Related Posts:

• Maakies:
  Standup
• Maakies:
  Fist Fast
• MAAKIES:
  Shaving Cut
• MAAKIES:
  Cow Gum
• MAAKIES:
  Time Travel

First up is Stephanie Tamez, one of New York’s most sought after tattoo artists. Tamez’s eclectic style, which is rooted in Old World art, has attracted the attention of A-list clients from rock stars to novelists. Her incredible font and text work, which draws on her background in graphic design, has been featured in two books on typographical tattoos. We recently had a chance to meet at Saved Tattoo, the bustling shop Tamez co-owns with Scott Campbell, and in her private art studio, where she’s been painting and exploring new modes of self-expression.

***

Stephanie Tamez, Tattoo Artist & Painter
Listen to the profile by clicking on the play button below.

***

Saved Tattoo

Tamez’s first tattoo

Virgin Mary, back piece

Painting-in-progress

***

Photographs by Allyson McCabe, except for “Virgin Mary, back piece,” courtesy of Stephanie Tamez.

Related Posts:

• ALBUM #5, AUDIO PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS AT WORK: Ariel Schrag
• ALBUM #4, AUDIO PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS AT WORK: Lea Thau
• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #3, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Rosie Schaap
• ALBUM #2: Angela Jimenez

The New Yorker has compiled a series of photographs of women in the early to mid 20^th century baring their tattoos. Many of them were pioneering tattoo artists themselves or worked as fair and circus attractions.

Related Posts:

• Thanks, Page Turner!
• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• Thoughts on Gender from A “Manic Depressive Nightmare Girl”
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• Radioactive Mongolian Dinosaurs and the People Who Love Them

My husband Ben loves the tattoos I already have because they were part of the landscape of my body before he arrived; they’re familiar to him now like old friends. Sometimes at night, when I peel off my shirt to put on pajamas, he leans over without warning to plant a kiss on the sun or the dove in the center of my back, or the little stick-figure girl at my waistline—just, he tells me, to say hello. At our wedding in 2009, it was me who kept tugging up my V-backed dress to cover the sun, which was peeking out, and Ben who tugged it back down, murmuring that the members of his conservative Christian family loved me anyway; a tattoo wouldn’t change that. Besides, we were marrying at his grandfather’s pond, not a church, on a muggy August evening, and I was barefoot, and my best friends had just read a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi and scripture from the Apocrypha. “They’re already scandalized,” he breathed into my ear, grinning.

Now, whenever I bring up the subject of the next tattoo—my fourth and, I swear to him, my last—Ben goes all quiet and sad-eyed and painfully inarticulate, and I seethe in confusion. It has taken a few of these non-conversations for me to draw out his discomfort: he claims it’s not the tattoo itself but the act of tattooing, some stranger’s hands on my skin, the needle and ink, the bloody process. That’s understandable. Tattooing is art, and it’s mutilation—creation through destruction.

My husband is a farmer and an agricultural engineer, tall and lanky, his arms and the back of his neck browned by the sun, his hands large and rough. In his scuffed work boots and greasy jeans, with a Leatherman strapped to his belt and a Bluetooth in his left ear, he looks utterly capable: nothin’ broke that he can’t fix. The engineers he works with, most of whom spend their days behind desks, joke that he’s the company’s resident hero. But Ben is also a sensitive man, and deeply kind, and in this moment, stripped of his hero gear, in athletic shorts and a white undershirt, barefoot and hunched over our kitchen table, he seems small, vulnerable, more like the thin-armed farm boy I first met in high school. He brushes his mop of dark curls off his forehead with his thumb and looks at me, tears trembling at the corner of his wide brown eyes. “I know it’s your body,” he says finally, “but it hurts me to think of someone hurting you.”

His earnestness is sweet. It ought to break my heart. Instead, I feel guilty and annoyed.

“Come on, Ben,” I say with a sigh. “How do you think I got those other tattoos?”

***

It started, of course, with a wound. I was barely twenty-one, recovering from an emotionally violent breakup with a young man I’d loved since I was sixteen, first as a best friend and later as a lover. I’d invested enormous intellectual, emotional, and physical energy in that relationship, my first, and had gradually wrapped my sense of self around its success or failure. Unsurprisingly, when the relationship collapsed, so did I. Exhausted, disoriented, a little crazy, and very angry, I pawed through the rubble. I wanted my body back. I wanted myself back.

