Time Capsules

Part two of my tattoo story series with Amber focuses on pieces she’s collected over the years commemorating family, friends, and identity (click here for part one, Amber’s love of nature and childhood ties to flora and fauna). One of my favorite tattoos of Amber’s is a bright collection of designs dedicated to her late grandmother.

“She absolutely hated my tattoos,” Amber told me. “And I only had maybe like five when she knew that I had tattoos. When she passed away, I wanted to get one for her. She was a country club lady, very rich, very prim and proper. She would never go anywhere without her lipstick and her nails painted, so that’s what those are.”

“She had these plates that were from Japan, because my granddaddy served over in Japan, and she fell in love. It’s a specific kind of Japanese blue. She had a huge amount of that kind of pottery around her house.”

Amber’s finger traveled down the same arm to a simple tattoo near her elbow. “Dan, my bestie, and I have that one. It’s a fork and a paintbrush because we met in grad school, which was an art program, and then Dan and I love to eat food together.”

Some friendship tattoos, however, don’t age as well as others, and not just in terms of how well the ink holds up. On the back of Amber’s arm is a dinosaur and volcano cleverly hiding an old connection gone sour. “It was a triangle with three triangles in it,” Amber said of the piece that the volcano now covers. “It was a friend tattoo, and I am no longer friends with one of those people, like bad separation. So I got it covered up. I wanted a velociraptor because I fucking love dinosaurs.”

The velociraptor is not Amber’s only coverup. Another spills over her shoulder, a large colorful flower. “It was a whole bunch of words written over each other that spelled out ‘bisexual.’ And it was the colors of the bisexual flag. I got that when I first came out, and I no longer identify as bisexual, I identify as pansexual as language changed and developed. And I was like, I don’t want to get another tattoo for pansexuality, so I’m just going to get a queer, pretty rainbow flower.”

We move to a deer head inked on the back of Amber’s left calf. “That one is for my granddaddy. He passed away before Granny did, a good handful of years. All of the things in that are things I grew up with around him. He taught me how to plant tomatoes; there was a magnolia tree in his front yard; he was huge into landscaping and gardening. And he loved snapdragons, those are the flowers.”

“His signature’s on it, as well as a little cat. Granddaddy would always sign his name with a little cat. Every single one of the cards or letters he ever wrote me. And they never had cats!”

Towards the front of the same leg is a matching tattoo Amber shares with her wife, Chris, two overlapping triangles. “Mine’s pointed down, which symbolizes earth, and if it’s pointed up, it symbolizes air. And it’s also just a queer symbol. A lot of queers have it and it was used to identify yourself as someone who’s in the queer community. And I think also, I forget if it’s up or down, but one’s masculine and one’s feminine. And Chris likes having it on her arm because it can be either way.”

I love Amber’s way of combining a bunch of details in a tattoo to commemorate someone she’s lost, like the memorial pieces for her grandparents, and the circular otter swimming in a pool of things that remind Amber of a late friend. It feels like a time capsule dedicated to that person.

“It’s for my friend Meg who passed away in grad school. She died of cancer, which really fucking blows because she was in remission for almost ten years and then in grad school it came back, and it took her within like five months. It was awful. But it’s just a bunch of her favorite things. She was from Ohio and had never been to the beach, and loved the sunshine. The triangle was like feminine, beach. She loved otters. She was a big yogi. And that’s her favorite Carolina rose.”

These photos are part of an ongoing project documenting people’s tattoos and their stories. I originally began sharing this work on my Instagram before moving to a blog format, so more can be found there. All the stories and photos collecting in this series will eventually be collected into a zine you can hold and smell and keep on a shelf.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Stops for Turtles

I first met Amber around 2008 when we both worked in a Fossil store at the mall. At the time she had a handful of tattoos that I don’t recall being visible at work, but over the years have come to encompass much of her body. She arrived in a tube top and shorts to make her ink accessible for the shoot, and our conversation began with me exclaiming, “You have a lot of tattoos! When did all this happen?”

“I was trying to look through, when it kind of blossomed. 2014 is kind of when it started getting heavy,” Amber said.

“I like to go at least twice a year. But money is a huge barrier. I do forget, quite a bit, how many tattoos I have, especially in the work that I do, like therapy with kiddos and adults and adolescents. Especially this time of year, I find it so hilarious because I’m covered. And then if I keep working with them, and they see me throughout the seasons, they’re shocked that I’m covered in tattoos. So I made sure that my profile picture, that like I’ve got a shorter-sleeved shirt on, and it’s showing at least some of this.”

 “And sometimes people are not cool about it. Or are shocked, and I don’t want to be the topic of conversation, especially in my line of work. I want it to kind of be like, ‘Here’s who I am,’ at the beginning. I’ll even, during the winter months, sometimes wear capris or intentionally roll up my sleeves.”

