The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  There was work for Cy on board the ship, more work than he ever imagined or expected, in the third-class cabins and the sailors’ quarters, many wanted motifs done, to celebrate new beginnings, or finished struggles. And with both of these sentiments Cyril Parks could certainly sympathize. In his suitcase he had his equipment and four books of bound-together manila flash, Riley’s designs cut down from the walls of the shop and his own never before displayed pictures. Each page was dedicated to a certain theme, skulls, hearts, lovelies. That which had covered the walls of the parlour could now fit in a large pocket. He set up a little station on F deck where they came to him and waited their turn, browsing through the notebooks, often pointing to a tattoo without knowing the English word for it, writing the names of loved ones down on scraps of paper so that he could spell them out with unfamiliar letters and etch it through a heart. So that left-behind wives or sweethearts or daughters were not so very much forgotten.

  The Adriatic’s sailors went in for women, patriotism, and souvenirs. Codes. Their codes were precise and adhered to as men of the navy, there were rules at sea, similar to those which would only permit a soldier to wear a medal if it had been won in service. There were anchors for crossing the Atlantic, turtles for passing the equator, and dragons for being stationed in China. Often barnyard animals on the balls of their fists, which was an old, old tradition that still prevailed, animals that liked to keep dry and would scramble out of water quickly in a panic should they need to. Roosters. Pigs. It was ugly flash, but Cy was nobody to deny a man his superstition. The men followed strict, professional qualifications, would not have a mark done without having earned credit for it and they wanted to assure him of entitlement with stories of voyages as he prepared and stencilled their shoulder.

  – When I crossed to the Cape with Blue Flue we hit a storm so big it put us back a week. A week I tell you, in this day and age, isn’t it madness. The thing would not let up. Not that I’m complaining, mind, I thought my number was being called. Waves bigger man Cader Idris, I tell no lie.

  It was honour and accomplishment. It was a maritime record like a ship’s log. When Cy first apprenticed with Eliot Riley, Riley had told him that he’d been tattooing so long he’d even done a few hold and fast tattoos on the knuckles of old-timeys on sailing ships and clippers. As if he’d been born before the age of steam! Riley could have shipped ice to the North Pole though, until he got too drunk to make feasible his lying.

  The shop in Morecambe had witnessed its fair share of naval customers. They were the old uncles and true souls of the industry, perhaps the rational explanation of Riley’s riparian assertion that tattooists gravitate to water. Here on board the ship there were old retired navy boys, who had sailed with the empire’s fleets since before the war and during, who had come back to the country with the decorations of the world, Japanese love-dots and ukiyo-e, traditional south hemisphere markings, and now they couldn’t stop dressing up their skin. They came to him and filled up the last little pieces of clear flesh with ornamentation. Some of their existing work had even been done using a woodcut technique with the ink chipped and rubbed in, but with all the vernacular skill that Cy had not possessed when Riley demanded he do it to his own leg. These tattoos were primitive, effective, beautiful, in his time at Morecambe he had even seen some done on faces, Maori moko style, though Cy knew that took a man who had lost something of his country to the different one, as if he knew his blood was journeying wrong and he was trying to find its source. The old sea-travellers who had collected foreign marks were exotic, alligator-skinned men, men who had passed through a spiritual threshold and met something sacred head-on in the delirium of pain. They were strong, strong in their discomfort, strong in their minds, men for whom the tapping of ink blocks into skin might in their heads become the beat of a song, clung to like a chanty to get them through the strenuous endeavour. It was true engraving, disparate at the edges so you could know it was a deep art, deeper than it needed to be for permanence – the colour and the scar coming together in something ritualistic. This was the most painful method of tattooing Cy knew of, and he knew of it all right as Eliot Riley got him to begin his training that way, raking off skin on his shins with that piece of blacked bamboo and a mason’s mallet, not sixteen years old and already scarred up like a battle-torn soldier. Having to hammer ink down on to his bone before he got anywhere near the helpful electric needle or exaction. The pure agony had him hating Riley, hating the man for the pedantic devils within him, the humiliation of that initial pedigree, and for crying in front of his master who had knelt with his hands pushing down on Cy’s feet, roaring at him to continue when the pain got too much, slapping his face softly like he was a blathering girl. Yes, he could respect these men, these sailors and travellers who’d seen the method through to the full torso pattern, black nippled, with knots of red along their hipbones and thighs, backbones crackling like the spine of a lizard. Because the pain was immeasurable, the blood loss was fantastic and any infection could be lasting, occasionally deadly if it wasn’t treated quick enough. Sailors had sometimes come into Pedder Street with whole stories on their backs, right down to their calves. Maps of where they’d been without the need for countries, or seas. There were the markings of Japan, New Zealand, Fiji. He would try to decipher what had been put on them. He would pull away a shirt and sit and smoke a cigarette and interpret them, respectfully, before he started adding anything else.

