Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

214 Notes to Chapter 4
your mother or daughter? You know the way things are. Tattoos last
a lot longer than relationships.”) I talk to other artists and I know I
hold the record. This guy came in and he wanted some girl’s name
put on him. I tried to talk him out of it like I always do, but he was
not to be dissuaded. So, I put his girlfriend’s name on him and he
leaves. A half hour later the phone rings and this guy says, “Can you
cover up the tattoo?” and I say, “Who is this?” It’s the guy who just
left! It turns out that he left here and went home and walked into a
totally empty apartment. The woman had taken everything they
owned and moved out while he was in here getting her name put on
him. That has to be a record.
At times this form of relational tattooing may become rather extreme.
One mid-western tattooist recounted the following story.
I have this chick that comes in every once in a while—a black chick.
Her boyfriend is some hot soul musician who has had a couple of
hits on the soul charts. Everytime she comes in she gets the same
thing. She gets his name put on her thigh. I don’t know, she’s a real
nice looking chick but she has G—— T—— about fifteen times on
her thigh. I try to get her to let me put a heart or a butterfly or
something on but she just wants the name. Last time she was in she
got something different. She got “property of” put before the name.
6. While this extreme form of desperate self-mutilation is rarely pursued,
I have, in the course of the research, encountered people who
attempted to remove tattoos by abrading them with sandpaper, painting
them with acid and other caustic substances, or by cutting them off with
knives. For example:
[Quote from fieldnotes] I saw the crudest attempt at self-removal I
have ever seen down at R——’s (studio) today. A young, fairly welldressed
oriental guy came in to get some cover-up work. I'm not
often shocked by this time but this one really took me aback. When
he took off his shirt I could see that much of his back was covered
with massive keloid scars which only partially obliterated the outline
of a crude demon's head and four playing cards. It turns out
that he had the back piece put on when he was in prison in Hong
Kong for some sort of petty crime. When he got out he was intensely
ashamed of the tattoo. He proceeded to purchase a bottle of acid
and, after fortifying himself with booze, poured the acid down his
back. The pain must have been unbelievable. I was impressed by
how gently R—— treated him. He told him that he had consulted
with a doctor after the young man had initially come to him and,
because the skin had been so seriously traumatized and the blood
vessels were so close to the surface, he could not tattoo directly
over the scars themselves. Instead, what he proceeded to do was to