volume 7
The Human Canvas: Wiping the Slate Clean
by Kristin Scott
As I walked down the hallway with its fading and peeling ashen walls, I could smell the burning flesh. My stomach started to turn. I’d smelled it many times before, but this time, it was lingering and making me nauseous, probably more from the anticipation of pain than the actual smell. As I rounded the corner and followed the woman with the long white coat into the room, I started to roll up my sleeves, like a Pavlovian beast trained for pain rather than pleasure. Taking my seat, I put my arm out on the table, and wondered how many more times I was going to have to do this, knowing that my burning flesh smell was about to mix with the others. It was more difficult each time, more painful, something I was beginning to dread days prior, to the point of making me sick before I got sick for real. You think it’s painful getting a tattoo on? Try having it removed.
My dad was actually the one who took me to get my first tattoo after I’d just turned 19 years old, back in the early ’80s, when it was more of a form of rebellion than the latest fashion. Since my dad was one of those hip, laid back dudes who used to play jazz piano back in Greenwich Village in the ’60s with the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, he was the type of man who was more interested in being my friend than my father. Mom called him the “vacation dad,”because he only had me for summer vacations and didn’t have to “bear the responsibility”of raising me. Of course, I liked him better than mom; he was a hell of a lot more fun and always did things that made me feel like an adult, like when he’d set up for his gigs in the Playboy Club on Michigan Avenue and have the bunny-tailed, bunny-eared, barely-clothed waitresses bring Coca-Cola to me in a wine glass. But when I first decided to get a tattoo, I hesitantly brought it up to Dad, thinking that this might just be where cool stops and parenting begins. But rather than lecturing me or suggesting that I wait about ten years to make this decision, Dad assumed that being the hard-headed kid that I was, he might as well help me rather than try to stop me.
And so typical of Dad; the one who researched out the best lesbian bar in Chicago when I first came out; the one who gave me a twenty dollar bill when he saw me eyeing from a distance the “Joy of Lesbian Sex”on a shelf in a bookstore and then waited for me outside for the next half hour until I finally emerged, brown paper bag tucked coyly under my left arm. He actually made phone calls to find out who was the best tattoo artist in the city. He came up with the name of some guy who was recently on the Donohue show, figuring if this tattoo artist was good enough to be on the top-rated talk show in Chicago, he was good enough to put a tattoo on his daughter.
Of course, part of the fun for Dad is not just being hip enough to “dig the scene”and lend a hand, but actually participating in whatever it is that he’s helping me to do that my mother would otherwise kill me over. So after making an appointment, Dad went with me to this guy’s tattoo parlor, saying that he wanted to go to survey the whole operation, to make sure that a clean needle was being used and that no “funny business”was going on. But I think Dad was just vicariously living through me; if he’d been able to be a lesbian, too, I think he would’ve.
My first tattoo was Snoopy. I’d loved Snoopy ever since I was five years old, and my connection to that childhood pal apparently lingered into my budding adulthood. I thought it was cute and non-offensive. So I had it put on my right forearm, asking that Snoopy’s collar be green (my favorite color) and his ears tinged with a little orange (my girlfriend’s favorite color). I gave the guy $35 and put my arm out on the table. Dad sat behind me, watching the whole procedure, asking a ton of questions, and being overall annoyingly non-cool. It took all of 30 minutes. It was somewhat painful, but no more than you’d expect from a bunch of light pin pricks. Two years later, I added two more to my body, this time without the accompaniment of Dad. Both were flying unicorns, larger than Snoopy, and much more colorful. Under one of them, I had them etch into the middle of my left breast my girlfriend’s nickname. Of course, as could have been predicted, we broke up a few years later. And ever since then, I’ve had to explain to all my lovers since what “Moe”means.
