The River White

We did not have a funeral for my father.

When he passed on July 5th last year, a cremation package had already been set in place a couple years before by his mother, also gone by that time and reduced to ashes of her own. We didn’t discuss it much, my mother and brother and me. I wasn’t sure who would come to a funeral, who my father’s friends were. We talked about the expense of it. It was decided we would have a small reception at home for family and a few old friends my mother was still in touch with. My father’s body, picked up the night he died by a couple of young men in suits employed by the Cremation Society of Virginia, was returned to us in a clear plastic bag tucked in a black plastic box, tucked in a larger wooden box, like some sort of elaborately wrapped gift. He sat on a shelf in my mother’s living room like that for just over a year, while the three of us grieved and thought about what to do with him.

In the end, it was decided to release his ashes at Colonial Beach, a rocky shore of the Potomac River less than two hours northeast of Richmond. Colonial Beach is the one of the few places the four of us ever went as a family. We weren’t big on family trips or vacations when I was growing up; my parents, bohemian and unconventional as they were, never really did any of the typical family fun things we saw on television or heard about our friends doing. We didn’t go to amusement parks or playgrounds or camping. My mother, who doesn’t drive, walked us to the post office where we picked out stamps for our collections. We drew and built things and cut out advertisements for porcelain dolls from the Sunday Parade that we glued onto construction paper and kept in a binder. My father took us bird-watching and to the sites of war memorials, to museums and the Baltimore aquarium. We never did any of these things as a family of four—although we all lived in the same house, there were the things my brother and I did with our mother, and the things we did with our father. Colonial Beach was the exception.

We stood atop a small cliff overlooking the Potomac one recent Sunday, taking turns throwing fistfuls of my father’s ashes into the wind. But first my brother, Robert, took a tiny glass vial out of his pocket and carefully packed it with a bit to keep with him. Robert and I climbed down the rocky bank to the water, where we turned the river white with my father. We left a little in the bottom corner of the bag to pack into tiny vials for my mother and me, and to sprinkle in the pet cemetery in her backyard. Back at the top of the overlook, we stood watching the bone-white of my father’s ashes wash down shore and said how he, a recovering addict who turned his life around in his fifties, taught us it’s never too late.

I had two cameras with me that day: my Minolta X-700 loaded with a roll of Kodak that I had already filled with images of flowers for a double-exposure portrait project, and the Pentax K1000 my father had given me, loaded with Amber 400D, a film pretreated to produce color shifts. I finished what was left of both rolls by the time Robert and I climbed closer to the water, but luckily he had his iPhone on him and captured some great photos that I will cherish forever. Collected below is a mix of all three.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Dream Without Fear, Love Without Limits

Part two of Carson’s tattoo story continues with decisions made and lessons learned. (You can find part one here). One of Carson’s largest pieces is a promising start on her left thigh, the outline of an owl.

“I got this a while ago on somebody’s couch. It was a friend of a friend, and then I stopped being friends with the friend after I got the outline. And then never went back to his couch, because I didn’t know him or a way to speak to him. And I just haven’t gotten it colored yet because I feel like, as it is, it’s ok, but I’d like to put a decent amount of money into it to make it something great and until I’m ready to do that, I’d rather it just be what it is.”

“I found this on Pinterest very long ago and I always loved owls. The way this one was colored was really cartoon-style and cute. I just thought it was really dope and he would like protect me, and then he never really got finished. There was going to be flowers on the ends of these branches, like there’s just branches that are nothing because he didn’t put lines there. They were going to be like no-outline flowers, all in color.”

“On the back of this calf I have a matching tattoo with my friend Bianca. We both have the same rose, and it’s like stained-glass style. It’s from Beauty and the Beast, it’s a quote. There’s a lot of Beauty and the Beast stuff that’s done in stained-glass and I also just thought it was really cool. ‘Tale as old as time.’”

