Tattoos: Stars

Tampilkan postingan dengan label Stars. Tampilkan semua postingan

Jumat, 22 Mei 2015

Paulette Beete's Butterfly (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next Tattooed Poet of the Week is Paulette Beete, who sent us this photo:

Paulette tells us:

"The image is of my 3rd tattoo, which was inked in June 2011. My sister also has a few tattoos and we decided to get the same tattoo to celebrate the fact that, after a lot of work, we'd become best friends. We both liked the idea of a butterfly because it represents a specific type of change. When caterpillars become butterflies, they become who they were meant to be all along, which was a great metaphor for our journeys of growing into ourselves. We worked with Bill at Ambrotos Tattoo in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. We liked this butterfly because it didn't look too girly like so many butterfly tattoos do. My sister didn't like the stars so Bill made a couple of sketches that replaced the stars with ribbons. Ultimately I kept the stars because they felt quirky like me. My sister's much more elegant than I so the version with the ribbons fit her perfectly."

Paulette sent us the following poem, "The Makers of Memorials," which was previously published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She noted, "I believe that the best tattoos are memorials of a sort; stories that we carry on the outside as well as the inside."

The Makers of Memorials

They sing. They sing blue songs
their mothers wore.
They sing grief, bone-thick & left-handed.
They sing songs cross oceans, cross sidewalks.
They sing skies sealed shut.
They sing men born wearing walking shoes.
They sing women born palms up.
They sing from mouths without lipstick,
charts without notes, pianos without tunes.
They sing back-door songs & apron-
tied-low songs. They sing.
Unmaking the made into something less
teeth-breaking. They sing
dead crops, dead gods, men
put down, men put out,
dreams put off. Off key, off beat, they sing.
Steady. Loud. Relentless. They sing
instead of, in spite of, next door to. They sing
in clinics, in bedrooms, on corners. They sing.
Women in blue & purple, in thorn tiaras braided
from agains & nevermores & never minds.
Songs of children lost, of savings lost,
pawn tickets lost.
They sing. They sing. They sing
blue songs of our mothers,
holier-songs of our blue mothers.
They sing the slow leak that will drown
the world. They call God home
for the re-making.

~ ~ ~

Paulette Beete's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in magazines including Crab Orchard Review, Escape into Life, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, and The Found Poetry Review. Her chapbooks include Blues for a Pretty Girl (Finishing Line Press) and Voice Lessons (Plan B Press). Her work also appears in several anthologies, including Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC. She blogs (occasionally) at thehomebeete.com.

Thanks to Paulette for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Jumat, 24 April 2015

The Tattooed Poets Project: Kirsten Imani Kasai

As we enter into the final weekend of yet another successful month of tattooed poets, take a look at the back of Kirsten Imani Kasai:

Kirsten tells us:

"My work is three separate pieces. The first, on the back of my neck, is a Byzantine monogram of 'Mary,' for the Virgin Mary. I had this done in 1993 at Erno Tattoo in San Francisco.

The raven tree and stars were done by in 2011 and 2013. My friend Keith Greene, at Federation Ink in San Diego, did both based on some clip art paste-ups I brought him. The bird tattoo has a double meaning. I’m rather Poe-obsessed, and so here are the Raven and the Tell-Tale Heart. At least that’s what I tell strangers…for me, this piece recognizes a really dreadful, difficult year of loss, transition and heartbreak. (I wrote about it here. Additionally, I wrote the poem 'a murder of crows' about this imagery of the raven and the gift of a human heart, which was incorporated into the prose/poetry piece 'mice' published in the summer 2014 issue of the Existere Journal of Arts & Literature.)

The third tattoo is my 'mother line' and features blue and pink stars for my son and daughter. The dead or shadow stars represent pregnancies I've lost."

