Amy has been one of my best friends and favorite collaborators for more than two years, and one of her strongest attributes as an artist is the ability to tell a story. The majority of the subjects I’ve photographed for my ongoing series documenting people’s tattoos have been volunteers; Amy is one of very few that I specifically asked to participate. There is a story in everything she does, and her twenty-five year collection of ink is no exception.
“I got my first tattoo when I was eighteen, and I got my most recent tattoo this year. And I am about to be 44. It’s the lotus on my lower back. Because I’m about to be 44,” she said about her first tattoo during our shoot earlier this summer. “So if you got tattooed when you were eighteen and you are in this age group, that’s probably your first one. I got it when I felt like tattoos all needed to have a very specific and important meaning. I felt like she was a survivor, and that’s kind of what I was trying to do. I guess that set a tone for me, huh?”
“I was living in Salt Lake, and I got this at Big Deluxe Tattoo, which is like one of the only ones in the city, and it was attached to a bar called Burt’s Tiki Lounge. Which had become my favorite bar in all of my known time. It’s gone now. I used to be able to go there when I was underage because of my affiliation with the tattoo shop next door. Which was simply that I had gotten tattooed there and made a few friends while I was there and brought in a few people.”
The most recent is a pair of clasped hands on her upper thigh. “Alex and I got tattooed together on one of our first dates because that’s super normal,” Amy said of her girlfriend, who stood nearby.
“It wasn’t one of our first dates, we had been together for a minute then,” Alex chimed in.
“Was it?” Amy said. “I feel like it hadn’t been that long. I mean, it was early on.”
“I lost my debit card that day,” Alex went on.
“And many other days after,” Amy said. “At a lot of other places.”
“I have some tattoos that I have because I traded tarot for those. One of them is almost gone. That used to say ‘true blue.’ But now she gone. He said he would put it on again but I think there’s something charming about the impermanence of something like that.”
“I like a hand tattoo but I do not want to tattoo the outsides of my hands because they look just like my mom’s, and it’s something that’s been remarked on since I was a kid. My kid talks about it. So I figured I would do the inside. And I did the left hand because I thought it would last longer.”
Amy traded tarot with the same artist who inked her palm for the snake on her rear end. “It’s probably my favorite. It’s one of my favorites. My friend Richard did this. We have been friends for a long time, and I read tarot for him. And I think on this day I drove down to his shop in Bristol, Tennessee. Right over the Virginia/Tennessee border. It’s like five or six hours away. It’s supposed to be the last town that Hank Williams was seen alive in, and that’s like the lore of the town. But Richard moved from RVA down there and opened a little shop, and I drove down there and got this tattoo.”
“I got this one with my kid when he graduated high school. That’s his handwriting. His teachers used to complain about how small it was, and he would fill up notebooks with that shit, and it was so fucking tiny. It looks like baby teeth to me. So I had him write it on a piece of paper. ‘Modern Man Must Hustle,’ it’s a hip hop song, an Atmosphere song that Jake and I used to listen to a lot when he was coming up from the time that he was little. And we’ve seen Atmosphere together a bunch of times. He used to be Jake’s favorite rapper, and mine too at that time.”
“I got this one in Salt Lake City when I was there on vacation. It’s not even a favorite tattoo, I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable. But I was walking down the street on my last day there, and I looked over and I saw a sticker of this Richmond band on this building, and I was like what is this? And I looked up and it was a tattoo shop. So I went in and asked the guy if he had time to do a quick tattoo, and he did that really quick, and I went home. I flew out the next day.”
“Utah [where Amy is from] is the beehive state, and it’s motto is ‘Industry.’ So beehives are everywhere. The state bird of Utah is a seagull. And that’s a pass for me. The story is pioneers came and settled in this really difficult part of land to cultivate, and they finally got crops growing, and then this plague of locusts came and descended on their crops. Like blackened the sky and came down and descended on their crops. And then, as though they were sent from God, these seagulls came and ate the locusts and saved the crops and the people didn’t die and lived through a harsh winter. They love a seagull.”
“I got this tattoo as a memorial tattoo to my sister having died. But I wish that I had chosen something different. But also I guess I don’t. I got this when I was like nineteen. My memories of her death are trauma-response blocked out for like a long period of time after that, and actually are sporadic at best. But what I remember from her funeral are carnations that had been dyed blue. And I don’t know if they had been part of an arrangement or what that was. But I remembered that specifically so that’s what I asked for. And what I got was this cabbage. Which is absolutely fine. You probably have less of a story with something like that, and at some point, people would be like, ‘What is that?’ And I would be like, oh it's a cabbage. And I would just talk about it being a cabbage. So if I’ve ever told you that, it wasn’t totally a lie. And I’m sorry.”
When I asked Amy what the character above the carnation means, she said, “It means ‘alive.’ It means ‘to be alive.’”
“I got this from a dude who, once I got this one, everyone was like, ‘Oh, how was that?’ I was like, I mean, really bruised but I like it. They were like, 'Yeah, he's a ham-handed son of a bitch, huh?’ And I was like yeah, did you guys know that? And they were like, ‘Yeah, he will drill you!’ I was like, I did not know that was the story with this man. I was bruised from like my elbow to my armpit. I was swollen all the way around. This tattoo really was like nothing else.”
“It’s like the crown of thorns and temptation, and the apple. I was feeling dramatic. Everything in my life was like drama at that time. I was writing dark poetry in dark places. I was in a place. You’ve been there.”
“I got this one because I woke up after a breakup, all like broken up and sad, and I called James, my tattoo guy who did like six of my tattoos. And I was like, ‘James, I had this dream about this tattoo with these knives stabbing through this heart, this bomb heart.’ And he was like, ‘Ok, I’ll do that.’ I was like, I want it today. And he was like, ‘Ok…’ He was like, ‘Come down after hours and I will do this for you, you fucking monster.’”
“He did the skeleton key. It was his idea to make it look like it was broken and going through my skin, and I still think that was a nice idea. He owns his own shop now and has for a bunch of years, called Sailor Jim’s Electric Tattoo.”
Come back tomorrow for part two of Amy’s tattoos and their stories. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.