Tattoo Gallery

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Run

After my second son was born in 2010, I decided to try running. I had worked out on treadmills and the elliptical but never run outside. I ran two miles, every other day for five weeks before I could run farther. Then I started training for longer races and even half marathons. I got this tattoo in 2012 as not only a reward for hard work but also as a reminder to keep running. The orobouros is the snake eating its tail, representing the cyclical nature of life and death. I may go in phases of running and exercising and periods of time when I don’t. But this will always remind me that I have done it and I can do it again.

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Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car edge

The words "pointedly bent, your elbow on a car edge" are a line of poem by George Oppen called "Party on Shipboard" from his first book of poems titled Discrete Series. In the poem, Oppen and his wife are on a road trip, they are pulled over on the side of the road and her arm is resting on a car.

I wrote my undergraduate "thesis" on Oppen's poetry when I got my BA and this line was the first line that pulled me into his poetry--the image so distinct.

In my view, the line is about metonymy and about memory. Often we don't remember an exact moment, we remember a thing that points us to the moment. The "thing" is in proximity to the memory as opposed to being the memory itself (which is a metonym because it points to an idea while a metaphor would be a direct substitution). I think the way that memories and attachments form is much like this and its something I think about a lot. How do memories form? How and why do attachments and desires form?

I think there's also something in the line about geometry, how our memories are literally "shaped."

I decided I wanted the tattoo around 25 and waited two years to make sure I actually really wanted it and had it done when I was 27.

The font came from a back and forth with the tattoo artist, Jason Tyler Grace . He suggested a very masculine, Western style font, and I resisted. I looked through his books and found a script done by an artist named Margaret Kilgallen. Kilgallen did a lot of work with hand painted signs, and much of the work is very populist (which in retrospect is very fitting because George Oppen was a huge socialist/populist/communist and quit writing poetry for 25 years because he thought poetry wasn't serving the public good).

Jason created the script working off of Kilgallen's and he added in the finials on each end of the line. It was also his suggestion to fill in the closed spaces of the letters with the orange color that you can see in the "p", "e", "o" and "d" etc.

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Quotation Marks

The quotes represent all the words I have said or ever will say. I’m also hoping to get a symbol of the coffee shop where I wrote my first book. They are a daily reminder of who I am.

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Gorgeous

This tattoo is a pretty simple one—a forearm tattoo of the word "gorgeous." One of my best friends in grad school (also a writer) had lovely handwriting, so I asked if I could borrow a word from a letter she penned me.

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Ross & Nicole

It's a dream catcher with my children's names, Ross and Nicole, inside. My hope for the future for them. That they achieve their dreams. It’s also a spiritual representation for me to remember the times we shared when they were growing up.

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Hope

This was my first tattoo, maybe 2006 or 07. Isn’t it funny how tattoos kind of always exist in the past like that? They are moments in which things happened. At least on some level that’s true. And on another level, the only thing that really happened was that I paid my neighbor’s niece, a stranger to me at the time, good money to jam needles into the soft part of my forearm. During the past in which I got the Greek for “hope” tattooed, I was very big into the mostly mutually exclusive ideas of speaking Greek and hoping. Hoping about what doesn’t matter, because it always changes. And after nine or ten years, the only Greek word I know any longer is the word for hope, which isn’t exactly true, but it’s true enough to matter.

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ΣΧ

I sobered up immediately once the tattoo needle pierced my flesh, only to realize that it was too late to change my mind about permanently displaying my affiliation with the Greek drinking club that contributed to my current state and predicament.

My only course of action at that moment was to plead with the tattoo artist to abandon my initial grandiose design and to replace it with the smallest font possible that would still be legible.  Unfortunately, I didn’t think about how it would fade and bleed when the surface upon which is was written aged by three decades.

So now I have a tattoo of a fly on my ankle… In Hoc.

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Sonnet LXXXI

This is my tattoo! It's on my upper thigh, and I had it done two years ago. 

The words come from a poem by Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet LXXXI." Neruda is absolutely my favorite poet, and I just really liked this line; it's nice to constantly have it with me. Tigers are my favorite animal but in the case of the tattoo, this tiger is an illustration representing a second poem, "For Jane" by Charles Bukowski. My mom was very sick when I had the tattoo done and has since passed away, and I used to reread "For Jane" a lot when her health was declining. 

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