Jonce Shares His Permanent Wedding Band

I met Jonce on Broad Street while leaving work yesterday. I stopped to talk to him when I noticed his hand and the name tattooed on it:

Jonce explained:

"This is my wife's name, Kate. We've been married ten years and I got it three, four years ago, I think now ...  I used to wear a wedding band but I used to do a lot of rock climbing ... so I would take it off a lot, so I just decided to do the tattoo."

The artist was his friend Keith Johnson, currently working out of Suicide J.A.C.K. Tattoo in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Thanks to Jonce for sharing this cool tattoo 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Megan Burns

Our next tattooed poet is Megan Burns, who sent us this beautiful work of body art:

Not only is it a big tattoo, but it's on the ribs, one of the more painful spots to get inked. Megan explains, "It's a pirate ship with the names of my three kids."  She added, "I'm going through a pretty ugly divorce and since I only get my kids half as much as I used to, I wanted to get this piece done."

She credited the work to Terry Brown, one of the owners at Downtown Tattoos in New Orleans.

Megan sent along the following poem to accompany the ship:

Goodnight, Moon

when a woman disappears
it’s a permanent stake
under night, this sky, bodies in a slipping
what you wrote: a secret is a way
of pulling a person apart
pour in like a poison, you feed it
poor excuse, a just score
a domestic failing
pulled force abutting angles
so we dropped a degree of fencing
made adjustments in parallel confines
braided down this writ
this work of medium thumbprints
I put palms to each side of your sweet
face & pretend to be of a gentler nature
absconded, a beauty of break, do you
know what a parade is for?
it’s a way of walking around grief
try to rendezvous this lesser
try not death comes like a desert
you my most thirsty, I was coming along
remember once the children huddle
three a bed where we lullaby
and they ask questions I have no answers
mother is a new “never-was”
if he wants a bed time story
tell him I have no feeling for you

~ ~ ~

Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has two books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008) and Sound and Basin (2013) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: irrational knowledge (Fell Swoop press, 2012) and a city/ bottle boned (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her chapbook Dollbaby was just released from Horse Less Press.

Thanks to Megan for her contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet'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 Tattooed Poets Project: Terri Witek's Pessoa

Our next tattooed poet is Terri Witek, who shared this photo:

Terri tells us this

"was inked by Ron Nelson of Mission Street Tattoo, in Santa Cruz CA. Most of my family have sleeves and other major body-work by Ron, who is married to one of my daughters. Some of his most beautiful imagery on the family skin is ongoing and unfinished--a slowly filling- in ship in full sail, an outline of a name. So it seems almost reasonable that I took so long --two decades-- to decide what I wanted. It’s no accident that I was reading Fernando Pessoa’s great Book of Disquiet when a shadow thought finally appeared. Pessoa’s name just means 'a person'—my tattoo could be both tribute to the poet who chose to remake himself in so many heteronyms and a kind of classifying stamp (like 'animal, vegetable, mineral' ) for the end of the world. As I now lead The Fernando Pessoa Game in Lisbon for Disquiet, International ( a workshop with Cyriaco Lopes, the visual artist who first showed me Pessoa’s work in Portuguese) , my tattoo is also part of a more-than-skin-deep, ongoing translation game. For this, and maybe because it took so long to arrive, I love unfolding my arm to it."

Terri also sent us this poem, which closes out her book, Exit Island:

Caravelle

                                with two lines by Fernando Pessoa

Cresce a vinda da lua                                  (but what is gained by the moon’s return?)

                                   

Teu corpo, teu limite.

When will o rio dovetail nas ruas                and which ainda arrives too soon?

                               

Cresce a vinda da lua.

While the drunken dogwatch pities                   another far-off monsoon,

                               

Teu corpo, teu limite.

Something pulls against day’s patois.          Something restrings the body’s loom.

                               

Cresce a vinda da lua.

Who would leave your side for comfort?    Who would row against the moon?

                               

Teu corpo, teu limite.

Tudo cresce, tudo pity                                  tudo rua, tudo moon

all is body, all is rowing,                 all notation is natacao

~ ~ ~

Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island, The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World , Fools and Crows, Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self . Her collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes have been featured in galleries or site-specific projects in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A professor of English at Stetson University, her summer faculty positions have included the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Prague Summer Literary Program and the DisQuiet program in Lisbon, where she runs “The Fernando Pessoa Game.”