“This was the one I got when I was eighteen,” Carson said, pulling up the side of her tank top to reveal the script along her ribs. “It looks awful I think, and it probably needs to be touched up, because it needed to be touched up when it was done. It’s patchy. It hurt more than probably any of them. It says ‘Destino,’ I was really leaning into the Cuban heritage when I got that. Like, why didn’t I get ‘destiny,’ why did I get ‘destino,’ I don’t know. But I really believe in, everything happens for a reason. And destiny, and that if it happens, there’s a reason for it. Not really religious or spiritual, but I just think that the universe gives you things.”

Inked in various places along Carson’s shoulders and arms are the names of her three children paired with sets of characters.

“First we have Alexis. I got this in Petersburg. Karla was getting a tattoo, and I went with her for moral support, and that meant I got a tattoo as well. This is what I thought of on the day, in the chair. I was like, I don’t have my daughter’s name, and this is her birthday in Roman numerals.”

“Wait, look, I can flex now! I can make it look like a muscle. It’s never been a muscle before, that’s new.”

“On the tops of my shoulders, I thought I had learned my lesson but I didn’t. I was still a grownup who got tattooed in somebody’s house. I had Devonte at this time so I was twenty-five, twenty-six. And I got his name tattooed on my shoulders on somebody’s kitchen table. After work, after a long day at Five Guys. It was my employee’s father’s boyfriend who did this. And this is his birthday on the corresponding side. It’s really big, and it’s not greatly done.”

The same employee’s father’s boyfriend also colored in an existing tattoo on Carson’s butt that she’d gotten on a Friday the 13th. “It’s like patchy. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was an adult! I knew better, I knew to go to a shop. And he was like, ‘I’m a great, I got you, I can do a great job.’ And I’m like, totally, got it! And I think I smoking a joint on his table while he was doing it, and like passing the joint to him. Like not smart decisions.”

“This I got on a Cinco de Mayo. I was a little intoxicated from margaritas, and I thought I should go get a tattoo! And Day of the Dead skull was what I decided. It was only $70. The difference when you go into a shop and your energy can make a big difference, because like my friend went in and was like, ‘I can only pay this much, what can you do? What are you going to draw me?’ And I was just like, I’m thinking of a Day of the Dead skull in black and white, and maybe like a rose. Like what do you think? And he came up with all this. And did it for the same price as her tinier, not-great skull. Because she was just coming into it like, ‘This is all I got, what do you have for me?’ As opposed to, I was like, you know, I’m open, what do you got?”

“This was a Friday the 13th, this was like a $40 one. And I just felt like I needed some luck at the time. I used to go to the horse races a lot, so I like the horseshoe. I just thought it was cute, why not?”

She tried a different approach in attracting good luck with a small piece on her hip. “I got that at like twenty or twenty-one, and just you know, ironic. I thought it would bring me good luck, you know.”

“These were both Friday the 13th tattoos. Both from Lucky 13, not from All For One. When I was in middle school, I read a book called A Thousand Paper Cranes, and at the end of the book, it taught you how to make a paper crane. And I remember how to make said paper cranes still, the only piece of origami I can make you. And I make them often, like I used to make them out of receipts or something when I was bored, or little scraps or Post-Its. And just leave little cranes around. So I went there for this one, and waited in the long line because I wanted this one.”

“While we’re running down why we shouldn’t get tattoos in people’s houses and we should get tattoos in tattoo shops, this wonderful quote that takes up my entire back says, ‘Dream without fear, live without limits.’ That’s what it says, right?”

I read aloud slowly, “Dream without fear, love without limits.”

 “See? So, it was wrong. My friend Chelsea was going to this guy’s house to get some cherries tattooed on her, and she wanted me to come along with her. Of course, why not? And then she was like, ‘Do you want a tattoo?’ And I was like, nah, I can’t really afford it right now, the $20 to get a tattoo in this guy’s house, I’m good right now. And she was like, ‘I’ll pay for it, what do you want?’ And I’m like, I don’t really know, I don’t really have anything in mind. And she’s like, ‘Well, find something! I’ll be here for a minute.’ And I found this quote on the Internet. We were also drinking and not sober. He did this on his bed. I didn’t know what it said for a while, and it kind of looks like Disney font. It also looks like he ran out of paper but I’m the paper. Because the spacing between the beginning of his letters and the end of his letters is not equal. There was a stencil and everything, I don’t know happened, I don’t know why it looks like this. Because he did it on his bed, that’s why it looks like this.”