Kirsten sent us the following poem:

process aestivation

she had forgotten all of it

too long

had she lain sleeping

snow white

knew the apple tainted

bit deeply

seeking poison like nectar

sleeping beauty

summoned the spindle’s

narcotic draught

milk teeth madly grinning

blood beading on her finger

she swallowed

the magicked bread

despite the warnings

—never eat from fey hands—

let the fisherman

steal her selkie skin

to keep her from the deep

and salted sea

buried undreaming

apple rotting in her throat

blood clotting in her veins

watching

night’s noiseless apocalypse

descend

awakened

she is ravenous

~ ~ ~

Kirsten Imani Kasai is the author of three novels: Ice Song, Tattoo and Private Pleasures; a short fiction/poetry collection Rhapsody in Snakeskin and a poetry chapbook The Atmospheric Mysteries of a Steaming Corpse. Kirsten is the co-founder and editor of Body Parts Magazine, a journal of provocative horror, spec fiction and erotica. She earned her MFA from Antioch University and lives in California with her family. Visit her online at www.IceSong.com and on Facebook here.

Some bonus footage includes this Google chat interview & reading with Pretty Owl Poetry:

Thanks to Kirsten for sharing her tattoos and poetry with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project!

Sabtu, 03 Januari 2015

Repost: Lizz's Tattoo Anchors Her to Her Brother

Something about this post from 2009 jumped out at me, so I thought I'd re-run it today.

~ ~ ~

One of the things that I love most about writing Tattoosday is the way New York City plays a significant role in the narrative. It may not be a blog about New York, but it would be a much different one without this city I call my home.

This is one of those posts that is tied to the fabric of New York.

This evening, I was taking advantage of a free ticket to see a revival of Guys and Dolls at the Nederlander Theater, which is still in preview and opens March 1st.

I was standing in line outside, about twenty minutes before curtains. The theater, on the south side of West 41st Street, faces the back of the New Amsterdam Theater to the north.

There were assorted people milling about across the street, folks I assumed were crew from Mary Poppins, outside having their last cigarettes before their show started.

I spotted a woman who had exited the theater and saw, from across the street, that she had a tattoo on her right forearm. I was doing nothing but standing in line anyway, so I crossed over 41st Street to say hello.

Lizz, who works as a dresser, was more than happy to share her tattoo:

What's remarkable about this traditional-style anchor tattoo is that she had it done at the same time, on the same spot, and with the same design as her younger brother.

For Lizz, this was her most recent, her nineteenth tattoo. For her brother, five years her junior, it was his first.

The piece is based on the state flag of Rhode Island, where Lizz grew up:

Tattoos in general have significant meaning for their bearers. When the same design in shared, and the act of being tattooed is similarly experienced, the emotional charge instilled in the work is compounded.

Another example of siblings sharing a tattoo can be seen here.

Lizz told me that she doesn't rely on one artist, but that her ink has come from different shops all over the country.

This tattoo was created at Cherry Bomb Tattoo (now known as East River Tattoo) in Brooklyn by the artist Duke Riley. Work from Cherry Bomb has appeared here previously.

Thanks so much to Lizz for sharing her ink with us here on Tattoosday!

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Sabtu, 06 Juli 2013

Daniela's Spiral of Stars

I met Daniela a couple weeks back in Bay Ridge, stopping her after spotting a text tattoo on her forearm. However, she preferred to share this tattoo:

She got this spiral pattern of 15 stars on her fifteenth birthday when she was living in Argentina. I always try to remain objective, but as a parent of two teenage daughters, I asked what her parents thought when she came home with this tattoo on her neck. Daniela told me that they actually took her to get the tattoo and expanded on why she chose such a visible spot for her tattoo:

"I do kinda regret the tattoo at times, but ... at that age, I was going through a lot at school, and I just wanted to stand out from everybody else. In Argentina, basically all the people are the same, so I didn't want at all to be like them."

She was born in Argentina and lived there for almost seven years, and she acknowledged that this tattoo was one way for her to express her own individuality.

Thanks to Daniela for sharing these stars with us here on Tattoosday!