Three straight days of ink might seem excessive for a first tattoo. But the clock is always ticking, and I’d a lot of catching up to do.
it was the height of the Covid epidemic: high case and fatality rates, testing requirements everywhere, masks de rigueur. We’d been sidelined without foreign travel for over two years; it felt both reckless and about time to hit the road. I’d found Adem Semturk of Fat Fugu Collective on Facebook: a real pro at black and white shading with a lot of energy and a unique lighting style reminiscent of strong candlelight in the dark:
I’d sent him a reference image my friend Richard Peyton had drawn for me, which was to be an homage to my animal rights interest and previous work—a kudu skull ripping out of my back.
In my ignorance about how things work in the ink world, I’d neglected to clarify that the image was only a starting point, and that I wanted a lot of extra details—a full back piece. The job was really more like four days than the allotted three, but I didn’t know that at the time, just like I didn’t know what I wanted in terms of filling it out.
Our trip started in Paris. La Merais is a beautiful and patisserie-filled neighborhood not far from the Louvre. We walked and ate and ate and walked and had a fun time visiting my old college friend, John, and his family.
The catacombs in Paris blew me away: literally ***millions ***of people are down there, accumulated over hundreds of years of plague, civil unrest, and outright murder. The sheer volume of the place has to be seen to be believed, and seemed a good preface for the mortality-themed ink job to come.
We rented a cottage in an estate in Grendon, a quaint village around twenty minutes from Fat Fugu in downtown Northampton. I had visions of Jaime and Lorelei exploring the bucolic charm, gardens and castles of the area, humming along on hedge-lined rural routes, wrong-side-of-the-road be damned, all while I would be jacked up on Gabapentin and Tramadol in my gas mask getting my back pulverized by a (quite talented and determined) Turkish sadist.
At least that was the plan, until Jaime smoked the clutch in our Opal in two minutes flat. There would be no getting dropped-off at Fat Fugu: I’d have to navigate those narrow, roundabout-laden English thoroughfares myself, wrong-side-of-the-road, clutch-in-left-hand and all other challenges fully up to me. I studied the half-lives of all the drugs to get a sense of what was safe to take when with respect to all the nightmarish driving.
The English weather was reliably shitty. Rain and fog abounded and it was hard to see clearly. The Nav on my phone had just enough of a delay to be of limited value finding the 5th or 6th exit, or whatever was necessary at the unending roundabout challenges, but nonetheless fate was on my side: I made the trip back and forth three times, lost on many occasions but never late, and unscathed, the Opal and me both. “Now ***this ***is an adventure!” I reminded myself—each time I passed a truck with no shoulder on a winding road in an under-powered, left-handed clutch of a car. This was no trip to the local mall to buy socks.
I‘d not been inside a tattoo parlor for almost a decade—when my son Danny got a sleeve at age sixteen in New Mexico—and it felt both odd and exciting finally to be in one again, and this time for my benefit. I'd thought about getting the work done for years, and had only just gotten around to making it happen. As an avid traveler I thought it might be fun to combine a foreign trip with inking; I couldn't yet know that it would be an entirely new kind of travel experience. Definitely not a mash-up!
Adem was friendly and professional and got to work on the design as I took some more Gabapentin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen. I'd tested the waters at home with these, and in combination with a low dose of Tramadol; so I already knew the cocktail wouldn't cloud my judgment or affect driving.
My guess as to what needling would feel like were close to the reality. I was relieved as Adem started and it became clear I could handle many hours of this. He worked fast and made a ton of progress in the first day. I didn't know that my medical assistants back home in the office had set up a betting pool over whether I'd actually go through with it! Well, now there were some winners. I suggested inserting the skull from my Keith Richards ring in the forehead of the kudu. Adem liked the idea and integrated it nicely.
Getting a diaper taped to my back seemed like an ironic twist on the finally-a-grownup feeling of getting inked for the first time. A preview, I guess, of where being grownup invariably leads. But fuck all that.
The next two days saw a lot of back-and-forth and revisions. I came up with the biomechanical angle, which was useful thematically and in filling in space, but made a lot more work for the project than Adem had planned. It was going to be tough to get it all done in three days.
The other folks in the studio were friendly and curious about the dermatologist cum-gas-mask popping pills and getting a whole back piece. Bet they thought we do things strange back in New Mexico, wherever that is.
The final day was long. The project really needed a fourth session, which I didn’t have, so Adem kindly and diligently toiled into the night. I’d run out of analgesics by mid-afternoon; it was a long day, therefore, for me and Adem both, as he went over new and already-inked areas, methodically, while the pain intensity kept climbing. Eventually I gave up trying to fight the discomfort and just declared it victorious. That approach turns out to be at least as successful as any analgesic. Even for a twelve-hour session.
Done! Swaddled for the first time in Saniderm, I high-tailed it back to Grendon at midnight, feeling elated at completion but also guilty that my wife and daughter were car-less and doing not a whole lot back at the cottage. But a little family-time was to come in London.
We‘d missed the Louvre, which was regrettable, so it was determined not to miss the British Museum.
We stayed at a funky artist’s loft and hung out with my niece, Vivi. It was a nice conclusion to a successful trip. I changed the dressing after 24 hours, and was surprised how little it hurt on the long flights home. I didn't even need to lean forward and hunch over the tray tables (as I'd thought I would). Sitting back like a normal person wasn't a problem at all.
Back home it was five more days of Saniderm, which took some getting used to, but I was amazed at how fully the piece was healed once I’d fought it off in the shower. First piece in the books! I’d thought I would stop there, but didn’t yet know what it means to be a ‘collector.’
