Jay, Josephine Baker, and More!

I met Jay at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade last month and she shared this cool Jospehine Baker tattoo on her right arm:

This was done by Cynthia Rudzis, owner and curator at Cirque du Rouge in Washington D.C.

In addition to this photo I took, Jay sent me photos of some additional work she has from Rudzis, on her back:

Jay tells us this:

"... is a tribute to my dad's Japanese Buddhist roots, [and] is actually a stylized version of one of the old Sherlock Holmes drawings that accompanied the original stories. The kanji [lower right] reads, 'every day is a good day'- my family's favorite Buddhist saying. Several of my family members also have it tattooed elsewhere on themselves.

The color piece at the top was taken from a 1930's wallpaper pattern and [is] used to connect the colors in my various pieces."

I was also delighted to see another photo that Jay sent me, considering I had recently been emblazoned with a crab myself:

Jay explained that this was done by Joey at Citizen Ink in Brooklyn  and that "it's representative of my home state of Maryland, with a blue crab and the state motto, 'fatti maschii parole femine' or 'manly deeds, womanly words.' "

Thanks to Jay for sharing her cool tattoos 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Bridget Lowe

Our next tattooed poet is Bridget Lowe, who sent us this photo:

Bridget explains:

"I got this tattoo rather impulsively in the fall of 2008 in Syracuse, New York, at the excellent Halo Tattoo. I had recently found out that my surname came with a motto, Spero meliora, which translates to 'I hope for better things.' I just thought it was hilarious and apt that the Lowe family motto pronounced to merely hope, while so many other family mottoes announce intentions to destroy, maim, annihilate, etc. The motto seemed like a weirdly accurate summation of my Irish Catholic ancestors, who were overall a suffering bunch, from coal miners to morphine addicts to alcoholics to religious fanatics to general melancholics. Better things--that’s not much to ask for, and they asked so nicely. It really killed me. "

Bridget was also kind enough to send us this poem:

Heaven

The villagers are reading hot guts
and drinking tonics. I’m relaxing
on a rock, sunning my midsection,
my delicate white legs.
The palm trees stand stiff
in the wind, archaic, shyly optimistic,
foreign. A Cuban boy
presents me with a muffin, his homeland
a mere neck’s-turn away.
My hair blows this way
and that, as if I’m the featured guest
in a music video from my childhood.
For every broken heart, one golf course.
Everything comes out even.
The birds call me by name
and while I’m distracted, fish heap themselves
into my basket. And the loaves,
the loaves! They multiply.

~ ~ ~

Bridget Lowe is the author of At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry (2011), and elsewhere. She has received a "Discovery"/Boston Review award and fellowships to attend The MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She lives in Kansas City.

Thanks to Bridget for sharing her poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2013 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos 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.