Tattoos And The People That Love Them (a.k.a. This has nothing to do with writing.)

I always liked tattoos.

My brother’s friend had two full sleeves, and a few on his chest and back. The running joke was, he couldn’t walk past a tattoo shop without stopping inside to get one.

An exaggeration, of course, but he did have a lot of tattoos. So many, they blended together on his arms into a swirl of Jackson Pollack-type images and colors.

I thought that was too many. I like tattoos where you can tell what the individual image is. It stands apart from the others, like a panel in a comic book. My brother’s friend had so many on his arms, they were a blur.

But I still liked tattoos and always wanted one. The problem was, what to get? If I was going to get a tattoo, it would have to be something that had meaning. Not something picked off a wall, or out of a magazine, or copied from someone else. I wanted a tattoo that was different and original. Something with significance.

The second problem was money. In my younger years, my life was pretty much lived day to day. I got paid on Friday, partied all night and Saturday night, and by Sunday morning, I was broke and struggling to figure out how I was going to make it to the next payday. I never had money to get a tattoo. Hell, I could barely scrape together cash to fix my POS car when it needed it. And it constantly needed it.

Time passed. I went to prison.

It doesn’t matter what for. That’s always the first question: “What was your crime?”

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), it wasn’t a sex offense or a child abuse case. It was a crime. A bad one. Worse than breaking open a vending machine and pocketing coins, but not as bad as what Jeffrey Dahmer did. I’ll leave it at that. Back to what this piece is originally about:

Funny enough (but not in a “funny, ha ha” kind of way), prison gives you a lot of free time. Time to think about the mistakes you made in life, but also to do all the things you never have time for in the hectic working world of a law-abiding citizen: get in shape, read lots of books, watch bad daytime television…

Tattoos are popular in prison. No matter where you go, there are always a couple of guys doing tattoos for money or as a way to barter for commissary or cigarettes. Some of the guys are talented artists, and some…not so much. I’ve seen really beautiful pieces of artwork done, and I’ve seen stuff that looked like a 5 year-old scribbled on someone’s back with a magic marker.

The trick is to research. It’s not uncommon to see a good tattoo on someone and ask, “Hey, man, you get that here? Who did it?” Referrals are common.

You find someone who has a semblance of artistic talent and then you watch them work. Why? To see if they truly know what they’re doing, or if that one good tattoo you saw was a fluke. Did they have one moment where the cosmos aligned and they were able to produce a great looking tattoo, but then everything else they did after came out badly? (Yes, I’ve seen it happen.)

You watch them work, and you watch to see if they work “clean,” i.e. do they reuse ink?

Ink, real tattoo ink, is hard to come by in prison. If guys can get it, they don’t want to waste it. So they’ll pour the unused ink, the same stuff they dipped the bloody needle into over and over, back into the bottle. And then, my friends, you’re at risk of some nasty shit. Hep C, HIV, etc.

The good artists in prison, the professional ones (as professional as an inmate tattoo artist can be), will dump the unused ink. They’ll also give you the needle and cylinder for the gun so you can clean it and keep it sanitary in case the session takes more than one sitting. Which it usually does.

A quick note about needles and tattoo guns in prison:

It’s all scavenged parts from other things. The gun is usually crafted from the inner workings of a cassette player, CD player, or beard trimmer. The needle is a sharpened pen spring or sharpened guitar string, fitted through the cut-off barrel of a pen.

It doesn’t work as well as a real tattoo gun. It’s slower, the needle isn’t as sharp, and the angle of rotation isn’t a smooth up-and-down, which means the needle is “picking” at the skin as it penetrates.

Most of my tats are real ink mixed with a supplement called “soot.” Soot, inside, is made by purchasing a can of hair grease from the commissary, fitting it with a wick, and then burning the can of grease like a candle. What’s left is a black, inky substance that looks and acts like real ink.

I’ve seen guys use all kinds of stuff inside as a substitute when they couldn’t get tattoo ink — ink from pens, ink from magic markers, paint, even melting down plastic chess pieces.  Yes, I’ve seen guys get tattooed with melted plastic. I’ve also seen guys get serious skin infections and blood poisoning from messing with some of that stuff.

As I said, most of my work is ink, but there’s some soot mixed in. I can’t tell which is which. But I was never crazy enough to try paint or melted plastic.

My first tat was the bat symbol on my left pec. It hurt a lot and bled like hell, and the second the needle hit my skin I thought, I will never do this again. The second he finished, I was already planning my next one. Tattoos are addictive like that.

The biggest one I had done inside was a tribal piece across the back of my shoulders and up my neck. The first session took ten hours, broken up for breaks for chow calls and standing counts. There were two more sessions after that for the artist to fill in shading and go over some areas he missed. On the outside, tattoo artists can use shading bars to fill in areas. We didn’t have that luxury in prison. It’s all single needle. And again, it hurts like hell.

Early on in my bit, I spoke with a prison counselor about my crime. After I described the circumstances and the events that led up to it, she said, “It sounds like you let the demon out.” That image stuck with me. It also got me thinking…

We all have a dark side. A demonic part to our soul created from pain, sadness, and trauma. It feeds on bitterness and anger, and rages to be let out at times. We (the non-psychopaths among us) strive to keep it locked up, asleep, fearing what will happen if we unlock its cage or if it gets loose.

