by Anna Journey
The Hebrew Bible’s first recorded murderer, Cain, bears an indelible mark on his body often perceived as a symbol of his grievous sin. According to the Book of Genesis, however, after Cain slays his brother Abel and God banishes him from the land, Cain confesses to the Lord his fear that someone might murder him during his travels. In her essay “How to Read a Tattoo, and Other Perilous Quests,” scholar Juniper Ellis writes: “Cain protests that in his wanderings ‘anyone may kill me at sight.’ ‘Not so!’ declared the Lord, and ‘put a mark on Cain, lest anyone should kill him at sight’ (see Genesis 4:1—16).” “In other words,” Ellis notes, “the so-called mark of Cain, a tattoo, is as much a sign of God’s protection as it is an indication of the wearer’s having committed fratricide.” Paradoxically cast off from and protected by the divine, Cain must wander the earth, searching for meaning in his life.
“Tattooing is an ancient profession,” Captain Morgan continued. “It’s an extension of ourselves, of self.” I asked him to tell me the story of his own first tattoo: a design based on a pattern of lizards he’d hallucinated during his debut LSD trip. “It’s a timeless pattern,” he said, one that he can summon, even now, without the help of acid. “It’s a kind of visual language.” Originally, a famous Swiss tattoo artist who’d planned to be in Manhattan for three days was supposed to give Captain Morgan his lizard tattoo. Stuck in Virginia, however, Captain Morgan couldn’t make any of the dates, so the artist put him on the waitlist of an associate who tattooed people out of a house on the Lower East Side. Captain Morgan wavered for several days before he finally decided to make the trip. “I felt like I was in a movie,” he said of his bus ride from rural Lynchburg to New York City. He was nineteen and it was his first time riding a Greyhound. In the 1990s, he recalled, the Lower East Side resembled the Wild West: crack-related violence plagued the streets and, because of the AIDS epidemic, tattooing was illegal in the city. Captain Morgan found his way from the Greyhound station to the tattoo artist’s house, arriving several hours early to discover the place packed with other clients. The artist led Captain Morgan to the front stoop, pointed toward a dive bar across the street, and said to wait there, warning him, “Do not go anywhere.”
When Captain Morgan returned to the house for his appointment, he noticed the artist spoke at least five languages. Stories spilled from the man as if in counterpoint to the buzzing rhythms of the tattoo gun: he told an anecdote in Portuguese to his wife, and other tales in French, Italian, English, and Spanish to various clients, who continued to drop by throughout the night. “He looked like a pirate!” Captain Morgan said, remembering the artist’s crowded mouthful of gold teeth. “It was my first step into another world,” he added, and it’s this sense of transformation he hopes his own clients will experience.
Back at the Greyhound station, post-tattoo, Captain Morgan looked around the packed waiting area and noticed someone drawing on a sketchpad. He felt drawn to the person—short-haired, slender, androgynous. “Even if it turned out to be a guy,” he said, “I’m on board. I’m not afraid of that.” The person turned out to be Maria, a world-traveling welder who’d returned to New York after a stint in India during which she worked side by side with Mother Teresa, washing, as she termed it, “homeless women’s butts.” Mother Teresa encouraged Maria to go back to her old city and share all that she’d learned. As Captain Morgan glanced down at Maria’s drawing, he noticed she’d arranged his face and those of the other waiting passengers in rows across the page, like one of those tiered group portraits of elementary schoolkids. “We had this amazing moment,” he said. Although they didn’t stay in touch, he’d always remembered her story.
“I’ve talked about you so much,” Captain Morgan told me when he called after five years. “Our magical cemetery story!” I loved that we’d become familiar characters in each other’s tales: two artists who’d converged at transitional times, united at first through Hollywood Cemetery, and then through a recognition of our similar taste for strange stories and love of poetry. Whitman and Ginsberg were his “gateway poets,” he’d confided, and he also loved the work of Ted Hughes, especially the dark fables in Crow. Captain Morgan remembered asking me to recite a poem as we sat in the café. I chose Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s “Prologue as Part of the Body,” a hypnotic poem that evokes the onset of death as a beguiling conflation of the senses—a deadly synesthesia brought on by an erotic waft of some femme fatale’s flower, à la Billie Holiday’s trademark gardenia:
It begins with something backward—
gardenia tucked behind
the ear as if scent could hear
its undoing
the fantastic bodice of a space
no larger than this plump
of sweetness, yeastlike, tropic
it begins with a turning, a trope,
that fragrance spiraling the cochlea
and the body confused by the enchantment
of the wrong orifice wrong passage—it was
after all where music should be unwinding,
cry shedding its epithelial layers, the tac-tac
of someone entreating, far away, some door . . .