So I took up running, adding miles and shedding pounds, forcing myself forward and whittling away at what felt like weakness. I ate less, then very little. My body grew lean and hard, more angular, less welcoming. I dreadlocked my thick, silky brown hair, so fingers couldn’t touch or tangle there anymore.

I was groping for ways to heal myself and move on. Like most creative people, though, my instinct is to remember. Whether we want to or not, we return to our memories again and again, picking at them like scabs, keeping the wounds open until we can find some meaning there. We obsess over the right words, pictures, and gestures to express it. We have to make something of our experiences. Then we can move on.

Two months later, with a broad-toothed comb and two bottles of conditioner, I untangled my locks and got my first tattoo instead:

a tiny stick girl, lifted from a painting I admired by artist Chico Fejardo-Heflin. She’s perched on a scribble of grass, bending to reach for a star that’s fallen to the ground. She has pigtails and a little purple triangle for a skirt. Beneath her feet, I scrawled the word “barefoot,” in reference to a Rumi poem I loved: I want to be where your bare foot walks / because maybe before you step, you’ll look at the ground. / I want that blessing. To me, it suggested courage in vulnerability, and despite the risks, I wanted that back too.

My good friend Corby, a PhD student and former youth pastor who has buzzed hair and her own piercings and tattoos, took me to Ground Zero, her favorite parlor in Muncie. With trembling hands, I slid my sketch across the counter to a young artist named Nate. Nate’s forearms were inked in images of Americana, like busty pinups and anchors; black script crawled up his neck. The waiting area of Ground Zero itself, where we stood, was painted black and covered floor to ceiling in designs: eagles and snakes, menacing winged creatures, and naked pouting women. Nate held up the sheet of paper with my little stick girl and peered at her. “This is it?” he mumbled. I nodded. “Where?” he asked, and I pointed to the left side of my back, just at my waistline. He scratched behind his ear. “’K.”

He led Corby and me into a back room, spare and sparklingly clean, and I straddled a chair with my shirt hiked high and my pants tugged dangerously low, exposing the long white expanse of my back, my flesh, and, it seemed, my personality, my heart in the form of a small scribble, bared for a stranger with a needle and ink. I sucked in my breath as Nate’s needle dug into my skin. I was paying a man to cause me pain.

Nate didn’t say much. He worked quickly, wiping away blood and excess ink as he went. I gritted my teeth against the bite and scrawl of the needle, but it didn’t hurt as badly as I’d imagined, and when I finally peered over my shoulder at the fresh tattoo—raw, red, still bloody, humming with pain and hot to the touch—I grinned at what I saw.

 ***

Over the next two years, I drifted through a series of casual romances. There were coffee dates and movie marathons, drowsy late-night conversations about music and travel, theology and social justice. There was also bad kissing and occasional melancholy sex.  There was intimacy without vulnerability and action without intent. I washed up on the shore of one relationship and, soon after, washed away. When Ben and I reunited during our senior year of college, it was because my grandfather, who was losing his life but not his sense of adventure to cancer, called me to ask if I would drive his Ford station wagon across the country to his daughter in Washington. “Take a road trip,” he said, the last bit of ornery still there in his scratchy voice. “And take a friend.” By the time we reached Washougal, Ben and I were holding each other like life rafts.

I got two more tattoos the week before graduation. A sun, blocky and childlike. A dove with multicolored wings, underscored with the word “hope,” a fragment of Pablo Neruda’s “The Flight”: From the birds I learned / passionate hope / the certainty and truth of flight. Both images were adapted from that same Fejardo-Heflin painting. Both spoke to the idealism and anticipation of that moment, my life aloft and entirely possible. And, like the original stick girl, both scarred. Cat scratches and skinned knees, Exacto knives and hot irons, even rashes—I’ve always scarred quickly and easily. Wounds stay in my flesh like love notes scrawled in wet cement. I found comfort in the tattoo scars, the symbolism in their simple design. They anchored me in my sense of who I was and who I wanted to be as I grew up: someone uncomplicated, hopeful, both brave and vulnerable, the rescuer, the rescued. At lost moments, I would reach around and trace my fingers over the raised skin slowly, mindfully, as though I were walking a labryinth back to myself.