“So after I got this, that’s when I swore I was never going to do another one, and then I got the owl, and I swore I wasn’t going to do another one, and then I did the shoulders and the butt, and then I was like, I’m never going to do this again. I’ve learned my lesson so many times. I’m the fool, every time.”

“The one on the back of my ear I got at the same time that I got ‘Unlucky,’ and I thought that this one was going to hurt so much because it was on my head, and this one didn’t hurt at all. It just kind of felt vibrate-y and a little tickly. And then the teeny ‘Unlucky’ on my hip, that one hurt so bad.”

“I really like how the dots are done in it,” Carson said of the flowers on her feet. “When it first was done, you could feel the dots. You can’t feel them anymore, but for like the first three or four years you could still kind of feel the pink dots. The guy who did this later did something else and he recognized it because of that style. He was like, ‘That’s my style, I’ve taught it to other people,’ but the dots were apparently his thing. He was like a traveling artist who came in, so it was like random that he recognized it.”

Thank you, cousin, for participating in my tattoo stories series, and thank you, readers, for reading. As always, you’re beautiful.

She'd Created a Monster

Carson is my first cousin, on my mother’s side. Her mother and my mother are sisters. I was twelve years old when Carson was born, an age difference that meant less the older we got, especially the older Carson got. She has three kids now, and a lot of tattoos.

She knew early on that she wanted tattoos, starting with a small Playboy logo on her ankle in her teens. “I got that when I was sixteen. My mom has a matching one, it was actually her idea. Her first tattoo, and only tattoo. And she was going to go get it with your brother, he was getting, I think, something on his knee or maybe the back of his calf, I don’t remember. But they were going together to get a tattoo, and I was just enamored by the idea of a tattoo. And so I begged to go get one, and she said no for a while. And I was I guess annoying enough that she decided to change her mind and we got matching ones.”

In the early 2010s, Carson and my brother Robert started going to Friday the 13th events at All For One Tattoo, a shop owned by our friend Dave in Richmond. If you don’t have Friday the 13th tattoo events in your town, imagine sheets of flash designs priced at $13 (and in All For One’s case, $31 and $113) and long lines trailing down the block. I was still on my “all my tattoos have to mean something” kick and didn’t want to pick something off a flash sheet, so it would be a few years before I joined the fun, but Carson and Robert were early revelers.

And it is a bit of a party, at All For One anyway. Get there early, make friends, choose something that speaks to you. Like the webby little heart beside Carson’s Playboy bunny.

“It was black and grey, and I colored it to be Spiderman. It’s a nod to my boyfriend Darryl. Love him, but I don’t really want his name on me or anything too much like that, so I liked that this was subtle and it’s not screaming Spiderman, but if you know, you know.”

“I got this at seventeen after I got the Playboy bunny. This was the following year. I decided I wanted this to memorialize our grandfather. Grey ribbons mean a lot of things, but it’s for Parkinson’s. It’s also for like some brain disorders. Like other people have come up to me and been like, ‘Oh, do you have this or do you know someone?’  My mom signed for that one too and she said, ‘This is the last one, I’m not doing anymore. This is all you get. Once you turn eighteen, you can do whatever you want.’ And then that’s when I got them back-to-back, and she started to worry a little bit that she’d created a monster.”

“All of these butterflies are Friday the 13th tattoos, and I’ve gotten them to represent different people in my life. I used to self-harm, and I joined the Butterfly Project on social media, back like Tumblr days. And it was just, you used to draw butterflies with Sharpies and name them after people to try to keep yourself from self-harming, if that’s what you were trying to do at the time. And so, I’ve gotten the butterflies throughout the years, ones that speak to me, and name them after people.”