As I reached the business-casual age of a professional thirty-something with Starbucks coffee in the morning and an office of my own, the unicorns and Snoopy of my less than innocent youth lost their appeal. The cartoon, fantasia-like characters just didn’t fit in with my black suit, briefcase, palm-pilot-to-keep-track-of-all-my-meetings world. Winters were no problem because I wore sweaters and suits, but in warmer weather, I could never roll up my sleeves or wear white, because the colors would show through. Perhaps everyone in my office had a tattoo on some part of her body, and I just didn’t know it, but I never felt comfortable enough to take the chance of letting my tattoos show.
Of course, tattoos have gone through many evolutions; they’ve been around for centuries. The word “tattoo”comes from the Tahitian “tatu,”which means “to mark something.”And since then, people of all persuasions have been marking their bodies, as our American hippies once embellished their sambas, painting them thick with the primary colors of their generation’s emotions, which churned in and out of patterns like the contents of their minds. Similarly, the body has been an artistic, cultural, economic and political canvas of expression.
But it is believed that the practice of tattooing originated sometime around 12,000 B.C., the earliest recorded ones discovered in Egypt during the building of the pyramids and the great empire, and later adopted by the Cretian, Arabian, Grecian, Persian, and Chinese civilizations in around 2,000 B.C. (Gilbert 12) In the 18th century, throughout the Marquesas, a group of volcanic islands in the South Pacific region known to many as French Polynesia, the art of tattoos became a ritual that indicated wealth, beauty and courage. Men had their entire bodies tattooed, while women’s tattoos were “restricted to their hands, lips, shoulders, ankles and the area behind their ears”(Shukla 80). Not only did the person being tattooed have to be able to pay the artist well for the service, but the more elaborate the design, the more aesthetic, and thus appreciated, the artwork was to the community. The person being tattooed was expected to submit himself or herself to the procedure (then a rather rudimentary one) without flinching. Tattooing was a ritual reserved for the upper class members of the community.
Tattoos began to flow through the subversive channels of England in the mid-18th century, upon the return of sailors from duty in Tahiti. And then in 1891, Samuel O’Reilly invented the first tattoo machine based on another piece of equipment invented by Thomas Edison for engraving hard surfaces (www.nmm.ac.uk). It was during this time that tattoos slowly became associated with the lower class and criminal underclass, the exotic “other”world from which the sailors returned. At precisely the same time, Paul Gauguin took his perceived flight from civilization and brought forth paintings of primitive iconographies that threatened conservative bourgeois aesthetics and ideologies. Given the nature of fashion, it’s no surprise that tattoos then became chic amongst the audaciously artistic and intellectual types, always on the fringe of the underworld.
As we approached the 20th century, the irony lay in the fact that in contrast to the inhabitants of regions such as Tahiti and Amazonia, where the practice of tattooing represented a deeply entrenched conformity of inherited cultural models, in the western world, tattooing was seen as anything but civilized. In the “civilized”late 20th century Western world, tattoos swung into the dark undercurrent of our collective conscious, becoming associated with bikers, criminals, gangs and other social clusters of depravity. Those who marked themselves often supposedly did so to distinguish themselves as outside the boundaries and borders of civilization, defying conformity. Tattoos became the mark of defiance. For me, it was certainly a rebellion, though a subtle one, a gentle and slightly whimsical version of “fuck you.”
Only recently have tattoos been transformed into a marketable, chic trend. As the curators of the 2000 “Body Art: Marks of Identity”Exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York explain:
Body art allows people to reinvent themselves as rebels, the opening panel informs us, ‘to follow fashions, to play and experiment with new identities. Like performance artists and actors, people in everyday life use body art to cross boundaries of gender, national identity, and cultural stereotypes’(Gardner 55).
And yet, curiously, although there are more people getting tattoos than ever before, the rate of tattoo removals has also skyrocketed. Apparently, many people in America who had tattoos etched into their skin years ago are now having them removed. According to one laser surgeon, he removes tattoos from “50 to 80 patients a week,”essentially tripling “the traffic [of his] practice”(Ho). And yet, according to a recent study by Harris Interactive for American Demographics, “an estimated 30 million Americans –and one in six between the ages of 18 and 24 –now sport tattoos.”So if there is such an increase in the removal of tattoos, then what accounts for the rise in tattoo parlors? In metro Atlanta alone, “more than 50 shops perform tattooing, a tenfold increase in the past decade”(Ho).