*** 

Ben didn’t exactly ask me to marry him. We asked each other, then sat in my parents’ backyard, foreheads pressed together, trembling and making plans. My journal entry from that day is an ink and pencil drawing of a tree with a girl climbing out on a limb. I’m getting married is all it says.

My father officiated the brief, quiet service in front of a tiny crowd of about thirty family members and close friends, beside a small pond at the edge of the woods just before sunset. To Ben and me, this was sacred space. It was where we had spent summer and fall fishing with his little brothers, where we met late at night after I’d taught class and he’d harvested corn, where we got quiet or dreamed, where what we were together changed. Neither one of us was particularly religious, but we were hopeful. The pond was the kind of place that made it easy to believe. Someone set up folding chairs and lit tiki torches, a close friend played Bach on her cello, and we sang the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”: Here I raise my ebenezer. Hither by Thy help I come. An ebenezer is a pile of stones, my father explained then. It’s an altar—in Hebrew, even haazer, meaning “stone of help.” It’s what the prophet Samuel built after God gave Israel victory over an enemy army. Yahweh roared down on the advancing Phillistines, scattering them so the Israelites could strike back, and then Samuel rolled a stone to that place and said, “Remember. God helped us here.” It’s what we do at a wedding too, my father said: we pause and raise a little pile of words and gestures, however inadequate, to a moment when by grace, our lives change—we change—for the better.

***

It’s a long time before we talk tattoos again. The subject is littered now with the broken bits of past conversations. Tonight, though, my husband is packing a bag for a business trip to Nebraska. I’m folding newly washed clothes. Our conversation is light, teasing; we’re dancing around the loneliness of the next few days. I toss him a fistful of the tall white socks he wears under his work boots, most of them worn and cherished to Velveteen Rabbit holeyness. Unless his entire big toe is hanging out, Ben refuses to buy new socks. I have married a man afraid of change.

Then, stuffing a stack of shirts into his duffel, he says, “I think I’m getting more comfortable with the idea of you getting a tattoo.”

And I hear, I think you should get your tattoo.

“Yeah?” I say. My heart thumps merrily, and I hand him a pair of boxers.

“Yeah.” He pauses. “I just wouldn’t want to be there when you do.”

So early the next morning, after I kiss and rekiss him goodbye, after I wave from the driveway until his car turns the corner at the end of our street, after I go for a run and finish the dishes and stand absently chewing my nails while the coffee finishes brewing, I schedule an appointment at a parlor in Peoria called Freedom Ink. I spend most of the morning at the kitchen table working up a full sketch of the tattoo I’ve imagined for two years, a mash-up of the Fejardo-Heflin painting, my own drawing, and bits of cherished texts: a tall, bendy tree blooming with new leaves and tiny stars; a stick-figure boy in the lowest branches, on tiptoe, reaching for a star; the words “wishful thinking,” taken from a Frederick Buechner book of the same name, scrawled just above the boy’s head; and the words “renew thyself,” a nod to Thoreau’s Walden, looping along the trunk of the tree. Renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again.

I sketch the tree with its boy into the space beside a little girl, under a sun and a dove—and there it is, my ebenezer. My humble pile of words and pictures.

That afternoon, I park my beat-up Buick in front of Freedom Ink, a tiny studio tucked between a record shop and an insurance agent. My bare thighs peel away from the leather seats with a sucking sound as I step out of the car, clutching my sketch with sweaty hands, trying to breathe deeply in the soggy heat of an Illinois summer. I’m wearing old shorts and a loose tank top I can tuck into the lining of my bra.

A slouchy hipster named Zach meets me at the door. He’s dressed in dark skinny jeans, a black T-shirt, and a newsboy cap turned just to the right. His thin arms are sleeved with tattoos. His hands are large, his fingers strangely slim and delicate.

“Here for an appointment?” Zach squints at me from behind thick black glasses, and I flash back to Nate at Ground Zero, then to Kyle at The Black Rose, and feel the adrenaline, familiar now, begin to thump through my veins. Four years and three tattoos behind me, and still my hands shake as I pass my artwork to Zach.

“1:30,” I say, and shrug, crossing my arms to steady my trembling.

