My grandfather is like many of our grandfathers, I suppose. He is a loving, but quiet man, who spent our family gatherings sitting stoically in his easy chair, trying to watch an old western on TV, while his children and grandchildren carried on around him. Like many of his generation, he moved from the rural south to Michigan to find work in the factories that churned out Chevrolets and Buicks by the tens of thousands in the 50’s. In all respects he was as many of my friends grandfathers were, except for one. During his time in the Army, on leave in Japan from the front lines of the Korean war, he slipped away from the MP’s and sat for several hours, half drunk, while an old Japanese tattoo artist marked him forever with American Eagle on his chest, and a pinup girl on his forearm. While I know now that many soldiers and sailors received tattoos during WWII and the Korean War, the other veterans that I was around during my childhood were not among them. Only my grandfather was marked in such a way.
It was fascinating to me as a kid. I could not fathom how they did not seem to fade. I tried to copy him by drawing crude illustrations on my arms using ball point pen, only to find that they would smudge throughout the day, finally being erased at bath time. I didn’t understand how they got there. If pens were not the culprit, as I had learned through experimentation, then my seven year old mind was at a loss as to how else one would produce them. He never even really mentioned them. Even though he spent most of the summer lying in the sun, shirt off, trying to deepen a tan that already made him look less like the descendant of Irish immigrants that he was and more like an immigrant from South America who spent his life working from dawn ill dusk in a California field trying to make a living for his family. They were simply there, as if he were born sporting an Eagle and shield on his chest like some sort of miraculous birthmark.
While the mystery of the tattoos faded with age and education, my fascination with them did not. I would pour over tattoo magazines while I loitered in the bookstore of the local mall, waiting for my mother to finish trying on dresses in the next shop over. I would keep an eye out for other people with tattoos as I walked down the public beach on vacation, trying not to stare when I spotted someone with tattoos of their own. And, I would try to come up with some ideas for the tattoos that I would get once I came of age. I would do all of this despite my mother’s insistence that getting a tattoo was not the sort of thing that respectable people did. I would spend the time trying to sketch out ideas even though the media portrayed people with tattoos as the dregs of society. I would do all of this dreaming and sketching and scheming because I knew, despite my mother’s admonitions, and society’s scorn, that tattoos are an incredible, and ancient, art form that I wanted to take part in. What I did not know was that it would be many years before I managed to get a tattoo of my own.
I did not get my first tattoo until I was 30. While I had wanted one my whole life several things kept me from taking the plunge. The earliest opportunity was in college, the time when many people get inked for the first time. I went with a friend to dingy tattoo parlor in Kalamazoo my second year at college. It was my first foray out of the fantasy world of half-assed sketches and glossy magazines into the real environments were tattoos were actually done. While I was excited to finally see what went into getting one, the reality of what I encountered pushed my desire back a bit. The place in question turned out to be one of the worst examples of a fly by night tattoo operation that I have ever encountered. The artists were smug. They were obviously too used to tracing butterflies onto the hips of barely legal sorority girls for quick money to care about doing anything that could be considered art. The shop itself was dimly lit and it reeked of stale beer and smoke. All in all, it was a thoroughly uninviting place. But, my friend was determined to have his arm wrapped with a trendy tribal band, and I was his ride, so I sat in the lobby for two and a half hours while a disinterested, biker looking, tattoo “artist” marked him for life. I hope, for my friend’s sake that he continues to be happy with his tattoo these many years later, but I know that if I had given in to my own desire to have a tattoo at that age, without fully considering what it was that I was getting, I would be trying to find a real artist to correct and cover that early mistake today.
The second (and third, and fourth, and so on) chance I had to get a tattoo came during my own time in the Army. During my time at Fort Gordon, Georgia, after basic and during training for my military occupation, I had several friends that would venture into Augusta on the weekend, find the closest shop that they could, pick a tattoo off the wall, and have it done. Some guys got the trendy (at the time) tribal armband. Some got a vaguely patriotic design (usually a flag or eagle). And some got what passed for a traditional Japanese style dragon or tiger in Georgia. Some of these tattoos looked good, but most of them looked like shit.
My perceptions of the quality of these tattoos were reinforced by my friend and bunkmate Zack. Like me, he was a few years older than the 18 and 19 year olds we were surrounded by. Unlike me, he had several tattoos, mostly of skulls and skeletons. While these motifs were not what I was into, they were without a doubt of a much higher quality than the ones our friends would show up with after a weekend of freedom. We would look over these new markings, give the guy a halfhearted compliment, and then goof on them once they left the room. For me it wasn’t that the tattoos were of poor quality, many of them were not, but it was that the tattoos had no meaning at all. Why would you get barbwire around your arm? Why would you pay money for a dragon on your back? Why would you pick anything off the wall, on a whim, and have in carved into your body forevermore? It was during this time that I decided to put real though into my choice, so that when I did decide on a design, it would be something that had real meaning, and not be something that I would shrug my shoulders at and blame on youthful indiscretion in my later years.
After my time in the military, I bounced around a bit. I was unemployment for a while. I worked as a “mid-decade” census taker in my township for a few weeks. I even landed a pretty good job at the cable company, before I was laid off due to cut-backs. I had no real idea of where I was going, or how I was to get there. As much as I bitched and moaned about military service, it was comforting to have a purpose in life. I was, for better or worse, serving my country. If not for the protracted wars we found ourselves involved in (speaking both broadly as a country, and narrowly as an individual who spent a year in Iraq) I probably would have stayed in the Army, making a career out of it. But, the prospect of repeated deployments and possibility of violent death a half a world away made me reconsider. I exited military service after three days of “readjustment training”, half assed and half hearted classes on how to find a job in the civilian world, without a plan. Eventually I settled on going back to college to get a degree in accounting. Despite my assurances to my family that I had a plan, and despite my seeming confidence in that plan’s feasibility, I was flying blind still. It was the best option at the time, but I still had no overreaching plan about what I was to do with my life.
It was this feeling of being lost, and without direction that gave me the idea for what ended up being my first tattoo; a compass. I passed this decision off to my friends and family as being related to my love hiking (partly true) and my time in the military (not at all true) because to tell them what it really meant to me was a bit embarrassing. Who wants to tell their loved ones that the tattoo they were about to get was representative of the feeling that I was lost, and that I desperately wanted to find my way in the world again. This sort of sentiment may be tolerated in an 18 year old, but in someone fast approaching their thirtieth year, with a family to support, it may point to some sort of failure in character. To me though, it stood for hope. Hope that no matter how confused the path, or unclear the trail, there way a means by which one could find their way. Having that decided, I looked for examples in tattoo magazines and on old maps, finally settling on a compass rose taken from one of Magellan’s nautical charts as my starting point. I then searched the websites of the hundreds of tattoo shops in Michigan looking for the one that could turn my idea into something concrete. I settled on a small shop in Ann Arbor that I found quite accidentally after asking a girl in a store where she had received her tattoo.
When I met with the artist, I was immediately impressed not only with the quality of his work, but with his overall demeanor, and the demeanor of his staff. This was not the shady, dirty, fly by night tattoo shop that I had been dragged to while I was in college, but a clean, professional shop that put one at ease when you walked through the door. I discussed my ideas, scheduled my appointment, and left feeling like I had made the right decision. That feeling was confirmed a month later when I went back down to have the tattoo done. While different from the source material in many ways, the design that my artist came up with was exactly what I was looking for. It was a traditional take on the compass rose, but it still had enough variation from the norm to make it feel unique. The colors are black and red, and it sits on the inside of my left forearm, reminding me always that there is a way, even if that way is not clear.
