The Tattooed Poets Project: Martha Serpas

On this, our fourth day of the third annual Tattooed Poets Project, we are honored to have work from Martha Serpas.

Readers may wonder where we find all these tattooed poets. Most come our way by word of mouth, but a small handful, like in Martha's case, agree to participate after we send out e-mail inquiries, without even knowing if a poet is inked or not. Most poets don't even respond, a handful do, but are not tattooed, and once in a blue moon, we find a tattooed poet who is happy to participate.

Anyway, here's one of Martha's tattoos:

Martha explains:

This tattoo is a montage over 20 or so years in the making. First work, Willie [at Willie's Island Tattoos] on Staten Island; Dan [Williams at the Bridgeport Tattoo Shop] in Bridgeport, CT; Bonnie Jean in Yachats, OR at [Tattoo by Design]; and a guy in Houston I never should have let reline it. Bonnie Jean was is old school and taught me that tattooing is like coloring in a book: anybody can do it if the lines are really thick.

The tattoo’s a chronicle of a tumultuous time in my life. The wind/water symbol (my design) traversing the image was first. It felt like a spiritual emblem. The bird represents a goal of peace (brought it in from somewhere). The moliere/Celtic cross  (graphic artist friend, Carla Januska designed) is modeled after the one on the chapel at my divinity school and doubles as a setting sun. It is my graduation ring, of sorts. The feathery flame shapes (Bonnie Jean’s freehand) within the wings and tail came last—my attempt to soften up the image when my life became more tranquil.

I have a small tattoo on my ankle that precedes this one(s); a memorial to my best friend on my thigh; a reverse hurricane symbol on my thumb (post-Katrina); and a symbol of perichoresis (divine revolution) on my forearm. I’ve been told I look like a doodle pad. I get tattooed about every 5 years. If I ever become content with life, I’ll stop trying to achieve the ideal personal emblem. For now, I doodle.

•••••••

Martha also contributed the following poem which, she explained, "was inspired by a photograph on the cover of Tattoo."  One note, Martha adds, is that "Suzanne owned the shop in Ann Arbor where I got my first ankle tattoo: Creative Tattoo by Suzanne. Great T-shirt: Go forth and live as art. I heard she passed away: Her breast piece was amazing."

Tattoo

She knows being chosen means to choose herself

and seals upon her breasts the Sacred Heart—

a thorn-bound garnet against open lilies,

a pink-and-white ink triptych on her chest.

Every shadow, a creed professed by lines

from votive needles to her deepest cells.

Her body gives life to art, reflects the fade

of dying flesh, and honors God’s design.

No second thoughts, she thinks that pain

is easily a choice we make ourselves,

as is admiring her canvas skin

as it ages. Affirmed with words spelled

on a defiant ribbon across her chest,

her blazón: Even the blackest sheep are blessed.

            [Appeared in Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002)]

•••••••

Martha Serpas’s two collections of poetry are Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002) and The Dirty Side of the Storm (Norton, 2007). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Southwest Review, and in anthologies such as Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of Image and the Library of America’s American Religious Poems. A native of Bayou Lafourche in south Louisiana, she is involved in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and is a hospital trauma chaplain.

You can learn more about Martha and her writing at her website, http://www.marthaserpas.com/.

A sincere thanks to Martha for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Kristina's Labyrinthine Symbol of Hopi

A few weeks back, I met Kristina, after spotting the top of her tattoo peeking out from under her shirt and reaching toward her neck.

I was intrigued and asked her about it. She revealed it to be a much larger piece than I initially observed and explained that it is a Hopi symbol of mother-daughter unity that accompanies her on her spiritual journey through life.

From what I can gather, this is a variation on the symbol for Tapu'a, or Mother Earth, and the maze-like construction of the emblem represents one's journey through life.

She had this inked at a shop in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

Thanks to Kristina for sharing this tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Renee's Papal Insignia Challenges Her Beliefs

I met Renee in the Clark Street subway station in Brooklyn Heights recently, and we had a fascinating conversation.

We talked for a good bit, and actually spent more time time talking about her plans for new tattoos, as opposed to what she already had on her body. She has five tattoos, two of which she did herself. We ended up talking most about this one, on the middle finger of her right hand:


This is one of her self-inked tattoos which, she says, she did using "the prison method". This generally involves using a needle or a sharpened guitar string and dipping it in ink. Sometimes with, sometimes without, a jerry-rigged motor.