Zach peers at the paper, steps behind a counter and does a little tapping on a computer. “Okay,” he says, adjusting his glasses. He points me to a shiny brown vinyl couch where I can wait. I perch on the edge of the couch, my knees bouncing, and flip through albums of flash fanned across a coffee table: the standard sailors and Betty Boops and eagles. Also, a set of infant footprints. Eric Carle’s Hungry Caterpillar. Every wall in the parlor is flooded with flash. The whole aesthetic of this place—simple, clean, cartoonish—calms me. Never mind that I’ve willfully entered a house of pain; I’m comforted by the thought that here, people seem equally devoted to beauty and memory.

Soon, Zach calls me to the front corner of the studio. Straddling the chair, I lift my tank top, make small talk, and ask cheerfully nosy questions about his career. Zach wipes my back with a clean, moist towel and arranges the template. As he peels the paper away from my skin, I wonder what Ben’s doing just now, and suddenly, I’m dizzy with loneliness. Then the needle hums to life, and I grip the back of the chair and surrender.

 ***

When he calls, I’m standing in my underwear before our bedroom mirror, struggling to apply hemp balm to my back. The inked skin has scabbed over, edged in tender pink. Ben’s heading east, crossing through Iowa. He’s tired, but I can hear a boyish smile tickling the edge of his voice. Five more hours on the road. He’ll be home this evening.

I’ve saved my suprise for two days, but now I can’t wait. “Guess what I did?” I blurt, giddy.

“What’s that?” he says.

“I got my tattoo.”

The yawning silence that follows seems to suck all the oxygen from the room.

That night, Ben heaves himself up the stairs and lowers his duffel bag to our bedroom floor. I hover while he does everything slowly: unlaces his workboots, strips his socks, pulls his polo over his head. He won’t look at me. Finally, he asks, “Can I see it?” I practically rip off my shirt. He sits on the bed next to me and touches my back with his fingertips, lightly tracing the scabs, following the tree branches, lingering on the boy. Then my husband covers his face with his hands, lies down, and wails.

***

I pace the house. I wash our cheap, chipped dishes over and over, taking deep breaths. I’ve hurt him, but how? A shrill, tiny voice inside says the man is angry because I didn’t ask permission; a sane, quiet voice says my husband the hero can’t see beauty in a wound I chose, a broken thing he can’t fix. Now I’m terribly, indelibly changed, yet somehow the same—same troubling past, same dark instincts. Maybe he married me to fix me. Maybe this self-mutilation means I’m still broken.

Hours later, I brush my teeth and creep into bed. Ben sits up. He shuffles to the bathroom and returns with my bottle of fancy lotion, the kind that boasts healing Dead Sea minerals and comes from a kiosk in the mall. My mother bought it for me one ferociously cold winter when my hands cracked and bled. After a few days, the skin did heal. I still use the lotion on my wind-worn knuckles sparingly, one fingerful at a time.

“Please,” Ben croaks, then clears his throat, “lie on your stomach.” His brown eyes are red-rimmed and dull with fatigue. I consider refusing. I want to tell him to get over whatever wound he thinks I’ve inflicted, and quickly, but because his chin quivers, I do as he asks. He lifts my T-shirt and squirts fat ribbons of cold lotion across my scabby tattoo, and I stiffen.

“What are you doing?” I mumble into the pillow. It’s a long moment before he answers, longer still before he touches me.

Then my husband lays his fingertips against my skin and begins to lotion the tattoo gently, in small careful circles. “Making friends,” he says.

Ben lotions my back every night for weeks to come with a kind of ritual, obedient quiet. It’s an act of reconciliation, but even as he tries to make peace with what he can’t change, he’s changing. And changing me, changing my tattoo. Sometimes wishing, Beuchner said, is the wings the truth comes in on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it. I can’t explain why we get grace even when we don’t want it. I do know we should submit to it whether we deserve it or not. Two years ago, when I drew a girl going out on a limb, I didn’t think much about the boy who’d be climbing out there with her, risking his neck too, reaching. And Rumi’s poem isn’t about a barefoot narrator, vulnerable and open to experience. It’s about a barefoot, beloved friend whom Rumi asks to go before him so that he can follow without fear. Because maybe before you step, you’ll look at the ground. I want that blessing— vulnerability as sacrifice. We help ourselves and each other in ways that make sense to us. My husband lotions the tree and the little boy and the stars long after their scabs have fallen away and my skin has renewed itself again and again and, I hope, forever again.

