When I turned 18, I already knew I wanted tattoos. Back then, in 2006, it was still rare to have them, and felt like an easy way to subvert the dry, stiff, Cape Cod conservatism that I was brought up in. I somewhat regret getting so many of them now, they dilute the clarity of detail in the muscle mass that I didn’t have yet when I got most of them, but there’s no sense in feeling remorse about permanent ink on the skin.
The trouble with getting tattoos absent a solid base of knowledge is that tattoos aren’t abstract painting; there is a fixed set of imagery that has been shown over time to work. Panthers, eagles, and skulls will always look better than some more personalized piece of imagery. At 18, this was my conundrum. I didn’t know that I should just get the damn eagle, and instead turned to my teenage fascinations as potential tattoo topics. At that point in my life, I was into William S. Burroughs, David Cronenberg, and post-punk bands like The Fall and The Birthday Party. The Birthday Party, of course, was the first band of Nick Cave, a man now globally famous after his four decades long solo career.