craft part ii

spent some time last night with an artisan who works in a very different medium than I do. Mike Brusso is somewhat shorter than me, late twenties to early thirties, with black hair that stands straight up off of his head. Above an unshaven chin is a pair of thick black glasses, similar to the ones that I wear. He was wearing a black t-shirt that had a picture of a circle on it, under which it said “You know, for kids,” a reference to a Cohen brothers movie called “Hudsucker Proxy.” On his neck, above the t-shirt collar, on the right side is a tattoo of an upside-down horseshoe with a banner that says “Trying.” On the left is a tattoo of an old style butterfly. The right knuckles are tattooed with the word “coca” and the left knuckles with “cola.”

Mike Brusso is, as you may have guessed, a tattoo artist. I was there to “get some work done.”

As a craft, tattooing fascinates me. It is equal parts artistry and technical understanding. It takes the skills of a graphic artist, illustrator, painter and sculptor, but also requires a historical knowledge as well as the ability to maintain and use tools, and to understand the different qualities of the inks and how they will age. Every tattoo artist understands these things (and many more) to varying degrees and practices them to varying degrees. Obviously, there is just as much range of skill and ability in the world of tattooing as there is in every other craft. I was recently in a tattoo studio I happened to be near and, poking through the portfolio just for kicks, was appalled at what I saw. It is certainly possible for a tattooer to be insensitive to the shape of the body, disrespectful of imagery, and garish and thoughtless with regard to color. Those are folk to shy away from.

Brusso is on the other end of that spectrum.

Many of you are familiar with the process of receiving a tattoo. Some of the following may be over-explanatory for you, bear with me. The work that I was getting done was around a tattoo I already have, a banner that bears my favorite Mark Twain quote. I was getting a traditional style swallow holding the banner in its beak, that would balance out the swallow on my left shoulder, and then some flowers, et c. to fill out around the banner. Nothing too huge, but something that I have been wanting to get, and a way for me to document having lived in Providence for a couple of years. The thing that made this complicated was the fact that the new swallow had to balance an existing one on the other side of my body.

If it seems strange for me to say that a tattoo artist has to have the skills of a sculptor, consider the human body. It is an incredibly complex assemblage of planes and angles, intersecting curves and forms. We think of the human body as symmetrical, which, to a certain extent, it is. When you get down to it, though, it is not rigidly symmetrical in the way that a manufactured object can be. There is an art school project in which you take a photo of your face, cut it in half, trace half of it on tracing paper, and flip it over. The point, of course, is to demonstrate the assymetricality of the human face. The result looks an awful lot like a person, but there is something that is a little bit off, a little wrong, because it is too rigidly symmetrical. The rest of the body is like that too. We stand in ways and use our bodies in ways that make subtle but very present differences between our right and left sides.

Mike printed out what is called a stencil (which transfers the design onto the skin) and cut it out. He wet my shoulder with soapy water, applied the stencil, and stepped back, looking from shoulder to shoulder to check the placement. He squinted, and then reached forward and pushed down on my left shoulder, stepping back and squinting again. It was like watching the sushi chef in my previous post examine the hunk of tuna. I was watching an artisan at work.

“You stand with your left shoulder higher than your right,” he said. I did not know this. “Stand normally.” I tried. He shook his head and wiped off the stencil. With his right index finger he located the very front of the ball at the top of my left humerus, then located the front of the top of my right humerus with the other hand, sighting back and forth. He re-applied the stencil. I was in his shoes recently, laying out pieces of jewelry on a slice of long leaf pine, moving shapes around and flipping them so that the grain would be shown at its best.
It took seven tries to get the placement right. A little up, a little down, a little more forward. Time well spent, as once the decision is made, it is made. Like cutting into a piece of tuna, or making the first cut into a piece of wood. As long as it is just drawn lines it can be changed and changed, but once the needle is involved, it is there for good. Each time he would look at it, squint a little (a trick that my undergrad painting teacher taught me that I still use), and move left and right to see how things balanced.

Finally it was placed to his satisfaction. It was interesting to watch this process as the client instead of the maker. I am used to this kind of contemplation from the maker’s end, of course, but to see it from the other side made me appreciate the end product that much more. This was not something copied out of a book and slapped on the skin, inked in and forgotten. Even though this was not some glamorous tattoo on a rock star or in front of a TV camera or shown in a magazine it is still a tattoo. It is his work. It needed to be right.

