Ty's Tattoos, Part III "Remember to Breathe"

I remember a day long ago when Rose and I took Tamsin to the park. The little girl played on the swings and the merry-go-’round, while her mother and I sat on one of the splintery picnic tables and smoked and discussed the men in our lives. Rose was well into a description of her new boyfriend’s motorcycle and their plans to take it camping that summer, when a wail from the monkey bars broke the thread of our conversation. Tamsin was lying at the base of the tangle of iron bars, her face in the dirt, her arms and legs splayed at odd angles.

      Rose clamped her cigarette between her teeth and strode over to her daughter, lifting her gently and brushing her off, carefully checking the alignment of her small limbs. Tamsin continued to scream, and when she raised her head to take another tremulous breath, I saw blood streaming down her neck. “Looks like her chin went right through the flesh.”

      Rose grabbed Tamsin, I grabbed the car keys, and we raced her to the emergency room. Tamsin alternated shrieks of “Mom!” and “Aunt Jackie!” until the doctor let us stand on opposite sides of the examining table while he cleaned the wound and prepared to stitch closed the gaping, inch-long tear at the bottom of her chin. He worked quickly, and I remember thinking how much his stitches were like the design I’d been embroidering on a shirt for Tamsin--tiny little cross-hatches of silk thread. His needle dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled, each stitch bringing together the edges of the deep red gash, each stitch perfectly set in the white flesh of her small chin.

      I don’t remember how much time went by, but all of a sudden the doctor paused and said in a calm, detached voice, “Mom, maybe you’d better take Aunt Jackie outside for some air,” and I realized that the room had turned black and crackly and that I’d been watching him work through a long tunnel of vision that was slowly narrowing.

      Rose lowered me into a chair and pushed my head down on my knees. “Remember to breathe,” she said, and I took three shuddering gulps. The room brightened gradually, and when I lifted my head, Tamsin was sitting up and gingerly tapping her bandaged chin with the heel of her small hand.

I remember to breathe now, and Brando works quickly. The ink has changed from black to purple; he’s filling in the center, leaving a pale highlight. The three high school girls and Tamsin and I all sing along with the music: “Are the colors brighter...am I finally waking up...there’s no such thing as destiny...no bad or good luck.”

      Tamsin twists her head to look up at us. “You getting a tattoo?” she asks the girls.

      “I am, for sure,” says one of them. “Just turned eighteen yesterday, so my mom can’t stop me.”

      “I got my first one when I was eighteen,” Tamsin says. Then she’s quiet again, and I don’t know if it’s because of what Brando’s doing to her ankle or because she’s thinking about her own mom. Rose was killed in a motorcycle accident a week before Tamsin’s eighteenth birthday, three weeks before Tamsin got her first tattoo.

  “Stop!” Tamsin commands. “I need a break.”

      Brando stops. “I’m done.” He blots her ankle again, lifting away tiny drops of blood. He turns the ankle toward me. “Look.”

      I look. A dark, dainty eighth note rises toward me on the bruised and burgeoning flesh. Brando glazes the new tattoo with antiseptic ointment, then relinquishes his hold on Tamsin’s leg. She prods the swollen pink tissue around the tattoo. “It’s perfect. Just what I wanted.” She swings her legs over the side of the chair and hops to the floor. The girls form a semi-circle around her as she pirouettes before a mirror set near the foot of the chair. Tamsin turns her ankle one way, then another, admiring Brando’s work.

      “Does it hurt?” the girls ask.

      “Naw. Not now. I love it.” She straps on her sandal as the CD begins another cycle. “Hey, hey, you got me goin’ boy,” sings Tamsin again, shuffling and dancing around the mirror. Brando squats on his stool, watching like a proud father.

      One of the girls hops into Tamsin’s vacant place in the chair. “I want Tinkerbell,” she says, pulling a scrap of illustration from her pocket. “Here, on my shoulder.”

      Brando glances at the picture. “Can do that,” he says. “Lemme get the paperwork.” He takes papers from the table drawer and and hands them to the girl.

      Tamsin still stands before the floor mirror. She gives her leg a little shake. The music notes rides high and bright on her ankle. “Got my wallet?” she asks.

      I pat my shoulder bag. “Yeah.”

      “Then pay the man.”

      I hand Brando fifty bucks, and Brando hands me one of his business cards. “Whenever you’re ready,” he says, and winks.


[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]

Ty's Tattoos, Part II "Nearer the Bone"

“Ready for you. ” Brando nods at Tamsin and gestures toward a reclining chair, the kind you find in a barber’s shop or dentist’s office. “Unless you want to wait for Freddie to come back from lunch.”
      Tamsin shakes her head. She hops up into the chair and unstraps the sandal on her right foot while Brando retrieves fresh instruments from the autoclave. I lean on the edge of the booth to watch. The singer growls from the speaker: “You were always waiting for me...patient for me...‘til you got me hooked.” Tamsin’s foot keeps time with the music.