Thanks to Terri Witek for her contribution to this year's Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet'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 Tattooed Poets Project: Teresa Mei Chuc's Cross-Cultural Ink

Our next tattooed poet is Teresa Mei Chuc, who has had all of her tattoos done at Shogun Tattoo in Pasadena, California by Andrew Moore.

Teresa tells us:

"My first tattoo, in Tibetan script, is my dharma name, Rinchen Khandro, which means 'precious dakini or sky dancer' in Tibetan. The name was given to me by Wangchen Rinpoche of the Maha Vajra Center in Los Angeles during my Buddhist refuge ceremony. The name means a lot to me because it embodies my spirit and purpose in life...dancing in the sky has a deep metaphorical meaning to me. The sky also represents sunyata. I wanted it tattooed because I wanted to always remember it among all my other names (Vietnamese - Tue, Cantonese - Mei Wai, American - Teresa).

The other tattoo on my back is cherry blossoms. I found out recently through a mitochondrial DNA test that I was part Japanese and the cherry blossoms represent that part of myself. I had known that I was part Vietnamese and part Chinese; my Japanese lineage came as a surprise and I wanted to embrace that part of me and the history that is interwoven with it."

"The tattoo on my wrist is the word 'sunyata' in Sanskrit. Sunyata means emptiness, nothingness, openness. It is an important concept to me and a very important concept in Buddhism."

"The tattoo on my upper arm is a Vegvisir, a Norse protection symbol. It is a Runic compass and a symbol from the 17th century Icelandic grimoire called Galdrabok ('magic book'). I tend to get lost, so I hope this built-in compass will keep me from getting lost."

"On my leg is an endless or eternal knot, an important Buddhist symbol representing the interweaving of the spiritual path, the flowing of time and movement within that which is eternal.

I find these days, it is easier and easier to forget the important things and my tattoos help me to remember."

Teresa also sent along her poem "Pencil," which was previously published in the anthology Mo (Silkworms Ink, 2011) and in The Good Men Project:

Pencil

"In spite of everything I shall rise again:
I will take up my pencil, which I have
forsaken in my great discouragement,
and I will go on with my drawing."

- Vincent Van Gogh


A missile is shaped like a pencil -
its long, slender body and pointed
end creates history.

A girl walking down the street
a few steps ahead of her sister and friend,
two medics who were trying to help
injured people, the parked ambulance -
all were annihilated by the same weapon.

Above, drones - silent, unmanned planes.
A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile
with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt,
the features on a face - the shape of a nose,
the color and length of a mustache.

In a room far away, in another country, a man
sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes
his thick, dark mustache as he carefully
contemplates, then pushes a button.

There is a charred hole in the ground
where the girl once stood.

There are pencils that write and erase,
write and erase, so that there is nothing
to be read on the page. The page blank
as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone.

There is a family drinking mint tea
in a living room.
The man holds a cup to his lips,
the glass touches his mustache.
A silent bird hovers above.
In a split second, everyone is dead,
the house is in rubbles - arms, legs,
splattered organs among broken concrete.

Soon, there will be no trace.

~ ~ ~

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War. Her poetry appears in journals such as EarthSpeak Magazine, Hypothetical Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Kyoto Journal, The Prose-Poem Project, The National Poetry Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010), With Our Eyes Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014), and Mo’ Joe (Beatlick Press, 2014). Red Thread is her first full-length collection of poetry. Her second collection of poetry was just accepted for publication by FootHills Publishing and is forthcoming in 2014! Visit her at www.tue-wai.com.

Thanks to Teresa for contributing to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet'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.

Tattoos I Love: Melanie's Tribute to Our Family

How is it possible that my lovely wife Melanie, who celebrates her birthday today, has a tattoo that hasn't graced these pages? It just is, I guess, but in celebration of her special day, let's all look at my favorite tattoo of her collection:

This photo was taken shortly after it was inked by the awesome Peter Cavorsi, owner of Body Art Studios in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, many five or six years ago.

The center of the piece is a Star of David with the Hebrew word חי (Chai) in the center. The design is inspired by this necklace Melanie has:

The Hebrew words encircling the center design element are the Hebrew names of our family members: Melanie's, mine, and those of our two daughters.

