Tattoos: Art and Destiny
At first glance, Victor NY’s Rite of Passage tattoo studio looks like classic Main Street retail space: a long, high box, freshly painted white from mellowed-wood floor to stamped-tin ceiling. Recently a dress shop, it still could pass for one, except for those imposing chairs.
Like a hair salon, the studio has stations, each equipped with the essentials: mirror, shelf of kaleidoscopic dyes, lamp, stool, black Craftsman toolbox, trash can.
And the black vinyl client chair.
If a dentist chair got tough, dressed in black, and hit the town, it would give wide berth to these battleworn beasts, these fainting-chair-meets-Harley creatures so at odds with the otherwise sedate décor. These sentinels bear silent witnesses to the main event; they transport a lounging body on its trip through pain and on, to transformation.
In a semi-private alcove, Colin Day is finishing work on the shoulder blade of a young woman. Her mother holds her hand. They take turns telling each other to stop squeezing so tight.
Nearby, an apprentice is working on a man’s upper thigh while his wife sits nearby. Nonplussed, the client suggests hamburger helper for dinner. All the men here are in black. A slow hip-hop groove wafts ambiance and obscenities, as Mom pays.
“It was a pleasure tattooing you,” says Day as she and her daughter exit.
In 1986, 3-year-old Day tells his mother, “I’m going to either be a paleontologist, or tattoo artist.” His destiny is down to a coin toss: bones or skin?
By 1996 the eighth-grader is drawing full “sleeves” on fellow students. Skin it is, then. He’s on the path, until high-school advisors steer him toward graphic design. Toward money.
A few years later, he’s creating his own curriculum, reading hobo author Jack Black, hitchhiking his way South, and hopping trains with his dog, Motley. Graphic design school was a scam.
“‘We can make you an artist. We can teach you’ And that’s bullshit. You can’t teach somebody to be. They either are, and you can refine their skills, or they’re not,” Day asserts.
Once in Key West, Day realizes his art has value. He paints spacescapes on discarded wooden panels and cabinet doors. These regularly sell for $20, but a sudden bidding war can drive them to $100, and he’s “good for a week now.”
Well, a week on tiny, nearby Wisteria Island (officially uninhabited) where Day camps with a dozen or two others, plus dogs.
Day claims life in the Keys was “…the lowest point in my life from the outside perspective, but as far as inside me, I was the most content there…”
His drawings brought tattoo requests and launched six years of “scratching” (amateur work). Once he got settled, he found a roommate who, by sheer fate, was a tattoo artist. They set up a little shop in their apartment, and Day learned the trade.
His ideal jobs these days involve freedom. One customer lists “20 words that he wants the tattoo to make you feel or think of.” Day then drafts an image. Even better is the customer who appreciates the artist’s style and wants any example, carte blanche. A “collector” commissions tattoos by various respected artists. To be collected is a high honor. Top artists’ work is easily identifiable “from a mile away.”
But there are heartbreaking jobs. A mother might present the last birthday card her son gave her. Can Day replicate the writing as a tattoo? Yes, he can mimic handwriting.
“That comes from my dubious past,” he says.
Tattooing is not always a simple payment for services. Discretion comes into play.
“I become a therapist, more than I mean to be… I slow them down. I make them realize they’re being indecisive,” Day explains.
Or impulsive. He turns down work he finds off-putting. A young woman asks for a teardrop on her face.
“No,” Day replies. “I am not ruining your face.”
A “scumbag” who already has Nazi symbols and now wants a spider?
“I have no problem ruining his face… ‘You got it, buddy,’” Day responds.
He doesn’t turn down genital work, per se. He just makes it impossible.
Day explains, “I kind of do that comically. I’m like ‘It’s $1,600 for me to touch it, plus the price of the tattoo… if you’re into girls, you have to bring a girl to keep the skin tight…’ I ain’t doing that.”
No one has met these terms.
There’s one more station tucked in the salon. Completely private, it belongs to Mel, the owner. She possesses a talent that holds Day in awe: restoring nipples to women who’ve lost them to cancer. Day swears they’re indistinguishable from the original.
“I cannot imagine what that feels like, to give somebody back something so important that they lost, and now they have it again… That has to be a really good feeling,” Day muses.
Art is typically representational: something real represented through the filter of human perception. For top tattoo artists, maybe it can circle back and recreate the real. Day seems destined for that top spot.