      “So,” says Brando, sitting down again on his stool. “What’re we doin’ here?”

      “An eighth note. About an inch high, right here.” Tamsin points at a spot about two inches above the knob of her ankle. “Black outline with a dark purple center. Here, I made a sketch.” She tugs a piece of paper from the pocket of her cutoffs.

      Brando takes the paper in one hand and Tamsin’s ankle in the other. He rolls her leg gently back and forth on the chair’s footrest. “Can do that. About forty-five dollars. D’ya fill out the paper-work?

      “Yeah. Last week.” Tamsin produces another folded paper from her pocket. Brando studies it, then hands it back, nodding. “I’ve had a tattoo before,” Tamsin says. She points again at the rosebud on her thigh. “Got it in Boise three years ago. I’m thinking of having it extended. Maybe a vine.” She traces an imaginary stem with her fingertip.

      “Can do that. I’ll show you some designs when we finish this.” Brando pulls on fresh gloves and swabs Tamsin’s ankle with an antiseptic cloth. Taking a safety razor from the drawer of his worktable, he shaves a small patch on her already-smooth leg where he will put the tattoo, then swabs again.

      Tamsin leans back and smiles at me. “You really oughta get one.”

      “I think I’ll just watch for now, if you don’t mind.”

Brando glances at me, sizing me up as a potential customer. I don’t know what his decision is. What he sees is a middle-aged woman with short hair going silver all around her face, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that says “Dolphin Biology Research Lab.” Sometimes, in the laundromat, when people read the shirt and ask me if I’m a biologist, I say “yes” just to make the conversation interesting, but the truth is, I’m a secretary in an insurance office, and I got the t-shirt at a garage sale. Whatever he thinks, Brando turns back to his work, filling a small vial with ink and fitting a new needle in his machine.

      Tamsin scoots herself up in the chair. Brando grasps her leg at mid-calf and pulls her back into a recline. He holds her leg firmly and gently and starts the tattoo machine. “What are you afraid of, honey...I’m nothing but a dream,” the singer croons.
      The first touch of the needle makes Tamsin wince and pull her leg away. I jump a little, too, jarring the wall of the booth and earning a disapproving look from Brando. He readjusts his needle. “You know, this one’s gonna hurt more than that other. There’s not as much flesh on your ankle. We’re nearer the bone.” Again, he takes her ankle and pulls her leg toward him. She closes her fists on the arms of the chair.
      Brando’s needle draws a black line. Tamsin draws in breath sharply and, between clenched teeth, sings: “My heart is hard...but it is pure...your heart is softness...the sweetest cure.” The buzz of the machine rises and falls, stops and starts. Tamsin writhes in her chair, but Brando never lets go his hold on her leg.
      I watch the needle trace a small eighth note on the flesh. The note floats above Tamsin’s ankle; its tiny flag waves and curls. “I’m just a shadow,” the note sings, “a wisp of smoke.”
     The shop door swings open and three teenaged girls enter. “Help you?” asks Brando, his needle pausing.
     The girls giggle and point at each other. “She wants a tattoo,” they say, nearly in unison, and laugh again.
     “Look around.” Brando nods at the books of illustrations. “Be with you when I’m done.” He goes back to his work.
     The girls wander the shop, examining the tattoo samples on the walls. One of them comes over to Brando’s booth. “Hey! Tamsin!” she exclaims. Tamsin looks up and smiles.
     The girl turns to me. “She went to our high school,” she explains. She calls to her friends. “Hey, guys, it’s Tamsin!”
     The other girls come over and stand beside me, peering over the partition. “Hi, Tamsin,” they say. “Does it hurt?”
     “A little.”
     “A little,” the girls repeat and continue to watch reverently. They begin a muted chorus of oohs and aahs as Brando dips his needle again and again, first into the ink, then into Tamsin’s leg. She rolls and pulls, but Brando holds her fast. She pants and sings, the machine buzzes, and I watch and remind myself to breathe.

Ty's Tattoos, Part I "Family Ties"

Ty’s Tattoos opened last year in the old Organic Grocery building on the corner of Fourth and Halliday. Twenty years ago, Tamsin’s mother and I came to the Grocery to buy ginseng tea and eat wild rice soup; today, Tamsin’s here for a tattoo, and I’m along for I’m-not-sure-what: the ride? moral support?