When Melanie came up with the concept of the whole piece, she wanted to make sure she got the Hebrew correct, so she met with a friend of ours who is a rabbi. He agreed, in a very rabbinical way, to provide her with the Hebrew lettering on the condition that Melanie would meet with him and study why tattooing is considered by many to be forbidden in Judaism. She agreed, of course, and the lesson proves valuable whenever she feels like challenging those who challenge her on why Jews shouldn't get inked. Note this 2008 piece from the New York Times about Jews and Tattoos.

One technical note: I was in charge of proofreading the final design before the stencil was made, and I missed the fact that, in one of our daughter's Hebrew names, which is comprised of three names, the second and third names run together, a detail missed by many, but proof that, even when you think you know something's perfect, you should triple-check. This small technical error doesn't make the tattoo any less awesome, in my opinion.

Then again, I'm biased, because it's a beautiful tattoo on the woman I love and, well, she chose to ink my Hebrew name on her flesh, along with our awesome children, as well.

So, on this, Melanie's birthday, I want to share her tattoo and wish her a wonderful day.

I love you Melanie, and I love your tattoos!

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.

Tracy's Owl for Jamie

I ran into Tracy last month in a drugstore in Penn Station.

She agreed to share this tattoo on her arm:

The name "Jamie" refers to her son. This is a mother owl with a protective wing over a baby owl, whose head can be seen resting in the middle of the mama owl's chest.

This was inked by the talented John Reardon at Greenpoint Tattoo Company in Brooklyn. Reardon's work has appeared countless times on Tattoosday, and it's always an honor to feature his work on the site. Readers may remember this narwhal by him which we featured back in June.

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

This entry is ©2013 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Sarah Certa

Today's tattooed poet is Sarah Certa.

Sarah's tattoo is simple, but powerful:

Photo by Sarah Certa

She even sent along a collage of the tattoo process:

Photos by Laura Martie

Why does a woman have a tattoo of the name "Johnny" on her arm? I'll let Sarah explain:

"My tattoo was done at Voodoo Tattoo in Big Lake, MN. It's on the inside of my left wrist, and it's my brother's name, Johnny, in my handwriting. He is two years younger than me and in the Army Infantry, currently deployed in southern Afghanistan. I got the tattoo this past fall, November 2012, about a month before he deployed, because I wanted to do something to show my support and admiration for him, and since I carry a strong needle phobia, this was a very big thing for me to do. It also serves as a reminder of strength, especially on hard days, to just keep going, the way he does..."

Sarah also sent us this poem, which is making its first appearance here:

The Wind

I’ve been eating way too much chocolate
these past few days, which really fucks up
my bikini-season diet, which is really
a ridiculous thing to waste time thinking about because regardless of my pant size
one day I’m going to die. This is not a newsflash
but every time I think about it, it’s as if I’m being beat
in the stomach with a baseball bat, and on it are the signatures
of everyone I’ve ever loved. It’s amazing
that I continue to recover from these assaults, that somehow
I get out of bed. I make coffee. Every day
I brush my teeth. I smooth Burt’s Bees chap-stick
on my lips, which are filled with blood, and how incredible
is that? How incredible, that I’m able to stand up
and put one foot in front of the other, shuffle forward
one small miracle at a time. How incredible, yet how
pathetic, as I sit here with my coffee and my diet, while nearly 2,000 miles away
my little brother is marching in the 5 AM rain with the rest
of his infantry platoon. He is already my hero,
the way he skydives into this life, so reckless yet good
to himself, raving about sushi like it’s his religion and sipping $90 whiskey
that’s almost as old as he is. You just keep going, he says. You’re not going to die
from running too much. I think about him
training for war this summer, hiking 25 miles
in the California desert with 60 pounds on his back, knowing
that soon he’ll be on foot in southern Afghanistan where he could
be blown to pieces at any minute, and already
each step he takes is an army-sized miracle, each breath the wind that pushes me
through another goddamn day.

~ ~ ~

Sarah Certa holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems appear in Country Music, The Bakery, B O D Y, and PANK, among other places. She is the Social Media Director for H_NGM_N, a contributing editor for Split Rock Review, and a freelance writer and photographer. Find her online at sarahcerta.tumblr.com.

Thanks to Sarah for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project! And a special thanks to her brother Johnny for his service to our country. We're wishing him our very best and pray for his safety while he is overseas.

This entry is ©2013 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet'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.