  Open ocean was a reflective, ponderous, dangerous place to be. A place of sickness and cabin-fever and contemplation, where it was said a person might meet up with their own self at a central axis travelling from another set of coordinates in life. There was something about the swollen surge of the sea that set the mind free, gave it a queer loose balance and direction like a compass riding on gimbals on the ship’s bridge. So that time spent alone seemed amplified by significance and conversations with fellow passengers, while often very welcome, could take on prematurely intimate or confidential proportions.

  – Afternoon to you, Mr Parks. Looking a tad vexed today, if you don’t mind my saying.

  – Hello, Harry. It’s a long way back now, isn’t it, England? Will we miss it, I wonder?

  – I should think in the end we’ll manage without her. I’ll not miss the Scrubs, which is where I’d be residing presently if it were not for the ingenious garter of my good lady. Just a shame she missed the boat really. I’ll not mention her name in case the authorities tackle you anon about meeting me in the middle of this old stone boat called fate. Still, I’m sure America has its fair share of ingenious women.

  – We’ll keep our fingers crossed, shan’t we?

  Luckily for Cy, and perhaps because he had inherited his father’s sea-legs and nautical tolerance, he suffered from neither the sickness nor the fever. But he did fall into thinking, fell into the condition with heaviness. Or a great, weighty thinking fell on him, like a piano slipping its fastening as it was hauled up a building and landing on his head. Either way they met. In his slim bunk at night, to the churning purr of the engines and the ruck of propellers through dark water, in a cabin of twenty other snoring men, his mind went out to the things that had formed him and been farmed from him. In the deep baths of the washroom, with the soapy water mirroring the sea’s external motions, he could lie for hours and be oblivious to the minutes that passed, annoying the steward who had others queuing for the facility. As he dressed the bodies with ink stolen from the Captain’s helm or the first-class lounges, he thought of his life, its gains and losses. He thought of Riley and his mother. There were memories like artefacts, half-there and jagged, suggesting a shape that was apparent but unfinished, as if misused or harmed by something, or waiting to be completed. At the rail of the Adriatic, outside her glassed-in walkways, salt-water smeared like the windows of the Bayview, with Riley’s lyrical rain on the waves scented strongly like a woman in the throes of love, and the deck made slick and slippery, he leaned looking out with his face on his fist, as
if stopped in time in a position of self-battery. The whole Atlantic surface was like a blue and white tablecloth to the edges of nowhere for him to lay his memories upon like dashed apart, salvaged crockery. And he thought about who he was and what he did and why.

  What was it that had drawn him to the occupation of painting flesh, of permanent living art, and had kept him there through all the shit and shovel of Eliot Riley? What was he that he went to it and stayed put while the gentle humour of Morecambe evaporated around him in all but the tattoo barker’s showroom comedy? There were times when he could take no more from the man, no more abuse or inclusion in his province of mind, his wretched damaging honesty, the butchery of esteem, and he could have smashed Riley’s head against the wall like a turnip until his sneering voice stopped once and for all. There were times when he had looked at his dwindling bundle of money and got as far as the train station. Then turned back. Where was the reward for all that masochistic persistence and endurance? The dispatching of his youth. The decay of his happy childhood. The reluctant temper that was made unobstructed by following the big man’s example. What was it about the trade that was day to the night of Riley? Suddenly Cy wanted an answer. Without it he was a piece from the past in the ruins of a decade. But like the bawdy pauper king himself had once told him it was impossible to pin down the exact appeal and beauty of their folkish profession, butterfly-captured and gorgeously open for all to see. You couldn’t find the marrow or the quick of it to suck out, or set a flame to the wick of it and illuminate a room. Tattooing was like being called by a siren song, or the music of the spheres, impossible to resist, impossible to explain.

  – Ask any one of us, lad, the good ones, not these buggers who do it for show, and we’ll all give the same answer. Why do we do it? Don’t fucking know.

  No, he could not find the degree of precision that his own hand delivered during the colourful transformation of others, to explain it, to explain his own part in it, though he tried hard with his knuckles on his cheekbone and his hours at the deck rail. His trade was about conveying meaning, about visual abbreviation, an indication of what elements a creature was comprised. Like the red hourglass on the black widow spider. Like the fangs and poison and claws and stripes found in nature. It was a non-verbal language. It had inherent meaning. How many war signs and symbols had he tattooed? A thousand, more? How many predatory markings designed to elicit terror, how much hostile camouflage, how many death banners, daggers, skulls, slogans, how much battle pride?