I have written before about Bill Beadle. He has passed now, but he was one of those people who taught me things when I was too young to know I was being taught. We were working together on a set piece once years ago, I was probably fifteen or sixteen, and I wanted to get finished with it so that I could go outside and smoke cigarettes with the cool kids. I slapped a piece of plywood onto the scenic unit and said “there, that’s good enough.” “For who?” he asked. “No one will ever see this, it doesn’t matter.” “No one may see it,” he said, “but you will know that it is there.” It is an exchange that has stayed with me. Even when I do take shortcuts, even now twenty years later, I remember him saying that to me.

Once the stencil was properly placed, Mike drew in some flowers and the banner and we got started. The first thing that gets done in most tattoos (especially if they are “old-timey” which all of mine are) is the linework. A fine black outline goes around all of the shapes. This part tends not to hurt too much because you are so pumped about the process and full of beer and adrenaline. Fascinating to watch. The tattoo machine hums and the needle moves in and out of the skin, leaving a fine black line of ink and a slightly raised welt. Some ink pools on top of the skin, and gets wiped away with a paper towel, leaving the sharp line behind, the beginning of a piece that will be, as one of my favorite tattoo artists has on his business card “with you for life.”

The linework took about 40 minutes and looked like this when it was finished.

Now it was time for the shading. Brusso took up another machine that had been loaded with a shading needle, which looks like a bundle of three or five or (for a really big area) seven needles. This is where knowledge of the tools comes into play, knowing which needles are appropriate, and which tattoo machines handle which types of needles the best. Mike Drexler, who did the RISD pin up tattoo on my leg, actually has a side business making tattoo machines. These are custom machines made by hand and sold directly to clients. Not unlike what I do. We have had a couple of really interesting conversations about making tools, about enabling artists and makers to ply their trade with the fruits of our labor.

The first shading is black ink, and the basic idea is that the tattoo should look finished after the shading is done. Here is a photo after the shading on my piece was finished. Looks pretty good…

Now for the color. We were moving into hour 2 of the sitting, and now the adrenaline is wearing off. The piece starts to burn a little, and the continued passes with the needles start to really hurt. This is really the only scenario in my life that I get this physically close to another man, Brusso is leaning into my shoulder and turning me back and forth as he applies red and blue ink to the new parts of the scroll and pink and yellow to the flowers. There is an extreme intimacy to this act, a direct physical and emotional connection between the artist and the client. It is a connection inspired by trust, and by art, and (cheesy though it sounds) pain.

This is not a long “sit” as tattoos go. This is a small piece and a relatively easy part of the body. Lots of flesh, comparatively little discomfort. Those big back pieces you see in magazines, those can be two or three or four sittings of five or seven hours each. That is some pretty extreme discomfort, especially as the reciprocating needle moves over the places where there is nothing between skin and bone (like the vertebrae). What I experienced last night at Federal Hill Tattoo was several points below putting my finger into a table saw. Maybe closer to a burn you get from spilling scalding water on your arm. Pretty uncomfortable, but totally bearable.

As he worked, Mike and I talked about tattoos and tattoing, about art and history. He stopped at one point to pull down a couple of books of collections of old type faces taken from 19th century printed documents, as well as a reprint of an early 20th century Sears and Roebuck catalog. He showed me all of the filigree that adorned the banners and letters, and talked about how the early tattoo artists added that kind of ornament to their work because it was what they saw all around them all the time. Much the same kind of impulse that drives my design choices, a response to what I see around me. Now that kind of ornament is de riguer in tattoos, though the source is often forgotten. Like those horrible raised-panel doors in cheap kitchens, doors made of MDF that have a “panel” routed into them, even though there is not structural necessity. The aesthetic persists, but because the original reasons for the aesthetic are forgotten they seem hollow, inapplicable. Even to the uninitiated, they seem somehow “off.”

By the end of the session, I was ready to be done. This is my story with tattoos, generally. Right at the end of the session, exhausted and with raw burning skin, I just want to have a beer and not have needles jabbed into me. Then a few months or a year later I am raring to go again. The memory of the pain fades and the joy that I feel about the work grows. I love all of my tattoos. They are markers of events, of places, of important things in my life: my wife, boats I have sailed, places I have lived. When our son is born, I am sure we will both get tattoos that commemorate that event as well.

Here is a photo of the tattoo taken this morning. It is a fitting frame for the quote, and I think it came out really well. I feel fortunate to be the recipient of such artisanry and craftsmanship, and grateful to have three hours last night with someone who respects and loves history as I do, and who reveres craft and artisanry as I do.