***

Listen to Sarah read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Annie Daly.

Related Posts:

• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• History of Tattoos
• Already Gone
• Inked Up Librarians

“Not yet,” I said, changing lanes somewhere on I-40 West.

“How have you avoided it for this long?” she asked as we whizzed past the vast gas-station-dotted nothingness of the American Southwest at night.

I thought about it a moment. Rusty and I had been doing it for two weeks, so it was actually rather impressive that I had hidden my butt from him this whole time. Specifically, the tattoo on my butt: my ex’s whole name drawn into the Aerosmith wings, occupying the entire left cheek. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but now, less than a year later, I did not respect or love either Aerosmith, who had begun to resemble their own groupies, or the person whose name was Xavier Roberts-ing my butt, who, I might add, had gotten my name in Metallica font over his heart.

I considered how big the tattoo was and finally answered, “I think Rusty is just really inattentive.”

“So Rusty is rusty?” This seemed like a pretty accurate assessment. Laura worked with both of us at the record store, so she was as good a judge as any. Laura had also been the one to tell me about the accident.

“Do you know that Rusty fell into the subway?” she’d whispered while we put away a shipment of metal T-shirts at our job the month before.

“What?”

“Yeah, dude,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Twice. The second time, he was dragged through the tunnel until the train came to a stop.”

“Whoa,” I whispered back, hanging up a Gorgoroth shirt of a bloody pentagram.

“Yeah. He had to learn to walk again and everything. He said it’s all scar tissue on his left side.”

We both looked at Rusty where he sat at the counter, angrily cataloguing 45s. He only really communicated by arguing about black metal bands with the tourists who flooded the store on weekends, or fighting with me and Laura in that viper’s-nest-of-elitism way that dudes who work at record stores are wont to do. He was kind of muppety and had a red beard, like Beaker if he were into Nordic church-burning music. That wasn’t usually my thing, but after moving home from a soul-crushing ass-tattoo sort of break-up, I wasn’t exactly sure what my “thing” even was anymore. As my best friend, Laura probably should have known that there was no greater incentive for me to get someone’s clothes off than to tell me they were covered in 40% scar tissue.

We made out a couple of days later.

***

The car slowed down through a work zone in Arizona, and Mo dug for the map under my seat.

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” she piped up from the back. “Your new boyfriend hasn’t seen your Aerosmith butt yet?”

“No. It’s kind of miraculous. And he isn’t my boyfriend.”

“But hasn’t he said I love you?” Laura pointed out.

“Yes,” I said. “Twice.”

Ali put down the map. “What did you say when he said he loved you?”

“I said thank you.”

“You’re his first girlfriend since the accident,” Laura said. “This is not going to end well.”

“I’m not his girlfriend. He hasn’t even seen my butt.”

We drove on through the desert, past orange construction barrels lit up under blinding work lights. Laura turned up the radio, and I thought about my butt. I had gotten it tattooed in the same spot Cher had her Greg Allman rose, but ironic soft-rock chic didn’t seem like a good reason to carry an indelible reminder of failure until I died. I had an appointment for a cover-up when I got back from this trip, but I was still unsure of what would take its place. I felt confident inspiration would find me. Road trips are good for that sort of thing.

We were on our way to California for me to do a big reading at the San Francisco Public Library. I had moved back home with no money, but I knew I had to make this trip.

There was another reason for the journey: the gravitational pull of destiny. Another friend had pointed out that the Eagles, a band I hated, were always playing wherever I was. At first I didn’t want to believe it, but the theory held up over time. Whenever I started the car or walked into a grocery store, “Hotel California” was there, singing out about its dark desert highway. When the Aerosmith logo was being seared into my butt, “Take It to the Limit” fuzzed from a little boombox in the tattoo parlor. And when it was New Year’s Eve and I decided to leave my boyfriend in the nowhere town I had moved to, I stopped somewhere in Maryland at midnight, turned on the radio, and caught the last two minutes of “Heartache Tonight.”

When I was planning our route to San Francisco, I saw that we would pass through Winslow, Arizona, the sleepy Route 66 town mentioned in “Take It Easy,” as in, “Standin’ on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.” I Googled a little deeper and found that this town featured something called Standin’ On the Corner Park, which had both a mural of the girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford and a bronze statue of Don Henley.