  Then there were the signs of sex, the big-titted women, the kitten girls, the exhibition of body parts, the twists on the spigot of breeding. Rude puns and come-ons. And there was love. Love in all its forms was boiled back to the red heart like beef to stock. All those hearts he had been commissioned to render. Heart after heart after red, red heart. Fat and full with True Love, with Mother, with Anita, with Josephine, with Clara inside, pierced by Cupid’s spindly arrows. Or broken, cut into two, torn open, Deceived written through the separated sections so that there could be no mistake as to why the damage had occurred. Such scars of emotion that would never heal! Or they would heal through his intervention, by being made secondary in ink. Because he could give pain a shape, and he could place it. And always the customers wanted to tell him about it. Their stories that had deserved an indelible memento. He was a funnel through which confidences and lives passed, became pigmented. His was a position of confidentiality, a tailor cutting round the balls of society, he would fashion the essence of a person, their experiences, into quick information or codification on the body where henceforth the public could read it from them. That was it. The tattoo was a jump too far. It was implicit. It was explicit. It was utter intimacy, intimacy with the whole basic fucking, killing, loving world. These were the prime colours of the life, were they not, the original three, and human beings simply mixed them up into civilized hues from there.

  Riley had been right. Underneath all the rambling philosophy that went nowhere, that made Cy want to curse at him for such pretension, there was one thing the man had seen. He had seen people stripped bare, he had reduced them down into an essence, to experience, who they really were – angels and demons and lovers and everything strung in between. He cut them back and went from there. He seemed able to do it, to pull a picture off a wall, personalize and tattoo it. Riley had once told him that it was not those big titties on a bare arm that offended, not farting ladies, nor a marked face. Tattooing was on the black side, yes, not because it dealt largely with the rougher working classes, not because it meant that sex and danger and opinion got put about in pictures on people like a rude proclamation. The boldness of it wasn’t liked often, granted; the tattoo might even be considered ugly or primitive in itself. That counted towards their trade’s bad reputation, but it was not solely responsible for it. The matter of public disturbance was not as simple as violated flesh or visual shock. What had the big man said?

  – Tattooing distresses those it does, lad, because it’s as generous as a whore on her birthday. It’s human art that you can’t peel back off the human or put away in a dresser drawer. It’s an unselfish trade, is ours. I’ll tell you what it is, it’s personal socialism, lad. Everyone’s included, everyone gets to look in to a person and share them, like what they see or not. It says here I am, shit and come and all. Nationality, how I like my women, what does it for me. Just like a bullet hole into the guts and bowels. Oh aye, and I’ll tell you this, lad: a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it that it can do of the man who’s got it on his back. And people don’t like each other half the time, they don’t like each other’s opinions or lives, they don’t want to sympathize with each other, they don’t want to share, so what they do is shoot the messenger. You and me. Scapegoats is what we are. What we do is in bad taste, they say, oh, it’s not artistic. When what it really is, is people like to keep each other strangers until they’ve judged. You remember that.

  And Cy had not understood it then, thinking it just polite society’s snobbery, and thinking Riley a bag of talking shit, he had not really understood it until now, here, ensconced on F deck of the Adriatic, tattooing perhaps his five-hundredth ruptured heart. And the man on whose shoulder the heart was coming was sitting as silent as stone, with tears running down his face for the woman he had lost and left back in Warsaw or Prague or Moscow. As true to the image as a shadow to any dimensional thing. Suddenly Cy knew what it was all about. He saw past the red ink going into the skin. He saw through to the core of what he was doing, how he bestowed uncompromising communication upon the world, how he brought forth self. How he translated experience and identity into colour and shape. How he caught the echo of a person and engraved it on to them. How he functioned as the artistic hands of others, redundant in choosing subject maybe yet imperative in its delivery. That was the strange and impossible core of it.

  Humans had gone well beyond the red hourglass and the simplicity of natural informative markings. They had evolved, complicated life, refined it, and lost touch. They had tried to push back the basics, the cruelty and poison, the seeds and urges, the nurture and beauty. The potential to love and kill, having loved and killed, the need to rut, could not be an initial introduction any more, set on a shoulder like a swarthy badge of life. Yet some would have it that way still, they would have the ordinary speech of identity, the colours of their landscape, that which they had in common with the rest of the human beings of the world, and Cyril Parks was just their scribe.

  Eliot Riley was gone. He was contained by death, finished, and his life’s picture had become clear. Who he was, a drunk, a bastard, a master of ink. Blue eyed in Cy’s memory, brilliant and awful, loved and hated. The only flesh-and-blood father he had ever known. He was the definition of Eliot Riley, and he had left his mark. Like a force of nature, like an earthquake bending a river, a volcano scarring mountains with lava or lightning striking tree bark. Like a tattoo on Cy’s life. And only then, with the understanding and realization, through Riley’s own de
ath, of that which the man had tried to convey alive, did Cy’s apprenticeship to him truly end.

  – These buggers are open books.

  Riley had once said this to Cy as another Ribble bus-load of drunken Scots arrived one September and spewed forth its cargo on to the promenade at Morecambe. The air had been cool that day and the sun seemed hot only when it reached Cy’s bare arms, as if not having done much work in warming up the space between. One of the passengers had clambered down the bus steps and gone to the railing at the edge of the seafront parade. He pissed off the platform as if standing at the public urinal while drinking from a brown bottle at the same time.