But it was summer trying to enter, swoon its way
into the skull, the Parfum Fatale collapsing
on the organ of Corti
a secret island discovered by the Italian anatomist
of the last century though it was always there
in the body, the locus of quivering
like the letter M
deep in its alphabet, the humming
on either side. Beginning is
the flower to the ear
the flute to the palm, the glittering mirror to
the back of the head, the steaming rice and the plums
in honey
to the feet, to the vertebrae, to the pineal gland:
oblivion, oblivion, oblivion.
At the time, I hadn’t told Captain Morgan that only two weeks earlier I’d come close to choosing oblivion. That before I moved back to Virginia I’d called a suicide hotline in Houston and confessed my plans to a stranger. I imagined a great release, a freedom as death moved through my limbs and spine until it finally reached the mythical location of the soul—“to the feet, to the vertebrae, to the pineal gland.” I was grateful to have changed my mind, grateful for the willing listeners. The entire time I recited the Goldberg poem, Captain Morgan leaned forward, chin propped on his hands, nodding. He gushed, when I was done, “I could tell you were tasting the words.”
Neither my husband David nor I have any tattoos. If I’d gotten the one I’d envisioned, at nineteen, I’d have a scene from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit inking my entire back: the green hills of the Shire, dotted with hairy-footed hobbits. All three of my previous boyfriends had tattoos. My high school boyfriend, Chris, a longhaired metalhead who became a junkie, had hand-poked OZZY across the knuckles of his left hand. My undergraduate boyfriend, Ed, had a stuttering black spiral that began at his right armpit and coiled above his nipple like a fiddlehead fern. My grad school boyfriend, Carrick, had two tattoos. The first one portrayed his self-designed symbol of order and chaos: the quadratic equation in which all of the letters and numbers in the formula were rendered in crisp black ink, with the exception of X. The unknown figure, waiting to be solved, was engulfed in wavy orange flames. His second tattoo, which he’d gotten toward the end of our time in Houston in honor of his master’s degree in bass performance and pedagogy, depicted the “circle of fifths”: a geometrical representation of the relationships between the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the related major and minor keys. The image looked like an evenly sliced-up pie garnished with musical symbols. Once, during a long-ago cemetery walk in Richmond, Carrick brought his fiddle with us so he could play the musical notes we’d noticed, during a previous stroll, engraved on a large headstone. The first time we’d seen the grave, fiddle-less, he’d stood in front of
the granite, sight-reading and humming the tune as he swayed and tapped his right foot. The next time, he’d lifted his instrument and bowed the strings, filling the ryegrass and magnolias with the dead music lover’s requested hymn.
Captain Morgan gave his Croatian witch-friend Vesna her first tattoo several Halloweens ago as she lay on top of her kitchen table in Salem, Massachusetts. As Vesna rested her head on a pillow, he tattooed a simple wing behind one of her ears as her roommate watched. Afterward, she and her friend left town, and Captain Morgan found himself walking aimlessly around Salem, aching from a sudden loneliness. “I could feel a chasm,” he recalled, “when they were gone.” He reached the wharf, gazing at ships in the distance and, as he walked, the echoes of his footsteps inspired him to write a song for Vesna. “It was written,” he said, “by the space they’d left behind.” The next time he saw Vesna, Captain Morgan gave her a traditional Japanese kanji tattoo and, afterward, sang her the footstep song, a cappella, holding her as they both wept. Next, she gave him a tattoo: the hand-poked letters VY, which entwined to form the initials of her nickname, “Ves Yes.”