Surely, this was no coincidence. This was fate. I had survived, and now the radio was raining supernatural coincidences like George Bailey ringing a bell and giving out wings in my new wonderful life.

I had been covering every available shift at the record store to pay for the gas to San Francisco. The stars had also aligned so that I could pick up Laura and my two other best friends in their respective states on the way. We had two and a half days to drive 3,000 miles and three days to drive back home. Laura and I both had to work that Sunday, but we figured out that with time-zone changes and by only stopping for gas, we could make it to San Francisco exactly three hours before the reading. We hopped in the car after work on Sunday night, tailed by a drunken Rusty, who blurted out his second I Love You of the week before I got in the car. He said it the way you would tell a waiter that a restaurant toilet is clogged: a short burst of embarrassment with no eye contact, followed by stumbling away in a fast and undignified manner. “Eagles suck!” he slurred into the night as we drove past.

“He’s going to freak out on you when you dump him,” Laura said as she buckled her seatbelt. We picked up Ali in Philadelphia and filled her in on our current dating mistakes on the drive to get Mo in Charlotte. My friendship with Mo was one of the few good things to come out of the butt-tattoo relationship. The other good things were these lessons:

1) Failure can’t kill you if you don’t let it.

2) Surviving remarkable failure will give you a magnificent, fireproof Teflon exoskeleton that will make you unstoppable and let you plow through life like Mario high on starpower. At least until the next remarkable failure.

3) If a tattoo artist tells you something is the kiss of death, listen to them.

I took a sip of coffee, accelerating the car while bugs turned to vapor on the windshield. Ahead, I saw the exit sign we had been waiting for. “Dudes! Winslow! We’re almost there!”

Laura felt around in nest of chip bags on the floor and located the Eagles greatest hits album I had spent months listening to, like a schizophrenic looking for clues in SRO wallpaper. “Got it!” she said, gently inserting it into the stereo.

“Track nine!” I commanded, and took the exit. The frontage road led us into a town lit by streetlights in soft orange, the parked cars and houses glowing like a thirteen-year-old experimenting with self-tanner. At this point, I had no directions to go by, just instinct. I assumed that Standin’ On the Corner Park would be at the center of Winslow, a desert piazza of ’70s soft rock much celebrated by the townsfolk. Even though it was 11:00 PM on a Tuesday, I imagined it would be full of long-haired dudes teaching each other the ins and outs of acoustic guitar. Equally long-haired ladies would probably be lying out on blankets at the feet of the bronze Don Henley, braiding each other’s locks and looking dotingly at their boyfriends. Winslow was a town that knew how to take it easy, a lesson we could all learn.

“Where the hell is this place?” I said, hitting the repeat button to hear “Take It Easy” a third time. Winslow was a town under construction with a lot of one-way streets.

“Hey,” Laura pointed. “There’s a Sonic that’s open. Maybe we can ask directions.”

“Good thinking,” I said, trying to stay motivated. I drove toward the green neon of 24-hour fast food, taking note of a man in a seasonally inappropriate puffy coat walking in the middle of the street. He was strutting with purpose. More lessons. Do everything with purpose.

I left the car idling and got out to ask the cashier where the park was. “Excuse me. Um, I’m looking for Standin’ On the Corner Park. Do you happen to know where that is?” I felt strangely anxious. At any second, this could easily turn into the set-up for a Rob Zombie movie.

“That got a statue?” she said.

“Um, yes. Of Don Henley.” I smiled, overcompensating for my lack of direction.

“You gotta go back down where you came and make a left on Second.”

I thanked her and ran back to the car. “We’re hot on the trail!” I said to my three friends, who were listening to their fifth rotation of “Take It Easy.” Excitement was still in the air. Everyone looked out their windows, squinting at street signs, eager for the left we had to take.

Laura saw it first.

“There! On the corner!”

We all turned at the same time, and there, on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, in plain sight on a Tuesday at 11:40 PM, lit by streetlights and a neon bank sign, the determined man in the black puffy coat we had seen on the drive to the Sonic was giving some other dude a blowjob. With purpose.

“THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS ON THE CORNER IN WINSLOW, ARIZONA!” I was beyond elated. Everyone else was screaming.

“Hey!” Ali pointed to a street sign. “There’s Second!”