Amber got her first piece at age 19, a black outline of three birds on the back of her shoulder. “I got it because my sister was going to get hers touched up, and I was like I really want something. I liked her tattoos and I was like, I will never regret this one because it has to do with my family. So it’s my mom, my dad, and my sister, and then the house that we grew up at had those orange day lilies. I was like I’m just going to pick three birds, because I love birds, that represent the qualities and character traits of my family. And I drew it initially, and then the artist barely did any edits, which I also liked. I was nervous about that, of having something on my body that I would look at later and be like, I don’t like that.”

She didn’t expect her collected ink to grow as exponentially as it did, but found deeper meaning in her tattoos as her body grew into adulthood and changed as well. “I thought I would be a person with like, four. I thought this was going to be my biggest tattoo [the birds on the back of her shoulder]. And then I fell in love with it. Especially growing with my body and getting used to my body and all of its changes. Like, these are permanent things that are really cool, that I can look at and enjoy no matter what my body looks like or does.”

Her favorite piece is the tangle of pumpkins on one arm, inked by Sara Bell at Lucky 13 in Richmond, who has done most of Amber’s nature-related tattoos.

On her opposite arm are two examples of the same species of newt at different stages of life. “The orange one is an adolescent version of the same one on the back, the back is the adult version. It’s an eastern spotted newt. I grew up catching them in my backyard. They’re an amphibian, so whenever it rained in my backyard, they would come out and walk around, and you could find them really easily because they’re orange. And then as adults they live in bodies of water, so I had to get the adult version too. They’re so fun. They’re so beautiful.”

She has a similar story tied to the blue-tailed skink wrapped around one knee. “Our cats would grow up catching them and biting off their tails, and their tails always grow back. Which I thought is just incredible. Even now, my cat brings them to me. I’ll find them in our rain barrel so I’ve covered up our rain barrel so they can’t get in there. They’re just really pretty. Something that has that vibrant of blue.”

Many of Amber’s nature tattoos are designed with the animal’s habitat and life stages in mind, the most impressive depicted down the entire length of one leg—the full life cycle of a monarch butterfly also inked by Sara Bell. “The caterpillar’s down there, the eggs are here, the chrysalis, and then him coming out of the chrysalis, and then him full grown.”

“That is the swallowtail butterfly,” she says of the piece on her opposite thigh. “And all of the things that she either feeds off of or the caterpillars lay their eggs on and eat. Queen Anne’s lace, thistle, fennel.”

All of Amber’s nature tattoos are chosen from some sort of personal attachment or experience she has with the species, like the box turtle on the back of her leg. “I grew up in the woods, and I would also catch them along with the newts. When I got my license, I would always stop and get them out of the street. They were always crossing the street where we grew up because we lived kind of in the middle of nowhere. So much so that my sister and my dad made this vest for me. It’s like an orange vest, like a safety vest, and it has ‘stops for turtles’ on the back of it. Because they’re like, ‘You’re getting out of your fucking car on 81 to like get a turtle out of the road, can you at least wear a vest?’”

I have a lot more of Amber’s tattoos and stories to share in a second post coming soon, including work commemorating loved ones and identity. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Expiration Date

My good pal Steven is sort of the king of expired film. It makes up the bulk of what he shoots, often taking advantage of the low saturation to make esoteric double exposures. I’m sort of new to expired film myself—I’ve shot it occasionally over the years, but more recently added it to my regular rotation.

Expired film is almost wholly unpredictable. The age of the film usually matters less than how it was stored—heat especially has a detrimental effect on film and can render the roll unusable if not kept in cooler conditions. You can find expired film on eBay pretty easily but even the most reliable sellers often don’t know much about where the film has been before they came into it, so any roll bears the risk of not developing images. I’ve had good luck so far, both with expired film I bought from sellers online and rolls gifted to me by friends who found a random roll in a drawer, but even the best expired film often has some limitations.

Most of the expired color film I’ve shot develops a bit underexposed and soft, as seen in the images in this post, which are unedited aside from basic color corrections done when scanned by the lab. Sometimes I like that, but good, bright daylight is your best bet. I shot the above shots just before sunset in a shady area, and the two photos below on the same evening but in more direct light. You can see where the latter two still have the slightly muted effect of expired film without losing as much color saturation.

I’ve shot some black and white film that expired in 1997 (images not featured in this post) that came out beautifully, completely unable to tell the film was expired, and some other black and white that developed with a sepia tone due to the condition of the film (also beautiful). Most of what I photograph isn’t that important in the scheme of things—I rarely take on paid work, and most likely wouldn’t shoot expired film for a hired job unless it was requested, and most of my other work is part of ongoing series in which if the shot doesn’t come out, there will be more opportunities to try it again. I have yet to shoot a roll of expired film that did not come out at all or did not make me happy, but it can happen, and there’s nothing lost if it does.

All images in this post were shot on the same roll of Kodak UltraMax 400, expired in 2008 and purchased on eBay. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.