Filling the Gap — My New Tattoo

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:58:51 -0500

Tattoos are not always meaningful, but most of mine have been. As you know if you’ve seen me, I have two mostly full sleeves on my arms. I got my first tattoo a little over nineteen years ago, when Maura and I got matching tattoos on our right shoulders to commemorate our first anniversary. I knew as soon as the tattoo gun hit my skin that I was addicted. As painful as it can be, as annoying as the healing process is, it becomes a scratch you just have to itch. Almost two decades later, I finally filled in a large gap on the underside of my right arm. I had been thinking about what to put there for a few years.

I wanted something to fill in the space left after I got a collaborative doodle that Maura and I did together over several sessions on my right forearm. We weren’t doodling a tattoo, but I looked at it one day and thought, “I need that on my arm.” We simplified it a bit to translate it into a tattoo-able piece and I reached out to my friend Chris Stubbs to ink my arm. He had already done other pieces for me and while what I wanted was not his normal style, I knew he’d nail it. Plus it was a good chance to hang out with him. Tattoos take time and it’s nice when you actually have something to talk about with your artist. I think the longest session I’ve sat for is eight hours; it was exhausting.

While walking my dogs early one morning, as I do, I had a sudden flash of what I wanted on my arm. I hadn’t even been consciously thinking about it, it just popped into my brain. After getting home, I forgot about it and didn’t do anything about it for a couple of months. Then I had the same exact thought flash into my head on another walk, at the time it seemed like a new idea, but then I remembered that I had already had that idea once. I took that as a sign and decided to finally do something about it. What I envisioned was a grid to contrast with the more organic, curved forms of the existing tattoo.

Grids have played a large role in my life:

Classic illustrations of black holes — the 1979 movie horrified and fascinated me
When I was younger I enjoyed drawing mazes and maps for D&D campaigns on graph paper
A lot of Maura’s artwork features grids
The KCAI logo is a grid

Above all of that, it’s about order out of chaos and chaos out of order — the perpetual cycle, necessary for change.

When I talked to Maura about what I wanted, she showed me a fairly recent gridded drawing from one of her sketchbooks — she loves grids! I loved the idea but thought it should be a little less dense.

Maura’s sketchbook drawing

She took a photo of my arm, the blank canvas, and took it into her digital doodle app. My only stipulations were the grid and the colors — matching those on the older ink — light blue, orange, green, and of course the standard blue/black tattoo ink.
She showed me what she had come up with and it was perfect, laced with even more meaning than what I had mentioned to her:

Twenty dots for my twenty years at KCAI
Eight of the dots connected for my eight years as the IT Director
Three X’s for the three dogs we’ve adopted together.
The Two Bit logo featured front and center
An abstraction of the KCAI logo dissolving into chaotic waves

*Maura’s sketch of the tattoo* *The finished ink*

I had told Chris about the black hole idea, especially the grid curving into the gravity well — a primitive 3D rendering of black holes that for some reason has a permanent place in my brain. He did a great job interpreting that into the wave forms on my bicep. Maura took his waves and gave them the rest: the logo, the color, the parts I didn’t know I needed until I saw them.

Ink on Something Out of Nothing

Filling the Gap — My New Tattoo