Art drives my life and keeps me going. I think about art all the time, in the fashion of making art, being with artists, collecting art, being a work of art. Art is everything and my childhood and my adulthood combined. I grew up around painters wanting to be like them, wanting to get tattooed like them and I am now in the company of the most extraordinary artists in the world and I feel I grew up right, and I think my 14 year old self would have thought I was cool as fuck now and I am proud of that.

I fall in love with everyone who has paint and ink and glue splatters on their pants and tattoos all over their arms. When I see heavily tattooed arms, I know that I will be held, not necessarily literally, but in an abstract emotional way. Tattooed arms draw me in close and we don’t even have to be touching. The affection hangs in the air. I love heavily tattooed folks. We are together a country, a nation.

The men and women who worked for my dad, who essentially raised me, were getting full body suits from Ed Hardy (my first tattooer) and Bill Salmon in the 80s – the revolutionary tattoo artists who changed it all and elevated the bloody pastime of sailors and Hell’s Angels to the category of fine art.

My search for my own revolutionary tattoo artists has brought me into the most rarified circles – lately spending days in renown studios belonging to Mr Cartoon, Kim Saigh, Eddy Deutsche, James Spencer Briggs, Craig Jackman and Shawn Barber. I am lucky beyond anything I could have wished for, anything that ‘The Secret’ could manifest. And of course I thank god every day for what I get to do, see, be.

Usually i get tattooed in 3 year cycles, stopping for three years and then starting again and then stopping. This is my 3rd time around. For the tattoo growth spurt, I get a lot of tattoos, with multiple sessions, with my beloved artists. We see each other constantly and the process of getting tattooed by them feels like a fun night out with friends, except it’s a night in – a night in their fantastically imagined and then made real spaces. Every session is memorable, the pain of the bloodletting releasing endorphins that surpass any recreational drug. The breaking of my skin to permanently embed images is a transcendental experience. I am high like the sky for hours afterwards. I feel like i am getting taller, still growing, like recurrent dreams I would have during my formative years, of falling and falling. I am falling backwards into bliss like a Nestea plunge.

Memoir Tattoo is the site of many miracles happening. It is like Lourdes or Varanasi or Mecca. I come to Memoir Tattoo and I am transformed as if i had bathed in The Ganges. I always leave their spacious, airy studio feeling like I have realized more of myself, I am coming closer to who I am truly meant to be. These tattoos were always on my skin. These gifted artists are allowing me to bring these lush adornments to the surface, and I am ever so grateful.

Nathan Kostechko, the wunderkind who tattooed the immortal and much admired phoenix on my left arm years ago now works at Memoir, so this is yet another good sign that I have come to the right place. What Kim, Shawn, Nate and Spencer draw on my skin creates and recreates me. Brendan Rowe, yet another amazing artist at Memoir and i have dates booked to do outlines, and I am so elated, having stumbled upon what i consider to be the Justice League – seriously these guys are the superheroes of tattooing (lovely Kim is Wonder Woman obviously, Shawn is Superman, Brendan is the Green Hornet, Nate is Plasticman and Spencer is Aquaman because allegedly he puts aquaphor in his hair) and to be able to call them my friends – that is the greatest brag of all time.

I came to the studio yesterday with a colorful kimono birthday gift bag waiting for me. Kim had gotten me macaron (delicious and of course they were almost gone by the time i got home so I gave my husband one of them and an empty plastic sleeve, yum) and a beautiful red leather writing journal with a sacred heart emblazoned on the front! It’s so pretty I am scared to write in it, but I know that to write in this gorgeous thing is to remind myself constantly that my thoughts have real and honest value.

Shawn gave this painting to me for my 43rd birthday, and it took all my might not to burst into tears at the sight of it. The compassion I see in every stroke of his brush makes me cry. When i look at this painting, I can actually feel my soulmate hovering around me – my precious dead dog Ralph – the true owner of my heart – I can almost touch him again, pet him again – what i wish for the most is to pet him one last time, like i used to do when i was late for something. I would look at him watching me rush around and try to leave the house, holding me in the rich red brown stare of his root beer eyes, and no matter how late i was i would always have to take a moment to love him up, feeling the silky fur of his chest between my fingers. I feel the warmth of his great big dog body and I remember lying on the floor holding him as he died, our bodies like two ‘c’s together, one enveloping the other, uppercase and lowercase. The heat of him radiating into the heat of me.

