Jay, Josephine Baker, and More!

I met Jay at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade last month and she shared this cool Jospehine Baker tattoo on her right arm:

This was done by Cynthia Rudzis, owner and curator at Cirque du Rouge in Washington D.C.

In addition to this photo I took, Jay sent me photos of some additional work she has from Rudzis, on her back:

Jay tells us this:

"... is a tribute to my dad's Japanese Buddhist roots, [and] is actually a stylized version of one of the old Sherlock Holmes drawings that accompanied the original stories. The kanji [lower right] reads, 'every day is a good day'- my family's favorite Buddhist saying. Several of my family members also have it tattooed elsewhere on themselves.

The color piece at the top was taken from a 1930's wallpaper pattern and [is] used to connect the colors in my various pieces."

I was also delighted to see another photo that Jay sent me, considering I had recently been emblazoned with a crab myself:

Jay explained that this was done by Joey at Citizen Ink in Brooklyn  and that "it's representative of my home state of Maryland, with a blue crab and the state motto, 'fatti maschii parole femine' or 'manly deeds, womanly words.' "

Thanks to Jay for sharing her cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2015 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Darren Demaree's Heart in Ohio

Darren C. Demaree is our second TPP alumnus returning this year to the site. His Nabokov tattoo last year was a crowd-pleaser, for sure.

His kids made a cameo last year, and so, here they are again:

You can see, on Darren's upper left arm, some Ohio-shaped ink:

It reads "How glad I am to be so simple / as to write love poems for a state / shaped like a swollen heart."

Darren explains:

"The Ohio tattoo is my most recent addition and contains the end of a poem of mine, 'Ohio #5'. The work was done by Dino Nemec at I Heart Tattoo in Clintonville, Ohio, just down the street from I live. I'd wanted to get an Ohio tattoo for a long time, and when the 'Ohios' sequence I wrote made it into my first collection it seemed appropriate for me to have the state frame my favorite lines from the sequence."

The poem from which these lines were taken appears below, in its entirety. It originally appeared on Juked, as well as As We Refer to Our Bodies, Darren's first collection which was published last year by 8th House Publishing.

Ohio #5

The sun is up. The sun is gone.
The red barn is still there,

chasing what moves towards it.
Too much of the what is spent

on the silhouette of its coming.
A religion for any moment, I believe

in nothing, I believe in Ohio.
How glad I am to be so simple

as to write love poems for a state
shaped like a swollen heart.

~ ~ ~

Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. He is the author of As We Refer To Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag),and Not For Art Nor Prayer (2015, 8th house). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. You can follow his writings through his website, www.darrencdemaree.com, or on twitter @d_c_demaree.

Thanks to Darren for his latest contribution to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.