I turned left, toward destiny, toward my future, toward the empty public park and the bronze statue of Don Henley that we all took turns pretending to give blowjobs to. Then we hopped back in the car toward our second destiny, our continued future. And as the sun came up over California, I realized that an eagle would cover a set of Aerosmith wings quite nicely.

Related Posts:

• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• The Rumpus Interview with Ted Travelstead
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• Happy Groundhog Day!
• History of Tattoos

Each tattoo’s origin is explained in detail and shed light on projects such as Brand Yourself A Librarian, which aims to unite prideful librarians. Others depict superhero librarians, such as a librarian who moonlights as a Wonderwoman style crime fighter. Regardless of design, each piece of ink champions a passion for reading.

See the whole catalogue here.

Related Posts:

• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• History of Tattoos
• The Stone of Help
• Already Gone

Related Posts:

• Give the Gift of Sugar!
• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• History of Tattoos
• The Stone of Help

Related Posts:

• Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
• Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010

Alex: So tell me that Viking tattoo story again.

Lucinda: Back when I was a parole officer, my ex-husband went to a bar with his volleyball team and karaoked onstage with a guy who had a Viking tattoo on his forehead – the helmet, the horns; everything. He told me about it; and I got hysterical, telling him, “Oh my God, that guy’s on my caseload.” It’s a white supremacy prison gang tattoo. He was not allowed to be in a bar.

Alex: You used secondhand info to put him back in jail?

Lucinda: No, we did an alcohol test the next day. He wasn’t supposed to be drinking because he had a commitment offense.

Alex: When I visited a tattoo removal clinic one time, I saw the pain ex-cons and or ex-gang-bangers went through to get rid of really stupid tattoos. Do you feel some sympathy toward some of your clients?

Lucinda: My experience has been that all of them level out in their mid- to late forties. When someone’s a parolee, it’s not like the first time they’re in the system; they all have long rap sheets. Some people think they’re scumbags, cockroaches, dirtbags. I don’t think like that. I’ve seen so many people outgrow the behavior; they’re winding down.

Alex: How do you cope with the stress?

Lucinda: There’s a lot of gallows humor that goes along with the job. In the field as a parole officer, I remember getting impressed with crazy crimes. One guy got a violation after drinking in a garage – these teenage boys were being cocky and harassing him. He dragged one teenage boy into the garage and put his head in a vice, and the neighbors intervened.

When he got out of prison and went on parole, I met with him. I shook my finger and said, “Everybody wants to put a teenager’s head in a vice, but you’re not supposed to act on it.”

Alex: How do you view your career?

Lucinda: I’m in it for the long haul. I’m not doing the stuff I used to do as a parole officer: drug testing, knocking on doors, etc. I do investigations on lifer inmates, specifically battered women syndrome. I check out their claims that their crimes were a result of domestic violence experiences. If true, it can be used as a mitigating factor in parole hearings.

Alex: I have a friend who gives pregnant inmates health assistance. What’s your interaction with prisoners who are also mothers?

Lucinda: As an investigator of battered women syndrome, I see a lot of mothers. I can see being in prison affects women really badly.  They’re lifers; their children are going to be raised by someone else. The women usually don’t press for communication. It’s a little sad; but I think when you have a lifer mom, it’s better to be situated with a new family.  As part of the investigations I often have to talk to kids.  They’re pretty bitter toward their moms.

Alex: How’s the roller derby team going?

Lucinda: I made it into the training program in July.

Alex: When’s the first meet? Is it called a meet?

Lucinda: It’s called a bout (laughs).

Alex: Do you have to tell them what you do for a living?

Lucinda: I don’t want to say what I do – I just said on the application that I’m an investigator. The crowd for the Sac City Rollers league is mixed. Some have purple hair, hipsters, but some are rough looking.

Related Posts:

• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• History of Tattoos
• The Stone of Help
• Already Gone

Tattoo locations (and what they say about you).

Hey, climate change isn’t all that bad; sometimes it creates rad crystals!

The world is filled with amazing things that I had no idea existed, like the hummingbird hawk moth. Way to go nature!

Pictures of things that belonged to William S Burroughs.

Related Posts:

• My Imaginary Bunker
• Maakies:
  Something Bad
• ALBUM #1: Stephanie Tamez
• History of Tattoos
• The Stone of Help