Something Out of Nothing

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

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.