I imagine two parallel lines going frantically in opposite directions, like two different colonies of ants on a mission. On one side, us baby boomers, scurrying for the nearest tattoo removal center, while those just coming out of high school and heading into college are bustling along in the opposite direction toward the tattoo parlors, stopping in the lip, ear, belly-button, breast and (gulp) “down there”piercing shops, and the rainbow-colored, hair-dye waterfalls along the way. Perhaps we baby boomers are still doing what we’ve always done, rebelling against the fashions of the time. It’s cool now to have tattoos? Gotta get them off!
As I approached my mid-thirties, my tattoos were certainly less appealing. And I couldn’t bear the thought of heading into my ’40s with them. After all, I’m slowly but surely moving toward my Crone years, the years where I’m supposed to be getting in touch with the Great Mother of All and connecting with the goddess that is burgeoning within –the wise and wonderful woman I’m to become. These years will be accompanied by words such as authenticity, winter, thresholds, boundlessness, joy, synthesis and integration. And how, I wonder, am I supposed to embrace my herstory, become a wise woman who speaks with patience and truth and sets examples for young maidens if I have a Snoopy tattoo? And what about when I turn 60 or 70? As time and gravity spread the tattoo on my breast out like a sticky wet lump of dough, the unicorn on my drooping breast would look like someone had taken a rolling pin to it. Snoopy would grow old with wrinkles and folds, and I’d no doubt be laughed at by the others during water aerobics at the senior center. Admittedly I did have a slight twinge of guilt when Charles Shultz passed away, as if removing the Snoopy was somehow an affront to his memory and my childhood reverence. But I was already halfway through the process, so I figured both Snoopy and Charles would just have to live on in my mind.
Ironically, though I spent most of my life living on the east coast, the place of birth became the place of death for these lively characters of mine; it seemed only fitting that I should return to Chicago to rid myself of the tattoos I got in Chicago. Of course, Dad had moved to New York by now, so he didn’t get the pleasure of accompanying me to get the damned things removed. I would’ve loved to drag him with me into the burning-flesh room.
I couldn’t afford a regular laser surgeon, so I went to the far west side of Chicago, to a “free”clinic that did gang tattoo removal, tucked in the middle of a ten-square-block hellhole of rotting buildings, burnt-out deserted cars, guys doing drug deals on the corners, twenty-dollar prostitutes with Pepto-Bismol pink stretch pants, and rusted metal, empty shopping carts that lie dead and twisted amongst squished beer cans, busted bottles, and smashed hubcaps in broken asphalt parking lots like some futuristic, end-of-the-world-in-a-major-city, war movie. But hey, you can’t expect the gang members to come down to the Gold Coast to get their tattoos removed, and I doubt the posh residents of Chicago would be too pleased with the city officials sponsoring the program in their neighborhoods.
I didn’t dare drive my brand new car there, so I had to take a train and two busses, the last of which, thankfully, deposited me right at the front door of the clinic. The first time I went, though, I had no idea where I was going. I knew it was a bad area, so I asked my partner at the time to go with me. She brought along a map and directed us onto the red-line, which we later found out was a good five blocks away from the clinic. I should’ve known better than to trust her directions; she’s always been horrible at navigation. And after we got off the train, she pulled out this huge map and started looking at it, trying to figure out which direction we should walk in.
“Put that map away!”I said, grabbing for it.
She yanked it away, stepped back, and said, “Why? I’m trying to figure out where we are and what street we need to go down.”
“You don’t already know? You should’ve had this memorized,”I said, exasperated, as I looked around and noticed that a bunch of guys with loose jeans falling down over their hips, bandanas on their heads and chains hanging from their belts were staring at us from a crumbling porch. “That map is like asking for trouble.”I snatched the map away from her and said, “Come on!”and started walking away from the group of guys, throwing my head ever so slightly to the side every few steps to make sure we weren’t being followed.
