I’m excited to share my first tattoo series set as a blog post—I’ve been working on this project off and on for over a year, and have shared several sets on my Instagram, but have so much more space and freedom here on the blog. I love knowing readers will see the photos larger and uncropped, and having the room to include my subjects’ stories.
Which is what this project is all about: stories. If you haven’t seen my previous work from this series, I meet with tattooed volunteers and photograph their ink while talking to them about their journey with tattooing. Many of their tattoos are great, some really great, but it’s the story that brings the collection alive.
I met with Chad in his kitchen a few weeks ago to get his story. We started with the beginning—his first tattoo, a phrase inked above his right knee.
“I got this at 19, it’s ‘Mr Mojo Risin.’ It’s an anagram for Jim Morrison,” Chad told me. “The Doors were like my favorite band. And this is actually from, I have a scrapbook of his handwritten lyrics of ‘L.A. Woman,’ so this is in his handwriting.”
“I think I hid it from my parents for like a year or two, even though I was 19 years old. I remember my grandma walked in the room one night and saw it. She came in asking where my sister was and she sees my tattoo. I put too much lotion on it because I didn’t know what I was doing so it almost looked like it was infected or something, and she looked at it and started crying, like ‘what have you done?’”
Chad says it was a couple years before he got his second tattoo, a horseshoe for his mother. “This is like the horseshoe she used on the horse she used to have, and I got shamrocks because we’re Irish, and me and my mom specifically are into Irish stuff.”
“She was more judgmental about it at first, even the one I got for her. She was like, ‘Yeah, it’s crooked, all the luck’s gonna drain out of it.’ She was talking shit about it for a while. Then eventually she just got over it because I kept getting more.”
“I’ve always been interested in tattoos, but yeah, it’s definitely something that just kind of happened. I got the first one and I thought that would be my only one. I put a lot of thought into my first tattoo, like I thought about it for like at least two years, all the time like, ok it’s gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be perfect. It’s gotta mean something. I didn’t plan on getting anymore honestly. I’ve always been interested in it, but I was kind of like afraid to get more tattoos. Like it was gonna harm me in my future career because I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. And I still don’t.”
Most of Chad’s tattoos are black and grey, but his latest one, a work in progress on his chest, will soon be in full color. “Originally I was only going to do black and white tattoos, or black and grey, but my friend Robbie, he gets a bunch of Japanese tattoos. And I figured if I was gonna get a Japanese tattoo, it would have to be in color, just because it would feel wrong to get it in black and grey, the traditional way to get them is in color. It seemed like almost disrespectful in a way to get it in black and white to me.”
“It’s an Oni head, demon head. It’s supposed to be good luck and ward off evil spirits.”
I asked Chad if he had a favorite piece and he said, “I don’t really have a favorite one. I like them all, I got them all for like, some of these I just thought were cool and some I got for different reasons, like traveling.”
My personal favorite of Chad’s tattoos, however, is the beautiful black and grey guitar on the back of his left arm, inked by Matt Williams in Suffolk, Virginia. “It’s a classical guitar. It’s kind of a tribute to this musician I really like, Justin Townes Earle. He played a guitar like this, and then the flowers are white gardenias. He had a song called ‘White Gardenias’ basically about drug addiction. He died at like 38. I don’t know what it was, it might have been drug related. I don’t know, his music means a lot to me. I actually got to meet him at The National a few years ago and I got to tell him how much his music meant to me, which was really cool. I’ve also been playing guitar since I was about 13.”
The guitar is part of a growing theme on Chad’s left arm that started with a cowgirl. “I went to Asheville, me and my friend were supposed to go on a trip but he bailed. So I went by myself. It was actually probably more fun that I went by myself. This again was this guy’s flash, Steve Zimovan, he used to be in Richmond. After I got the cowgirl one, I just decided my left arm was gonna be like a western sleeve. I’d already gotten a bunch of traditional tattoos on this arm, like the guitar, Americana. So I just like dove into that.”
Later Chad added a flash horse by Richmond tattooist Zac Clark, and a cactus by an old friend. “My stepbrother lives in Houston, and my friend from high school moved to Houston a few years ago after getting out of the Coast Guard and became a tattoo artist. When he was in the Coast Guard, he got totally covered up. His whole body is covered up, his face is tattooed. I saw him after not seeing him since high school, maybe eight years or so. I met up with him and he did the cactus for me, because I was in Texas and it fit with the western stuff. That was really cool, seeing him and getting that tattoo.”
Our last stop on Chad’s tattoo journey takes us halfway around the world to South Africa, where he spent a summer studying anthropology abroad. “I was there for a month studying human evolution and culture, and this is Mrs. Ples. It’s an Australopithecus, I don’t remember it’s been a long time. But it’s like one of those famous hominids, it’s kind of like what made people know that human existence started in South Africa and moved out to the rest of the world. Southern Africa and the southeast is known as the cradle of civilization because that’s basically where humanity started. This is one of the earliest human ancestors.”
“I was afraid to get a tattoo in South Africa, I was like what is like down there? But it was actually one of the cleanest shops I’ve been to.”
Thank you for reading, I truly appreciate each person who takes a few minutes to view my work here. I know that a quick mindless scroll on social media is an easy way to see what people are up to, but I created this blog to move away from that sort of thing, and it means a lot to me for people to spend a little extra time with something I made. This project means a lot to me too—it’s something I do in dedication to my father, and I have so much appreciation to the people who are wiling to let me photograph their bodies and record their stories. Thank you, you’re beautiful.