“Alexis [her daughter] is the bottom one, purple, orange, reds. And then the next one is Devonte [her son] which is like these greens and yellows and blues. Which is funny because when I got that, he was a bitty baby and he didn’t know colors or what he liked, and he likes yellow and green best out of all the colors. And then I got this one for Abuela, this little green and yellow guy, but she probably wouldn’t like to know that because she always told me not to get a tattoo for her. It just reminded me of her, it was tiny and dainty. This one was next, this was for my mom, the big one. And this one for Zoey [her daughter] and this one for Darryl.”

“The moth was a Friday the 13th, you have it too. And I’ve always kind of thought that this was for Andy, because he’s not really a butterfly, he’s a moth,” Carson told me, referring to our cousin Andy who passed away in 2020.

Opposite the moth at her elbow lies a line of script twisting into a small blue character, the word Ohana spooling alongside the outline of Disney’s Stitch.

“I got this in Atlantic City for my birthday. We kept the kids with Nana, and me and Darryl went to Atlantic City. I wanted a boardwalk tattoo, so I walked around until I found a shop that looked like a boardwalk shop. This was $100, Darryl thought it was way overpriced. But he paid for it because it was my birthday! And I wanted it. I got the Stitch to be this blue. It was supposed to be kind of fading, it doesn’t really fade from black to blue. It’s just black and then blue. And also he doesn’t really look like Stitch, so he could use some work. But he’s cute! Some shading could happen.”

The family theme runs strong in Carson’s ink.

“Dave drew this and did this for me after I had Devonte. My grandmother’s middle name is Encarnación, but I always thought that Encarnación meant carnation. I think somebody told me that, or I just made it up in my childhood head. And it doesn’t mean that, it means incarnation. So I have always associated carnations with Abuela, but that’s false, wrong Spanish. So, I got carnations for her, and I got roses.”

(That’s my Abuela too, fyi.)

“The carnations are down here, and these are my mom and Abuela. And then I wanted three roses. I didn’t realize until he put it on that there were four roses, and then I had Zoey. So I think Dave knew before I did that I needed four roses. It was a happy accident because I don’t have to add one now. These were supposed to be me and my kids.”

“This is a phoenix that I got on a manic episode, love her. I was in a little bit of a dark place when I got her and I was feeling like I was going to be reborn, and I like everything that the phoenix has to say.”

“I got the star first and then the mushroom. You were with me for those.”

“The birds I got when I was eighteen with your brother, on a Friday the 13th. I had just turned eighteen, and I had just gotten a tattoo for my 18th birthday. And my mom was already like, ‘Oh no, don’t get addicted.’ Like, what are you doing? And I went with him to the Friday the 13th and got this one. Dave did it and I liked it so much, I couldn’t imagine not having the other one right here. My other wrist just looked empty, like where was his friend? And he [Dave] skipped me ahead in line because I had to go to dinner, Robert was supposed to get me home. He [Robert] was in the chair so I had a little bit more time, and he [Dave] took me right after he did Robert real quick and did his friend [the bird]. Carl and Craig, he named them for me because I asked him to.”

“My semicolons I got at Loose Screw Tattoo. Jen did it when she was apprenticing. And those are for suicide awareness. I’ve had two attempts. And I’m still here. That’s why there’s two.”

Surrounding Carson’s semicolons are four black-line astrology symbols—three on one arm, and one on the other. “I got this and this a while ago when it was just me and Alexis, and then I got these two recently. So mine is on the left and my kids are on the right. It’s Libra, Leo, and Taurus. And for a little while before I had Zoey, it worked because me and Devonte are both Leos, so I was like that’s fine, double meaning. But then once I had Zoey I was trying to figure out how I was gonna incorporate.”

Carson has so many tattoos, and so much to share about them, that we need a second post. Stay tuned for part two of my cousin’s tattoo stories soon. Also, in a tattoo story series first, there are two digital photos in today’s set. To date, I have shot all other tattoo sets entirely on film, but when I photographed Carson, I misjudged how many frames I would need and ran out. I happened to have my digital camera with me, which is incredibly rare. I never take it along as a backup, and usually only pick it up a couple times a year. Can you guess which shots are digital?

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.