“What’s your problem?”she asked me, annoyed now because I’d taken her map, taken control. “Take a look around . . . do you see any other white people around here? Do you see anyone wearing the kinds of clothes we have on? Or women stumbling around with maps in their hands? Jesus Christ,”I said, shaking my head, “how fucking oblivious are you?”I was scared, probably too scared, which was making me more angry with her than I should’ve been, but I didn’t like being lost on the far west side of Chicago; and the last thing we needed to do was advertise the fact that we had no idea where we were or where we were going.
After about ten minutes of arguing about which direction we should go in, we finally figured it out and got to the clinic just in time for my appointment.
After that day, I always changed into my grungiest clothes, hoping I’d have that “don’t fuck with me”look that I can occasionally don in an effort to keep people out of my face. I also sometimes get called “sir,”which usually annoys me, but I was glad for the mistaken identity in these instances. No one ever bothered me.
When we walked into the clinic, Chase took a seat while I went up to the front desk. Again, we were the only white people in the overly-crowded room. Mostly, there were black women, or rather, black teenagers, sitting in chairs with young children and babies. The television was blaring some taped video about health care, noticeably plastered with nothing but white faces, talking as if they’d just come from Health Care la-la land, all smiles because they were eating the proper foods or got a great check-up at the doctor’s office. But none of those white people in the video were in health clinics like this one in areas like this. It was embarrassing. It was one of those moments I wished I wasn’t white.
“Can I help you?”the woman behind the desk asked, not looking up.
“I have an appointment for a tattoo removal,”I said.
“Name?”she asked, still looking down.
I told her and she shoved a bunch of forms at me, suddenly seeming to notice that not only was I white, I was a woman. “Go sit down and fill these out,”she said, staring at me as if I had a dead animal on my head.
I had to fill out five forms, which amazed me. I couldn’t imagine some gun-toting, strong-ass, no-bullshit gang member who had been forced by court order to have his tattoos removed sitting down with the patience to fill out all these forms. The last form asked me what gang I was in. I wrote, “The Peanuts Gang,”chuckling to myself as I did it. A lady next to me, bouncing a toddler on her knee, threw a look at me like I’d just farted.
The “free”clinic wasn’t really free. “Twenty-five dollars. Cash only,”the woman behind the desk barked after she glanced through my forms. Either she didn’t see the “Peanut’s Gang”remark, didn’t find it funny, or, most likely, just didn’t care.
I pulled out twenty-five dollars and handed it to her. She said nothing more, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to sit down or wait, so I just stood there. Two minutes later, as if annoyed with me, she growled, “Sit down. I’ll give you your receipt in a minute.”
I sat down, not knowing what to look at. The place was so crowded that Chase and I couldn’t find two seats together, so we ended up on opposite ends of the room. The magazines littered about were some I’d never seen before. The few times I looked up at someone and smiled, they just stared blankly at me or vacantly through me, as if I didn’t exist. So I just sat there, staring off into some space on the floor, leaning back, tossing my legs out into the aisle, as if I had nothing better to do than hang out there.
I’ve never had laser surgery by a laser surgeon in a regular hospital or upscale treatment center, so I don’t know if the results would’ve been better than by the technician in the tattoo clinic, but according to the American Dermatology Center in New York, the “less expensive methods leave ‘unsightly scars’”(Lifestyle). And sure enough, I do have some scarring; and even after a good two and a half years of treatments, the ink is still not completely gone. There are other ways to remove a tattoo, but laser surgery, which is what I had (though via a cheap machine with minimal technology and administered by a technician, not a doctor) is supposedly the most effective. The laser basically “breaks apart the ink particles so the body’s immune system can flush them out”(Ho). You can also remove a tattoo by “excision,”essentially cutting away the skin that contains the tattoo, which may then require a skin graft; by “dermabrasion,”which “peels the skin”away and causes a lot of bleeding; or by “burning,”a method that leaves a “very significant scar,”not to mention, sounds excruciatingly painful (Lifestyle).
