Three Roses from Jane

On Friday I met Jane while walking on Broadway, across from Zuccotti Park. She was kind enough to share these stunning roses with us:

These roses are simple in design, but were executed masterfully. Jane credited Elizabeth Markova from Bang Bang Tattoos in Manhattan. Read a small feature on Markov here.

Jane explained, "the three roses are a representation of the beauty my grandfather, grandmother and daughter have contributed into my life; molding me into the woman I am today."

Thanks to Jane for sharing these stunning flowers with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website 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.

Not a Tattooed Poet, But a Poet's Tattooed Daughter

In our pre-April anticipation of the Tattooed Poet's Project, I look to Rebecca Foust.

"I don't have any tattoos," she informed me in response to my inquiry about her ink status, "but my daughter Finlay has the name of my book (and its titular poem), All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song tattooed on her head, shaved in order to raise money for research for childhood cancers."

Well, that suits me just fine, so check out Finlay's head tattoo:

Rebecca also shared the poem from which the title and, hence, the tattoo, originated:

Altoona to anywhere

Go ahead, aspire to transcend

your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap

the life you dream on,

escape the small-minded tyranny

of your small-minded Midwestern

coalmining town. 

But when you’ve left it behind, you

may find it still there, in your dreams,

your syntax, the smell of your hair,

its real smell, under the shampoo.

Beware DNA; it will out or be outed,

and you’ll find yourself back

where you started, back home,

unable to refute the logic of blood and bone 

you’ll slip, and pick up Velveeta

instead of brie.  It’s inexorable.

Kansas one day will turn out to be Oz

and Oz Kansas,

with the same back porch weeping,

the same husbands sleeping around,

addiction, cancer, babies born wrong;

the same siren nights pierced

with stars seeping light, all that

gorgeous, pitiless song.

[first published in Margie, nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.)

~ ~ ~

Rebecca Foust was the 2014 Dartmouth Poet in Residence and is the recipient of fellowships from the Frost Place and the MacDowell Colony. New poems are in the HudsonReview, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, North American Review, Omniverse, and other journals, and an essay that won the 2014 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Award in the Winter 2015 issue of the Malahat Review. Foust’s most recent book, Paradise Drive, won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry and can be ordered at http://www.press53.com/Award_for_Poetry.html. For more information visit http://rebeccafoust.com/.

Thanks to Rebecca for sharing her poem and to Finlay for sharing her tattoo!

This entry is ©2015 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet and her daughter's permission.

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.

The Sound of a Daughter's Heartbeat, in Ink

I met Graham last month on Broad Street in Manhattan last month. I met him in the lobby of the building where I worked and I asked him about the tattoos on his inner forearm:

I guessed correctly when I asked him if the fuzzy line was a sound wave. "Yeah," he replied, "it's actually my daughter's heartbeat." How cool is that? I asked him to elaborate:

"I actually went to school for music and I had originally planned on getting a sine wave on my arm. And then, when I went for my daughter's first sonogram, they checked her heart and the sine wave came up on a screen and I just asked them if they could print it, and they said yes, and two weeks later I had it tattooed on my arm."

This was tattooed by Graham's friend Cheo, who is an independent tattoo artist.

The hand above/next to the sound wave was tattooed by someone else, about nine years ago, when Graham was twenty-one, at a small tattoo parlor on Merrick Avenue in White Plains. He explained:

"It's actually called the Reiki healer's hand ... Reiki is a holistic energy practice...my mother's a Reiki master, and so am I, and that's basically why I got the Reiki healer;'s hand, because it has to do with the master and working on a patient. So it was a way for my mom not to yell at me about getting a tattoo."

Thanks to Graham for sharing his cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website 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.