When I was a little kid, I’m talking super little… I watched a movie called Papillon starring Steve McQueen as Henri “Papillon.”
Steve McQueen’s character gives a tattoo to a guy while laying low on an island in the movie, and I immediately new I wanted to do that.
I’m a tiny tyke, and I did some hand pokes… Um, trouble I did get for that.
(The tiny one I did on myself still exists)
Years went by, and the need stuck. (see what I did there?)
I met this cat named Greg Irons when I was about to hit my teens. He was the bomb. Made wicked comics.
My kinda guy, coulda been a relative with his attitude, a weird blend of hippie and biker vibe, which was kinda how I was in hindsight mentally, though a child of that generation, rather than part of it. He influenced me a lot with drawing, art in general, and he also did tattoos.
Fast forward…
I’m a rough kid. Like to party, fight, and other stuff we shan’t mention here today.
My dad is a kinda a blend of hick and hippie attitude, so “work you lazy shit” was how he figured I should spend time if I wanted stuff, but he was also super liberal and easygoing in the true sense of the word, and didn’t judge me for my mischievous, and sometimes odd ways unless it ended up leading me towards issues with the law.
He also was not like “go find a job,” but instead he was like “here is a job for you.”
I should mention he was also artsy… painter, sculptor, etc.
Critical as fuck though when it came to my own art.
So… I’m fresh in my teens, just 14, he has me working my ass off where he works. Fish stuff… commercial, not guppies.
He has given the thumbs up on me getting a tattoo if I want. I actually didn’t ask, just said I was going to get one, and he thought it was stupid, but didn’t really care. Greg Irons is to do it, and he has this cool Pegasus thing for me. It’s a gift tattoo even, gonna cost me notta. In hindsight I maybe earned it. I colored a bunch of junk for him. Lots. He introduced me to Dr. Ph. Martin’s Watercolors and Pelikan ink in the process. I should note here, that though Pelikan was regularly used in tattooing, I personally never used pelican for tattoos later on when I learned.
Back to the story, I was impatient, and I wanted a tattoo NOW. I send a letter to Greg. Yes, a hand written on paper type thing that you drop off at the post office with stamps on it. I wanna make sure if I get tattooed by this other dude, he’ll still give me the Pegasus for free, and that it’s cool.
For the record, this Pegasus design was the bomb, and it may sound weird now, but this is the early 80s, and such stuff was macho bad ass.
So… he says cool, and he knows the guy, though not friends, and knows his brother as well. Most tattooers, and even artists of a certain type actually knew each other, or at least knew of each other back then because it was a small world. Both those brothers are tattooers, both were a bit more biker-ish, but would be what I’d describe as hippie-ish bikers as well, and both work in fantasy style art, and I end up with one as my first mentor in actual tattooing, machine building, and ink mixing, and get inroads into commercial fantasy art of a certain style because tattoos wasn’t really a high dollar profession choice in those days… but that’s all part of another story. It’s actually a sad story. I have told it before, but it involves the guy I was supposed to learn from (Greg) dying by being hit by a bus while out of country, and me being all sad about it, and my last letter (not the one mentioned before) never getting a reply, but instead a call from some dude (also an artist) who I didn’t know, but got to know a bit while doing graphic novel type work for a adult (not porn) graphic art publisher years later.
Anyway, back to the story. I get this little tattoo. My dad ends up getting a little tattoo as well. I was surprised at that.
What did I get? Something stupid of course because I was an idiot fourteen year old.
Was it cool and bad ass? Not really, but for the time and my age it was so cool.
I went to high school with a frigg’n tattoo.
That may seem not very unusual now, but in my day, only bikers, sailors, and whores was who people said got tattoos, and if I am honest, it was close to true, and teens didn’t get tattoos. Not pro ones, and not really hand pokes or wanna-be kitchen wizard ones either. So, my small, and very goofy tattoo was considered bad ass. Bad ass meant totally awesome, tough, and macho cool back in those days if you are a gen Z reading this. Rebel rebel rebel I was.
If camera phones existed and social media existed back then I’d have plastered my sweet tattoo all over, but what existed was regular film cameras and polaroid. People only took a shot or two, and film cost money, and so did developing, and then you’d have just one copy, and often that copy would get lost or destroyed, so pictures weren’t like now, and because of that, what we ended up with is very few records of times, places, and events in our lives compared to what people have now. In general that is a good thing. Early Gen X lacked parental supervision in the way kids have now, and even the good kids of my generation did stuff that if it was on record, it could change their whole lives.
In the end, I have not one single picture of that tattoo when it was fresh and clear.
I don’t even have one picture of it as a close image. There are few pictures at all of me from those years.
Kind of a blank of three years photographically compared to the rest of my life. Then the volume picks back up in my later teens. That goes for good pics and random candid. Many pictures as a tiny tyke, then many as a late teens kid, but early through mid teens… well, I was misbehaving, people were busy, dad working lots, mother having a rough time, my grandpa wasn’t a picture taker, etc.
So, all of this, and why the babble? It is because I have the very oldest picture of myself in existence with a tattoo. Summer of 1984, just 14 years old, dumb as fuck, overly wild, partier, nature boy who loved to camp, fish, hike, fight, work out, climb, swim, ride motorcycles, piss of my female friends with my trampish ways, and experiment with nature’s mind altering gifts.
There is no photo in existence showing me with a tattoo on my skin before this one.
Yep, curly hair… all gone now. Or mostly anyway.
As you can see, it’s HUGE!
Can’t tell what it is? I’ll tell ya, but you will not understand.
It is a very drunk squirrel holding a green martini, with a maraschino cherry in it.
It may sound nuts, (see what I did again) but there was a very good reason for my choice. It is filled with symbolic humor, but was an inside joke.
If you think it’s bad, check this… it jokingly became the family squirrel. Yep, some male relatives, and close fellow hoodlums got it as well. They were in on the joke.
As a side note, that squirrel didn’t stay alone long. Before I was fifteen it had friend tattoos, and by sixteen it was lost in a crowd of ink.
It has never been touched up, and never been covered. I still have it, but you can’t make it out well anymore. I’m good with that. It aged, I aged, that’s how it goes. Time flies, and we fade away just like our old tattoos and memories of childhood.