The hand-poke tattoos that Captain Morgan gives and receives feel the most meaningful, he told me, because he gets “fired up by the connection with the other person.” “They’re less subject-oriented and more interpersonal,” he said. One of his hand-poke designs was given to him by his then-girlfriend: the date of a particular Halloween they spent together in Salem. Another hand-poke image maps the craggy lapis outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which his friend Camilla had designed for herself. After he’d finished her tattoo, he said, “We’re not done,” and she stared at him, waiting. “Now you’re going to do me.” I asked him if his tattoos—the old girlfriend’s hand-poked date, Vesna’s initials, Camilla’s mountain range, the vision of lizards, the whimsical carrot on his right ankle done (with his guidance) by a Belgian metalhead in the medieval city of Ghent—began to speak to one another, if tattoo artists create a larger, continuous story on the skin. “Yes,” he said, pausing, “but we begin by blindly stumbling into it. Like writers, people with tattoos have to find their voice.”
“The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work,” writes Walter Benjamin, “—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were.” “It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing,” he continues, “like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.”
I was a potter for half of my eight years in Richmond. My ceramics teacher, Steve, a lanky red-bearded Wisconsinite in his late thirties, taught me how to throw pots on the wheel. As one of the final touches before I cut the still-wet vessel from the wheel head, he showed me how to leave a mark on the bottom interior of the form by gently pressing my right thumb into the clay as I spun the wheel around once, leaving a spiral, a distinctive ridge-like swirl. This way, each time someone finished her coffee and glanced down into the empty mug, she’d be reminded of the artist’s touch at the center of the object.
Steve also taught me how to “pull” handles from a lump of moist clay shaped like an eggplant. I’d hold the fat end in my right hand, dip the fingers of my left hand in a pitcher of water, and repeatedly pull the tapered bulb outward and down, maintaining even pressure, thinning and narrowing the ribbon of clay until I’d shaped a six- or seven-inch-long handle. Before severing the ribbon from the rest of the lump, I’d give it one last slow pull, running my thumb down the center in order to create a smooth shallow for a future coffee drinker to comfortably rest her own thumb. When the handle dried enough to hold its shape, I’d score the two ends with a pin tool and press them into the vessel, leaving, as Steve taught me, the impression of my thumb at the top and bottom of the handle, where each part joined the mug’s body.
Although I’ve kept dozens of my own handmade pots from art school, I prefer to drink my morning coffee from Steve’s mugs. It’s how I remain close to him. It’s how I recall his Wisconsin drawl each time he’d greet me, poking his head into the ceramics studio as I threw at the wheel (“Hey, Eee-a-nuh!”), or his love for his black lab Gerstley (named after Gerstley Borate, an ingredient used to mix glazes), who’d cringe behind Steve’s toilet during thunderstorms, or that night I went with Steve and a few of his grad students to see a funk band in Bogart’s smoky back room (an ex-speakeasy) and we all danced. Even though I haven’t seen Steve since he left VCU when I was twenty-one, I can press my thumb into the ghost print of his nearly fifteen years later and find a phantom fit. I can sit, here in California, sipping my coffee, and feel the shape of my former life.
Curious about what it would be like to leave a mark on a person and map a story on someone’s skin, I bought a pair of tattoo guns and a set of twenty inks. I also ordered some synthetic “practice skins”: a ten-pack of six-by-eight-inch rectangles of beige-colored rubber. They looked like pot holders made from human pelts that might hang on the kitchen wall of a gingerbread house inhabited by an evil fairy tale witch. The guns—one with a metallic red grip and the other blue—came in Ziplocs filled with dozens of unassembled parts, an instructional CD-ROM, in Chinese, and a list of eleven oddly translated “tattoo guidelines,” in English, that seemed by turns menacing (number three: “Heart disease: will stimulate cause seizures”), apocryphal (number six: “Woman’s menstrual period: poor immunity”), and accidentally metaphysical (number eight: “Spirit is not normal or has a history of spirit: will affect the disease”).