     There used to be three small tables jammed against the windows at the back of the store and a minuscule kitchen where the Soup of the Day simmered in a giant porcelain kettle and where a waitress of natural beauty cut sandwiches made with heavy slices of whole grain bread and served them on handmade stoneware.  
     Nothing remains of the Organic Grocery now except the smell of patchouli and one huge fern that dominates the north window, its long fronds trailing nearly to the floor. The bins of lentils and dried fruit are gone; the wood-burning stove with its bubbling teapot has been replaced by a table piled high with three-ring binders, their plasticized pages offering every imaginable kind of tattoo. Every inch of flat surface in the tattoo shop--walls, doors, even the ceiling--is covered with samples of the artists’ work: rampant dragons dripping green scales, ruby blossoms with thorn-laden stems that wind in and out of the eye sockets of grinning skulls, figures of women whose majestic limbs arc and droop like the fronds of the fern hanging in the window, or whose hair spikes away from their heads and circles their wrists like barbed-wire bracelets.

The tattoo artist stands in his booth in the midst of this graphic fury, poring over the shoulder blade of his four o’clock appointment, a large, fleshy man who sits, shirtless and with eyes closed, his clenched fists braced on his knees. Every few seconds the man emits a low grunt--almost a moan--and the tattoo artist lifts his buzzing needle from the man’s back and swipes away droplets of blood with an absorbent cloth.
“Take a break,” he says to his client when we enter the shop. He lowers his tattooing machine carefully to a table at his side that holds a tray of ink vials and extra needles, a jar of drawing pens, and a box of antiseptic wipes. He snaps the surgical glove off his left hand and taps the long ash from the cigarette that’s been smoldering in an ashtray on the floor behind him. Then he turns down the volume on the CD player above his worktable.
“Help you?” he asks. I see from the certificate on the wall of his booth that his name is Brando. I’m not sure if that’s a first name or a last name, because it’s the only name on the certificate, just “Brando,” centered on the line below the words, “Certified Technician.” Brando’s wearing tight black levis and a black leather vest over a black t-shirt. Black and green vines and snakes cover his arms from wrist to shoulder, and a wide band of tattooed skulls peeks above the neck of his shirt. His dark hair juts stiffly up and away from his head, as if it had been lacquered when he was hanging upside down. Brando’s skin--where it is not decorated--is pale and opaque, and his chin is covered by black tattooed lines that drip from his lower lip and curl under his jaw.
“I stopped in last week and talked to Freddie about a tattoo,” says Tamsin. She idly flips the pages of the plastic binders on the table. “A music note. On my ankle.”
“Can do that.” Brando glances at the clock on the wall behind him. “Can you wait? Freddie should be back pretty soon, or I’m just about finished here.” Tamsin nods, and Brando turns the volume back up, snaps the glove back on, and resumes his work. The large man squeezes his eyes shut against the pain and moans again.
We look at designs and listen to the groaning. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask. “It sounds pretty painful.”
“Oh, I’ve already got one, remember?” Tamsin lifts the ragged edge of her cutoffs. A small yellow rosebud clings to the front of her left thigh. “It didn’t hurt much at all. Mostly, it’s just irritating--like a little bee sting, over and over again.”
“Well, if you say so.”
“Relax. In fact, you oughta get one, Aunt Jackie.”
“Oh, right! Me, with a tattoo.” We both snort at this absurdity, but the truth is, I’ve thought about it. Tamsin usually treats me like one of her friends--I’m not really her aunt--but I wonder if today my role is surrogate mother. Maybe I’m supposed to raise the objections that her mother might make if she were here. The problem is, I’m not all that sure Rose would object to a tattoo. I suspect that had she lived long enough for Ty’s to arrive in Pocatello, she would have been their first customer. Maybe that’s what Tamsin’s thinking. Maybe I should get a tattoo just for the sake of family ties.
Tamsin hums a little with the music. “Hey, hey, you got me goin’ boy,” she sings. She executes a swaying, swiveling dance step. The large man on the stool stops groaning and opens small, piggy eyes.
     Tamsin points to a design of ribboned hearts. “How ‘bout one like that?” I shake my head. She laughs and dances over to the booth where Brando bends to his task. She peers around him at the tattoo on the large man’s shoulder. “Better get ready...I’m comin’ back,” she sings to the buzz of Brando’s needle. The large man tries to turn and look at her, but Brando nudges him back into position. “Burn you like fire...I’m a pyromaniac,” sings Tamsin, and she dances away across the shop. The large man momentarily forgets his pain and smiles and tries to catch Tamsin’s eye, but she’s got hers closed as she sways to the music, her wrists riding gently on her hips.
Brando finally snaps off his machine. “Okay, all done.” He blots the large man’s back one more time and tapes a gauze patch over the new tattoo.
The man stands and buttons his shirt. “Thanks. See ya later, man,” he says and hands Brando a wad of bills. He gives Tamsin a final, slightly wistful look before leaving the shop.