what is written on the skin

i'm contemplating what image to get for my fourth piece of ink and where to put it. my first tattoo is a very poor looking home-made skull [happy face-looking, really] on my left ankle done by my brother when i was sixteen years old. i know many persons would normally get something as awful as that piece covered up with a piece done by a professional tattooist. but i think tattoos are part of our personal narrative and the palimpsests on the skin should be visible as we move thru our limited number of days and years.

a couple of days ago geof huth wrote a bit on tattoos and reminds me that i had asked him what a vis-poet thinks of the art. frankly, i'm a bit surprised on the number of poets who are inked. guess i shouldn't be considering how popular body art has become. but when i got my skull-cum-happy face there wasn't a whole lot of people with tattoos. or so it seemed at the time. yet, i'm happily surprised by not just the number of people who are inked but also their varied reasons, which of course are all personal, why we get inked.

i'm not intimating that i was way ahead of the curve of body art at all. not in the least. thom gunn probably had all us poets beat by getting his panther in i think the early 1960s. when i was in my early 20s and was taking a grad course in poetry writing i recall a dream i had which i related to a couple of older friends [older at that time meant a person in his/her mid to late 30s] at a poetry reading. i dreamt that i was a tattooed john berryman. i was reading the dream songs like a madman back then. i was a bit ga ga over berryman's dress, his tweed sportcoats, thick black-frame eyeglasses, his steal-grey beard, too. yet, i've always liked the admixture of the hi and the lo, tweed jackets and ink on the skin.

well, shit. i'm no berryman and the old poet can keep his own madness to himself. my dream was significant only because before i got my second tattoo at age 19 - a panther on my right shoulder done by local tattoo artist bill liberty - i had a dream about having a number of tattoos, which i think somehow gave me permission to become and revel in being a tattooed person at a time when, again, tattoos were still very much part of a subculture and not widely embraced. i still like the mix of hi and lo and still like sportcoats covering up a bit of ink. anyhow, i see that poet john bloomberg-rissman's second tattoo is a repro of a work by paul klee and it's a beauty too. it reminds me of those things i like written on the skin. and a shining example that the why of it is as personal and mysterious perhaps as the number of choices we make of the images we place on our bodies as the narratives of our lives deepens and exfoliates.