The design is based on the insignia of the Pope.

At the time that she did this, she felt a connection to the Catholic Church that was very strong. Religion was a "huge part of her childhood"

However, as anyone paying attention to the news recently is well aware, the Catholic Church has been under fire for quite some time due to its handling of internal matters regarding abuse among the clergy.

Renee finds that who she is now is "irreconcilable with the Catholic Church" and, as a result, she plans on having this finger tattoo covered up "as a statement" about her feelings and her conviction that this symbol is, in her words, "something I can't have anymore".

So today's post features a tattoo whose time is running out, which is not all that common here on the site. I have always maintained that the tattoos seen here aren't always the "best" in art, but rather, interesting encounters in New York with interesting people.

Thanks to Renee for being so forthcoming about her personal connection to tattooing, and for sharing this small, seemingly harmless tattoo, that carries with it such a weight, laden with meaning.

Karen's Colorful Ink Glows in More Ways than One

Autumn has not been good to us here on Tattoosday. Inkspotting has been, um, spotty, at best, and most of the work I have seen has been indoors and/or below ground.

On Tuesday, I glimpsed some color peeking out from a woman's sleeve as she walked south on Seventh Avenue.

When I stopped to talk to her, Karen was gracious, despite the chill in the air, and filled me in on the two pieces (yes, just like last Tat-twosday) on her right wrist:


Karen is a student at Fashion Institute of Technology and was inky of another sort, with smudges on her hands and arms from her projects. She is an artist specializing in textile surfaces, designing such things as wallpaper, tissue boxes, and other items requiring her craft. She cleaned some of the ink up from around her body art, enough so we could get a clearer shot of her tattoos.

The one on the left is the insignia from the Gunslinger's revolver featured on the covers of Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

This is referred to as the "Eld Sigul" insignia and stands for the Gunslinger. I'm sure fans of the series will correct me and/or expand on the topic should they find that explanation lacking.

Do note that we had a Dark Tower tattoo recently on these pages, here back in October.

What's noteworthy about this piece is the ink used has special qualities. Karen originally wanted a hot pink tattoo, but the shop (Skin Deep Tattoo) had just received a shipment of ink that illuminates under black light. I've not seen one of these in person, but have seen samples elsewhere in the blogosphere.

The other piece, on the right, is a "third eye" designed by the artist Alex Grey, who is renowned for his cover art for the band Tool:


In fact, this "third eye" piece is from the art of the Tool album Lateralus:




This, also, was worked up at Skin Deep. Karen believes that Rob was the tattoo artist for both pieces. The extreme close-up at the top of this post emphasizes how vivid the ink used in the piece is.

Karen has two other tattoos, but they were well-protected from the elements, and were not visible higher up on her arms.

I do thank her again for being so amenable to stopping and sharing her work with us here on Tattoosday!

Tattoos from the Blogosphere: More of Mat's Ink

Back in April, I posted an incredible back piece that was sent to me by a comrade in the blogosphere, Mat Giordano. Revisit it here. Totally worth it.

Shortly after sending me the elephant pictures, he sent me these, to add to the mix. I thought it was time to be a good blogger and share. Full disclosure: these are in Houston, photographed and sent by someone I've never met, but have spoken to on line.

Nonetheless, it's amazing ink, and Mat is a multimedia designer, so his work is pretty interesting.


So, what's with this flower? Here's an excerpt from our chat (edited and abbreviated):

Me: What's the flower?

Mat: Sort of a mutation of a hibiscus

unrealistic color scheme

but what was in my head;
I just didn't know it until I saw Travis' stencil.

Me: did you do the design or was it a collaborative effort with Travis [the artist]?

Mat: I never design my tattoos

just ideas

I realize my place as a designer

I'm not a tattoo artist

lots of designers make the mistake of designing their own tattoos and being very adamant about what the tattoo artist should do

instead of letting them fly at what they are best at

Me: Agreed

Mat: I say "I'd sort of like this"

and say "tattoo what you think belongs there".

This was a special one for me

Me: Why special?

Mat: It was the pink-to-red gradient of the hibiscus plants that I planted in the driveway of the first home I had with ... my little boy Jack

whose name you can see on my wrist at the end.

