Friday, June 11, 2010

tattoo you

My friend Tim is a nurse in Ohio. We were very close during junior high and high school, then we lost touch (the way many old friends do), and we've recently reconnected through Facebook (again, the way many old friends do). We went through an interesting period of our lives together and I am grateful for it. I can still picture us walking around the suburban streets of Long Island with our spiked hair, our respective dads' military-issue jackets (mine was Army, his was Air Force), our combat boots/Converse All-Star high tops, our new wave/punk t-shirts, our black nail polish. We must have been quite a sight because we turned more than a few heads. We'd spend our time talking, laughing, listening to music, doing all the things teenagers do...we were just in slightly different packaging from everyone else (and that was part of the fun).

Tim has quite a few tattoos and he asked me if I would design one for him; he said it would be more meaningful to him to have the work of someone who had been important in his life, rather than just having his usual tattoo artist work something up. I was extremely flattered and more than a little nervous about the prospect. Designing a tattoo is something I had never done before. Tim said he wanted something based on "The Dance of the Pleiades", which I had to admit I wasn't familiar with. He emailed me an image to use as a jumping off point, and we spoke on the phone to bounce around some ideas. He gave me the date for his appointment and the exact dimensions he needed the work to be, which I found very helpful...a deadline and parameters can be great when you're not sure what you're doing. I told him repeatedly, "Now, if you don't like what I come up with, just tell me..."

I got to work eventually (I was too daunted to start right away for some reason) and came up with a simple interpretation. I kept looking at it and wondering: Will he like it? Is this what he's looking for? What if I need to rework it and I run out of time? I colored the design two different ways, scanned what I had, took a deep breath, and emailed everything to him. I heard from him within minutes...and he was thrilled. WHEW! The images reached him at the end of a rough day, so it was all the more gratifying for both of us. I am really excited to see how it looks when it's actually on his wrist/forearm, and hopefully I will have some pictures to post before too long. Thanks for the memories, old friend. I am honored to have my artwork be a permanent part of your life.

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