cheap piercings. There was a shop there that had massive discounts on Wednesdays…and we’d go get new holes poked in us almost every week. By the time I was 19, I’d had a wide variety of piercing experiences (lots of parts of the ear, nose, lips, tongue, nipples, nape of my neck, etc.). A cornerstone of the person I am these days was cast back in those days, with those people, and our experiences together.

I feel like this post is already kinda long, and I have a lot more to say…we haven’t even gotten to the years I spent living abroad, the tattoos I got from back-alley shops everywhere from China to the Dominican Republic. To do it all justice, there’s going to have to be an Origin Story: Part II…

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you!

xoxo