A doctor had called in a prescription for me, a week before my first removal appointment, for an ointment that I was supposed to put on the tattoo two hours prior, then cover with plastic wrap to keep the ointment from drying, so that my arm would be numb, the pain “minimal.”I figured since the first tattoo I had put on was Snoopy, he should be the first to go. The ointment was rather expensive, and though I had health insurance, it wasn’t covered because it fell under the heading of “cosmetic”health care. But I figured the cost was worth any amount of pain saved.
In the burning-flesh room, Vicki, the woman who was removing the tattoo, put on dark goggles, removed the plastic wrap from my arm, swabbed my arm with alcohol, and started flipping switches on the machine. She handed me another, lighter colored pair of goggles and told me to put them on. I wasn’t scared. I’d had the damned thing put on in the first place and though it hurt, I was tough. But damned if that laser didn’t burn like hell when she pointed the gun-shaped thing at my tattoo and started zapping away. It felt like someone was taking a large rubber band and pulling it back as far as possible, then snapping it onto my arm, over and over, in rapid succession, staccato bursts of flames.
“You ok?”she asked. Not waiting for a response she added, “You need to hold still.”
I gritted my teeth, balled my hand up into a fist, and said, “Yeah, I’m fine,”as she started zapping again.
I could feel the blood rushing into my face. If this is what it feels like with the anesthetic ointment, what the fuck does it feel like without it? Thank god the tattoo was relatively small. She stopped a few times and dabbed the area with a piece of gauze, lifting away the little blood drops that were forming on my arm so that she could see what she was doing. In about ten minutes, she was finished. She applied Neosporin to my tattoo and wrapped my arm with gauze. “Don’t take this off for at least 24 hours, and don’t take a shower for 36,”she instructed. “Do you have any questions?”
“Yes, I have another tattoo on my left arm, near my shoulder, and I’d like to set up another appointment for that.”I rolled up my sleeve to show her the unicorn flying over a rainbow as it came out of a cushion of white clouds.
“I can do it now if you’d like,”she said.
“I only brought $25 with me,”I replied.
“It doesn’t matter. The $25 is per treatment, not tattoo.”
“Oh, well, in that case,”thinking about how much more money I could save doing them both at once, “go ahead.”
“It’ll hurt more since you didn’t put the anesthetic cream on it,”she cautioned as she began swabbing it with alcohol.
I just said, “yeah, OK,”and started to stare off into space, somewhere in the same zone of daydreams I must’ve been in when I got the unicorn in the first place. I balled my hand up into a fist again. This one took longer, and I thought at one point that I was going to pass out from the pain. Again, it felt like a high-speed thumping of rubber bands snapping on my skin, but much worse than the first time. In all my years, I can’t remember anything ever hurting so bad; not the time I was playing basketball and broke my arm and the bone was sticking up and out of my skin; or when I fell fifteen feet from a tree when I was trying to saw down a branch to make a tree house; or the time when I was stung by over twenty yellow jackets behind the horse barn; or even when I went through the windshield of a van during a car crash in my early twenties. Nothing had ever hurt so bad as this little handheld machine zapping a pretty red light onto my skin. But I just sat there, unflinching, eyes scrunched up behind my goggles, tears rolling down my cheeks, teeth crushed so hard against each other I thought they’d crumble, the redness from my face now spreading to my chest. By the time it was over and she’d applied bandages, I could barely stand up, but she was shuffling me out as quickly as she could. As I slowly walked to the counter again to make another appointment, a short but burly guy with olive skin, oily, slicked-down black hair, a dirty white tank top and tattoos covering both arms sauntered back down the hall behind her. I bet he didn’t put that ointment on, I thought as I watched him walk into the burning-flesh room.