Shawn’s painting recalls a good time in that dog’s awesome life. I look at it and I remember when he was healthy, when he was so robust and bursting with life that I had to make deals with other dog owners at the dog park to help me catch him because he was fast and strong and I couldn’t run as fast as his exuberant young shepherd mix body did. That dog taught me to treasure the feeling of being alive, and now that he is dead I feel I must live harder just for him. Feel it. Appreciate it. Love it. Like I love art. And Shawn’s painting brings Ralph back to life. I am humbled by his talent and generosity. He gave me my dog back. He raised Ralph from the dead like Lazarus resurrected from the tomb and this is the power of art. This is what art should do. Art is life. 

Eddy Deutsche, just one of my amazing tattoo artists, had a magnificent beast of a dog, Hodji. An all black Newfoundland, with glossy long fur and a massive head. He was the noblest of creatures, and quite a comforting presence, calming those with needle anxiety, resting his impressive maw on shaking limbs and touching noses as if he could heal, and I am sure he did heal. Animals are magic. The world is theirs. We live in it to honor and appreciate them. Their presence is a tremendous gift that nature provides us. Those we can tame, we are meant to care for and love and hold and treasure. They remind us of how limited our capacity for love and devotion is. They show us how to worship and how to be present and how to live. How to uncurl and curl our spines when we lay down. Everything and everything can be learned from these small, medium and sometimes very large teachers.

When Hodji died, Eddy envisioned a huge tribute, a blazing, blistering image of the beautiful beast leaving his earthly dog body and entering another one more suitable to contain his grandeur. The dog was no longer an adorable pet, but closer to a sun god – with fire in his breath and veins. No longer bound to the earth by his bad hips and far too accelerated dog years – in death, he had come to his true self.  I love this painting.  What do we do with our grief for our animals is important. When we can make beautiful art such as this, we can transcend our pain and suffering. We can know that their lives and our lives were made better by our closeness, and see plainly that those countless moments where our eyes met, were not dog to human, but rather, divine to the divine. Namaste indeed.

I have missed Ralph every moment since his death. Years and tears have not blunted the harsh emptiness of the loss of him. There is a blank spot in my psyche and my heart, an empty echo that used to be filled with his long black nails on the wood floor, cold spots where his body would warm the planks. When I wake up in the morning, I will still instinctively put my hand down where he once lay next to me every night, reaching for him and I will remember in the most shattering yet devastatingly silent way, that he is not there. I cannot be convinced to scatter his ashes. His remains must remain where they are, near where his bed was in life, wrapped with his black leather sailor jerry flash collar, resting on a funereal shrine to him, adorned with oil paintings and watercolors and pencil drawings and other tiny appreciations of my love. He’s become like king tut, his greatness realized more in his death, his tomb filled to bursting with riches.

Eddy helped me put yet another tribute to Ralph on my skin, where he lives now. The memory of the big dog resides in my body, the softness of his fur on my hands, especially underneath his chin, and on the wide plains of his chest, white like he wore a poet’s shirt under his black jacket of curls.  I can feel my lips touch the top of his head, where his skull lay hard and sure underneath his butterscotch dot eyebrows. I can smell his big corn chip paws and feel the roughness of the pads, as my fingers searched between them for tiny pebbles from our many millions of walks. He lives in me, not on the earth,  not in the sky, but in me. and he’s a horse here, which is what I think he would have liked to be, perhaps what he thought he was. Tall and strong and fast and a kicker and a runner and a majestic beauty. My tribute to my love done by a masterful artist who truly understands. This tattoo brings me to almost uncontrollable cathartic crying with its beauty and sincerity. Perhaps I can let the ashes go now. I have this.