After David and I watched an amateur instructional video on YouTube, we assembled our guns and sketched our designs. Mine: a simplified outline of a fox. I planned to fill in the body with decorative swirls that resembled the curlicues of wrought-iron gates. David’s initial design: an elaborate still life of a bowl filled with grapes, pears, apples, and a banana. He soon realized the image was far too large and detailed for a novice and instead tattooed a cartoon June bug across the canvas of his practice skin. I chose light brown ink for my fox, surprised at the difficulty of maintaining continuous lines. My hands shook as if from delirium tremens, even when I turned the pulsating gun’s power down to half speed. And when I filled in the small triangles of the animal’s ears, watching the needle repeatedly prick the fake skin, I realized I was flinching in sympathy with my phantom client. When I finished my fox, the animal recalled a wobbly organic design squeezed from a tube of dry, clotted henna. “I have,” I declared, jabbing my gun in the air, “a new respect for the line.” Finally, when I flipped over my synthetic skin to expose a jagged two-inch rip, I realized that had this been the skin of a real person, my vibrating needle, on which I pressed too heavily, might’ve pierced down and hit the bone.
I’ve learned the Japanese word for the border area between tattooed and non-tattooed areas of the skin: mikiri. There are a number of techniques of mikiri, each one resulting in a different style, shape, and shading on the skin: a certain visual quality of division. Matsuba mikiri (“pine-needle border”) demarcates a spiky gestural edge, like the bristled outline of a pine tree. Botan mikiri (“tree-peony border”) creates a scalloped border, like an undulant row of round peony petals. Butsugiri (“line border”) maintains a clean, straight border, an unbroken line. Akebono mikiri (“dawn border”) evokes the bruised margins of a sunrise: that smudged horizon between sky and land, ink and skin.
After Captain Morgan moved to Nashville, we lost touch. And after I moved into his apartment on the grounds of Hollywood Cemetery, I realized that without his magnetic presence and colorful tales, I felt alone in Richmond. Although I wasn’t frightened of living in the cemetery, even at night, I realized I was the one—and not the holly thickets or mossy stones—who was haunted. Each time I stood within the three-foot chill of my panoramic bay windows, I glimpsed a different ghost. Some days it was my estranged poetry mentor, Lee, walkin
g with me down the sloping road of Hollywood Cemetery past the groundskeeper’s house. We’d once run into a fiction professor crouched in the grass, stooping to snap photographs. “I’m taking pictures of fungi,” she’d sputtered, blinking rom behind her glasses. We’d walked off, nudging each other. Other days I could almost see Carrick’s auburn beard breezing from the bark of the peeling cedars. Sometimes even the wind brought with it the splintered notes of that moment he taught me how to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with a horsehair bow on the toothless edge of his singing saw. I sounded like a preschool violinist—all squeaks and sharps and flats. And why hadn’t I considered that his ancestral plot was here—a whole population of headstones engraved with his Scots-Irish family names—that loomed on the hill in their grey judgment as if to convey, in unison, You’re unforgivable.
The hardest part of my return to Richmond, though, was feeling haunted by the living present. Lee, who wasn’t speaking to me, lived only two blocks away. The tattooed server at 821 Café asked one day, as she dropped off my brunch check, if I’d seen my friend sitting at the counter. “The one you’re always here with who orders the Earl Grey and omelet with spinach and bacon. I thought it was weird,” she added, “that he left without saying hi.” Later that evening, after I’d been pacing the apartment, nervous about my phone interview for a university teaching position the next morning, I’d accidentally locked myself out when I went to check the mail. My new front door, heavier than I was used to, had shut and locked automatically. I was in my pajamas, without a coat, and about five inches of snow covered the ground. It was still snowing. No one else in the groundskeeper’s house appeared to be home, though I could hear an upstairs TV. No one answered my knocks. The fact that I couldn’t even walk two blocks to Lee’s to borrow his phone made me sink to the boards of the front porch in tears. I finally trekked the four blocks to the café, where one of the owners gave me a mug of steaming peppermint tea on the house and a server handed me her cell phone. An hour later, a cab took me to my landlord’s house and back to the graveyard, where I used the spare key. The next morning my voice shook throughout the phone interview—not from my coatless wanderings in the snow but because by then I knew I couldn’t stay. I was friendless, in a winter graveyard, my magnificent apartment entirely wasted on me: a poet who couldn’t write, the rangy days without shape or purpose. If the borders of my self were shaded in ink, they’d form the blue slur of the akebono mikiri, blurring my past with my present, my hope with my burden. My green landscape of rest now shone, hard and featureless, in snow.