For two full days, I couldn’t sleep. I’d lay on one side and it hurt, then I’d roll onto the other, and it’d hurt worse. So I spent two nights laying on my back, eyes wide open, in pain. I couldn’t sleep with my partner for fear she’d accidentally knock my arm in the middle of the night. So I spread myself out on the couch. No, she did not offer to give me the bed, which is, no doubt, just one of many reasons we are no longer together. I also had to cut off the arms of a t-shirt, because I couldn’t bear the touch of the fabric against my skin. Even a breeze coming in from an open window was painful, as if someone just poured alcohol onto an open wound.
And for two days afterwards, I had a fever, which I later learned was also par for the course. And my arms were swollen red-puffy-heavy things that I could hardly move. When I took off the bandages, I had to literally rip each bandage off, for it always stuck to the wound. I tried peeling it off slowly at first, but it just made the suffering last longer. For days after that, I had to keep applying Neosporin to both areas to keep them from getting infected. The ointment mixed with the blood, and every now and then I’d have to wipe my arms because the mixture of Neosporin and blood would start to trickle down as it melted from the heat of the wound. I had crusty drippings all over my arms, from parts that I’d missed dabbing when the ointment first ran down.
After about three or four days, scabs started to form, but I wasn’t supposed to pick at them. I couldn’t help it, though, because they were so itchy. I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t either claw at them or slowly pick away the scabs. The fun part, a good five days or so later, was when it all turned into a light coating of dead skin, like when you’ve been burned by the sun. I’d spend hours peeling away these translucent layers, rolling them up into little balls like I used to as a child with my Wonder Bread, and collecting them in the palm of my other hand until I had a good pile to toss in the trash. I did this to the chagrin of my partner, who would sit there and stare at me as if I were sniffing the insides of my sneakers after a five-hour game of basketball.
I did this routine every six to eight weeks for over two years. It was awful, nothing like the half hour each it took to put the damned things on in the first place, and the one week of healing afterwards. But after the “free”gang tattoo removal clinic stopped carrying the laser equipment, which they had to sell because of budget cuts, I had to stop going for treatments. Snoopy’s ear and the tip of his nose are scarred with small, but obvious patches of white—white not like skin white, but like paper white—and a little of the orange that outlined his ear still remains. For the most part, though, from a distance, you can’t see it at all. The only thing that still shows is a little bit of Snoopy’s green collar. Apparently, green is the hardest color to get rid of.
Since the unicorn was a lot bigger and more colorful and required more treatment, it’s only a little more than half-faded, though there’s no scarring. One of these days, when I’m rich from all those novels I’ll sell, I’ll go to a real laser surgeon and have the rest removed, perhaps even fix the little bit of scarring on my right forearm. Of course, now that I am no longer working in the corporate world where I was much more self-conscious and feeling as if no one would take me seriously, it seems to matter much less. Oh well, at least they were light, airy kinds of characters, my Snoopy and unicorns, as they fade on my skin and in importance, and not some skull and cross-bones crossed with a snake weaving in and out. In fact, now that I’m living the creative life of a starving artist, the tattoos don’t seem to matter at all. In fact, if anything, they are probably somewhat cachet. Hmmm. Maybe I could get a new tattoo with a portrait of Virginia Woolf? Or a row of books. No. On second thought, I think I’ll just keep my artistic and cultural expressions to the page.
Works Cited
Gardner, James. “Ink-Stained Wretches.”National Review 05 June 2000, Volume 52, Issue 10: 55.
Gilbert, Steven. Tattoo History: A Source Book (New York: June, 2000) 12.
Ho, Rodney. “Tattoo Removal: The Art of Regret,”The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 18 October 2002: Friday Home Edition, 1E.
Shukla, Pravina. “The Human Canvas,”Natural History Nov. 2002, Vol. 108, Issue 9: 80. www.dictionary.com/search?q=tattoo www.nmm.ac.uk/galleries/skinb%5fdeep%5fgallery.htm