Every morning when I'd be leaving to go create things for a living,

I'd see it open in the driveway

one on each side

so past that, being in Houston now, it's nice to look at it and remember

I was there this past weekend and all those feelings came rushing back like a tidal wave

Me: The hibiscus (maybe all flowers) can carry such emotional weight as symbols of places...I grew up in Hawai'i where the hibiscus is the state flower and to me it just represents home

Mat: Wow, so you can sort of relate how I feel about the relations of a flower symbolizing comforts of home

or symbols of anything that carry emotional weight, I suppose

Me: Absolutely, especially when they are so significant to a specific time and place.

As you can see, interesting discussion about the emotional weight behind tattoos as symbols of not only the abstract (the idea of 'home'), but of concrete places as well.

Later on, Mat elaborated : "I couldn't really understand, beyond the fact that Travis is a great friend of mine, why my mind immediately wanted those colors [in the hibiscus] he predetermined right before we started, until I realized the weight of what they meant in my subconscious, which fortunately made its way through a pretty muddy network to my conscious so I could relay it to the artist. Thankfully, Travis can read me pretty well, in turn cutting plenty of my mindless stares and utters out of the time frame."

Mat has communicated about tattoos with me on a level more cereberally than anyone I have met since Tattoosday began. He's above and beyond the "I-liked-the-art-on-the-wall" mentality, which is fine for many people.

Below is a shot of Travis Stanley, the artist at 713 Tattoo Parlour, in Houston, Texas, working on Mat's flower tattoo.

And finally, a cool shot of Mat's wrists:


Jack, as mentioned above, is his son. The name was inked by Marc da Sharc at I-Drive Tattoo in Orlando, Florida. Marc da Sharc also did the other piece, but at the aforementioned 713 Tattoo Parlour. For those unfamiliar with the design, it is the symbol for infinity. Mat specifically wanted to clarify that the placement of that symbol on his wrist "by no means was a decision based on how long he thinks he'll be around".

Thanks again to Mat for sharing his tattoos here!

Tattoos I Know: Janet's Tat Trick

When I moved to New York in 1997, one of the first friends I made at work was Janet Loder (now Loder-Berthelon). Even though Janet left for greener pastures almost five years ago, we still talk and occasionally get together for lunch or a social jumble of offspring (i.e. our kids play together). Last Thursday, we met at lunch and Janet let me take some hasty shots in the sunshine of her three tattoos. All pictures were snapped on the steps of the New York Public Library, between Patience and Fortitude.

The first of Janet's tattoos was inked in Buffalo, New York when she was 19 or 20, approximately 20 years ago:


This pachyderm has been touched up twice in the twenty years or so since first decorating Janet's right shoulder blade (aka the posterior scapula). It was the first tattoo I saw on Janet, back in 1997 when tattoos were not as common as they are today. Janet has always loved elephants, and has a few collected, the first of which was given to her as a child by her much-beloved Aunt Claire, for whom her daughter is named.

Janet's love of elephants (and hence her tattoo) stems from their being majestic creatures that are matriarchal and intelligent. They are social beings that even mourn for their dead.

Janet's second tattoo was inked four or five years back at her friend Michelle's bachelorette party:

This simple yin and yang symbol, inscribed on the left side of her lower back, was added in the East Village, we're guessing at Andromeda Tattoos Studios. It is a symbol, for Janet, of her striving for balance in her life.

Her third and last (but not final) tattoo was also done at Andromeda, and is on the right side of Janet's lower back:


Janet is particularly proud of this one and thinks it has the best story of her three tattoos. I would agree. She had this done in 2004 when she had been traveling a lot on business between New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She began dating a guy in L.A. and was seeing him whenever she flew into town for work. As her California work projects came to a close, their relationship reached a crossroads, and there was discussion and soul-searching over the matter of relocation. He didn't want to leave L.A. Janet was born and raised in Buffalo and is a New Yorker through and through. I can't imagine her living in L.A. And neither could she.

As one might guess, her decision was solidified when she went and had this tattoo done which, "sealed the deal not to move to L.A." Once branded, she mused, there was no way she was leaving New York.

The rest is history.

Thanks to Janet for sharing her tattoos and accompanying stories! You know a friend is true when they'll let you blog about their tattoos!