That was where I went wrong that fateful night. I got tired of fighting it. I told the dark, evil part of me to go out and do what needed to be done. I was weak. I knew I could never let myself be weak again. I would always have to be strong and on my guard.

I had a picture in my head of a dark, devil-like person, features in shadow, locked in an old-time jail cell, all stone and iron bars, with its hand clutching one of the bars. It’s trying to push its way out, the bar slightly bending. I could feel the sheer force of will the demon is exuding. “Let me out,” it’s saying in a rage-filled voice.

I can’t. Not ever again.

I wanted it on my arm, some place where I would see it daily and be reminded that I have to always be strong. I described it to the guy I chose to do the tattoo. He nodded, understanding what I was describing. Perhaps he understood all too well.

He sketched the bars and the bricks. “Where’s the guy?” I asked. “Trust me,” he replied.

He put in the bars and tattooed the demon guy freehand. It took two sessions, probably five hours total. Other guys called it a “time piece,” a term that usually refers to a tattoo that signifies doing prison time. Tattoos that feature prison bars, clocks, or webbing on elbows, are usually “time pieces.”

But no, that’s not what this one was/is. It’s a constant reminder to me that I have to keep the dark side locked up. If I don’t, people might get hurt. People might die.

More time passed. I had the itch to get another one, something on my right arm.

Prison is a ceaseless stress test. You’re under constant siege from the staff and your fellow inmates. Anger flares at the slightest provocation. You never know what’s going to set someone off because you don’t know what the person has experienced in life, is experiencing right then. Did he get a letter from his wife that she’s divorcing him. Is his girlfriend moving out of state with the kids and marrying someone that wants to adopt his kids? Did his appeal get turned down, his parole denied?

Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking. Boo effin’ hoo, right?

I’m not saying this to try to elicit sympathy for people in prison. I don’t have any, so I don’t expect anyone else to have any. There are no true innocents in prison. I’d say the vast majority deserve to be there, and I say this from a position of being one of those people, and living side-by-side with them for a long time.

No, my point is, you never know what is going to set someone off in a violent fit of anger. It could take a lot, or it could be nothing. They could lose their temper at the slightest hint of a perceived insult. Or someone could take months of physical and verbal abuse and then have a psychotic break.

There are people inside who love to stir things up. They will egg someone on, pushing, pushing, pushing, until something gives. I once witnessed a guy get stabbed to death over a disagreement regarding a five dollar gambling debt. It wasn’t the money that sent his attacker on a murderous stabbing spree. It was the other guys at the card table urging it on until the disagreement turned violent.

Some people crack up in this kind of environment. Some shut down. The sociopaths and the psychopaths are fine. In fact, they’re in Heaven. They thrive on those conditions.

I was tempted to crack up, just lose it completely. I veered from thoughts of suicide to thoughts of unleashing a violent rage against those around me. The demon inside me would whisper, “Let me out. Let me take control. I’ll shove my thumbs into their eye sockets and sink my teeth into their throats. Think of the hot blood splashing across your face and how glorious it will be.”

Suicide or a psychotic break didn’t appeal to me. I had to shut down. Not let anything touch me. Forget about the world outside the fences.

One night, I had a vision of a man standing in the middle of a city street. The buildings around him are burning, flames shooting from the windows, smoke billowing out and up. He doesn’t notice…or care. His head down. He’s lighting a cigarette, hands cupping the flame. He’s in shadow, an outline almost, but the flame from lighting the cigarette illuminates his face a tiny bit.

The message is, the world is burning down around him and he doesn’t care. It doesn’t affect him. The world around him can’t touch him. That was what I needed to get by and finish the rest of my time. I had to become untouchable.

It was a different artist that would do this piece. The guy that did my demon in a jail cell had gone home. There was a kid doing good work. I approached him, described what I wanted. He asked for picture references.

You can usually find graphic novels around. Guys in prison love comic books. They’re easy to read. Lots of pictures and not too many words they don’t recognize.

I found pics of John Constantine, the Hellblazer. There are plenty of pics of him lighting a cigarette. In fact, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a comic where he doesn’t light up. Anyway…

The pics of him were a base. I didn’t want Constantine per se, but a shadowy representation of a guy lighting a cigarette. Constantine worked as a model for what I wanted.

The city around him was a different problem. The artist asked me: DC? New York? Chicago?

No, I didn’t want a recognizable city because that’s not what the image was about. It was about a feeling, not a memory of a physical place.

I found some comic book images of a city on fire. Again, the artist used it a model, but he added to it. He combined images, and added in some of his own.

This piece took longer to complete. Four sessions this time, ranging from ninety minutes to three hours. It came out really well and served me as a meditative image for the rest of my time inside.

My tats are all faded now, partly due to age and partly due to exposure to the sun. I think they’ve held up considering the conditions and makeshift equipment that produced them. I get asked about them occasionally, and usually I’m vague in my answers.

It feels good, cathartic in a way, to finally disclose where and how they came to be — especially the ones on my arms that hold such importance to me and symbolize not only a terrible point in my life, but my efforts to escape it and build myself into a stronger, and better, person.