Come here, no closer, let me prick
you—not poke, I am not
that needle which administers
your flu shot or draws a vial of blood
from the crook of your elbow,
though I may steal
some, have it smeared
on your skin. It’s up to you,
your intoxication, you’re responsible
for the amount you bleed—let’s hope
you didn’t lie on that permission
form sheet with your signature.
 

Your body is my canvas,
unappreciated by many—don’t worry,
those idle judgments made from yesterday’s
mindsets have not caught up
with the times, still living in the olden
days, pre 1970s. I’d like to thank
MTV and pro athletes for implying
my work is cool; for organizations—
the Alliance for Professional Tattooists—
for cleaning up the industry, realizing
“safer practices protect the clients—and
the tattooists.”¹ Thanks for saving—
qualifying—my job, but the help
was uncalled for.
 

Before entering jail cells,
before parlors popping up on main street
meant whorehouses following next door¹—
irrational fear, if you ask me—
I was the sacred source to grant
Dhegina women “their proper place
in the cosmology of their community,” but no
longer they say, firing me
from that honorable role by the mid 1950s.²
Simply can’t have
the best of both worlds—mainstream
shot it to hell,
 

but I am fashion crazed, entirely
dependent on my artists’ and—or—victims’
needs, wanting nothing more to please
(except for the judgments—screw
the judgers). For the Inuit
in the American Arctic, I was nothing
more than eyed-bone needles
and pigment-rubbed sinew stitched
through their skin.² Now, today,
I am a machine, designed of many-pointed
needles, holding the ink within
my layers, puncturing the skin—
what a lovely lively canvas—
and the ink is drawn down³
permanently marking, embedding
in, the skin.
 

It’s this permanence they—the incessant
judgers—can’t stand, the desecration
of God’s perfect image⁴
forming my best canvases. I am greater
than the brushes of Van Gogh
or Picasso, for these “symbols
of ownership by,
devotion to,
identification with,
and protection by
a deity or master can demonstrate
the image of god.”⁴
 

My persistence, my prevalence, over the years
are wearing these horror-stricken Christians
down. For now, let’s take a moment—
a knee?—to thank Samuel O ‘Reilly, what a wonderful
man to invent the first electric tattoo machine
back in 1891. Or shall it be dear Thomas Edison
that I show my gratitude to, for it was his
embroidery machine the invention was based from.
 

Don’t chide yourself in thinking
I’m only a century old.
With the Polynesians who inhabited Hawaii,
I was better known as kakau, guarding
the people’s health and spiritual well-being.
My depictions of lizards—greatly respected
and feared—and the Hawaiian crescent fan
to distinguish society’s highest-ranking members
were revered, adorned with intricate patterns
on the hands, fingers, wrists, and tongues for women;
arms, legs, torso, and face for men.
I was only “a needle made from bone,
tied to a stick and struck
by a mallet” to apply pigment
to the skin—only after each use
was I destroyed,
such secrecy guarded this practice.⁵
(You didn’t hear it from me.)
 

I am the identifier of lost sailors.
In their fear of shipwrecks
I was called upon to ensure their Christian—
ahh, the irony—burial while prostitutes
used me to indicate their profession
and prisoners expressed protest
against society. Then
there are the SS men—the bloody
bastards—who had me tattoo
their blood group
on the inside of their upper arm;
but my least favorite role was playing slave
to the Nazis, forced to tattoo numbers
on their victims’ arms.⁶
Keith Underwood may have clipped
the cord, revolutionizing me
into a battery-operated machine
gun⁷—what a terrible term, I despise
the accuracy that negativity can convey—
but I promise I am not this young.
 

The Tahitians gave me the name,
derived from their tatau, to mark,
first used by Bougainville in 1771
to describe my decorations on the body
canvas; I’ve existed much longer,
I told you, since the Neolithic Period
some 5,300 years
ago—hush, don’t judge my age
for I have survived centuries, my work.
Didn’t you ever hear of the frozen
corpse found trapped
in a melting glacier in the Otztaler Alps
back in 1991? No?
That’s a damn shame—I survive
in the memories of Holocaust victims
but am neglected for traversing time.
 

References

1. Berkowitz, Bonnie. “Tattooing outgrows its renegade image to thrive in the mainstream,” The Washington Post, (February 2011). http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704915.html
2. Phillips, Betsy. “Unearthing the Secrets of North America’s Tattooing Traditions,” Think Progress, (March 2014). http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/17/3410711/native-american-tattoos/
3. Feltman, Rachel. “Watching a tattoo needle in slow motion reveals the physics of getting inked,” The Washington Post, (September 2014). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/24/watching-a-tattoo-needle-in-slow-motion-reveals-the-physics-of-getting-inked/
4. Zelyck, Lorne. “Under the Needle,” Christian Research Institute 28, no. 6 (2005). http://www.equip.org/article/under-the-needle/
5. “Skin Stories: the art and culture of Polynesian tattoo,” PBS, (2003). http://www.pbs.org/skinstories/history/hawaii.html
6. Fedorenko, Janet S., Susan C. Sherlock, and Patricia L. Stuhr. “A Body of Work: a case study of tattoo culture,” Visual Arts Research 25, no. 1 (1999): 105-114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715974
7. “Tattoo Technology,” Patents, (April 2003). https://www-google-com.ezproxy.emich.edu/patents/US6550356