My chest/abdomen piece receives really nice reviews. (Once it was even ‘stolen‘ on FB by an unscrupulous artist claiming it as his own work—I can’t imagine a better compliment!) Occasionally, though, it gets mistaken for an elaborate T-shirt: the curved and well-demarcated edge of deep blue on the upper sternum, arcing up to the sides, does resemble a collar. I’d set up the tattoo that way in order to be able to hide the ink when (perhaps) necessary at medical meetings or in the office. But as I’ve “grown into my skin” over the past three years, acquiring more and more ink and losing shyness about what I have, and seeing that my patients largely don’t care or even like the ink and its attendant stories, the emotional (and probably even professional) need to cover my tattoos has receded quite a good bit. So I decided I’d work a little more on the front piece, combining a visit to meet Dr. Serup in Denmark with one more trip to Sandry Riffard in Le Puy-en Velay near Lyon. Besides, Sandry is such a character that any excuse to go and hang out with him again shouldn’t be passed up.
He agreed both to rework the front, going up a couple of inches from the prior close, and also to fill in the upper/outer back of my thighs, above where Machida Horiken finished my Japanese leg sleeves. Fill in some gaps around the scapulae. Yellow up my wrist Star of David a little. Of course I had a long list of other things that couldn’t possibly be accomplished in the allotted three days over Thanksgiving break; but we’d see what could be done.
I had the idea of bringing a tentacle from the octopus on my chest up and out of the water, going around my neck and choking me in a visual gag, with waves just underneath to break up the ‘collar.’ Some folks were receptive to the idea; however Sandry wasn’t one of them…. I hired my friend Silvio Muniz—the talented Brazilian tattooist and Photoshop guru who’d worked on both buttock tat references—to work up something here from scratch. He tried but it proved hard to get anywhere and we decided simply to let Sandry figure it out in person.
Sandry (rightly, I’ll now concede) judged it best aesthetically and thematically to keep the inside: water/outside:ripped skin motif that he’d originally come up with years ago to solve the problem of joining the front and back pieces. He’d give me an octopus choker, yes, but it would remain within the confines of ripped skin framing the interior made of water. And for the thighs I requested his signature stained glass—giving hm totally free-rein arguably for the first time since we’d started.
It was great to see him and Claudine again, to walk the narrow, cobblestoned streets and admire the churches, statues, and stately buildings. To feast on the pastries and fresh bread early each morning over coffee. It’s a gem of a town and I’d never have had the pleasure of visiting even once (let alone four times so far) were it not for him. The neck and thigh work was uncomfortable, the wrist and back and hips easy; of course we hated each other’s music as we traded turns on a Bluetooth speaker, but that’s something of a running joke I’ve had with him since the very beginning.
I might throw in a little Easter egg or two in my groin at some point, for Jaime’s eyes only, but otherwise I think that’s it for the body suit. I’m grateful for all of the talented work done by the nine artists with whom I’ve worked: Sandry, Yomico Moreno, Adem Semturk, Steve Butcher, Veronique Imbeault, Machida Horiken, Dani Ginzburg, Yehonaten Chen, and Yan Korchak.
There’s more to come later in the form of my contests and streaming show (see elsewhere on this site) but, for now, I’m finally there, after 450 painful hours of getting tattooed, spread over twenty trips in six countries.
So that’s it. I’m the Ink Doc.
