Tattooing The Joys And Sorrows Of Life

I fell in love with Bill Wykoff when I was 8. He smoked Lucky Strikes, taught me to play gin rummy and kept a German Luger automatic pistol he’d brought home from the war in a drawer of his roll-top desk. Also, he had a tattoo, a massive one on his chest and shoulder with an eagle and snakes and a great rippling flag. Then my mother dropped him, and I never saw him again. But the memory lingers on. That was one terrific tattoo. “Yeah, that’s what they call military flash,” Jason Sherman tells me. He is a tattoo artist at Talisman Studios in Millerton, NY, and I am trying to find out why so many people are decorating their arms, legs, backs and butts these days with tattoos. His walls are covered with all kinds of flash, images that help people design their tattoos: dragons, dragonflies, scorpions, eagles, fish, wolves, hummingbirds, monsters, skulls, skulls and cross bones, lots of those. These images are often menacing, which is the point, as Sherman sees it. All kinds of warriors have painted themselves to shock and scare the enemy, to signal tribal ties, to make clear they are different from ordinary people. Tattoos do the same thing. They are shields, and insignias, and medals and stories. That’s why, Sherman figures, Wykoff and so many other World War II vets came home with a lot of ink on their bodies. Also tattoos prove you’re tough. “That’s because you have to be tough to handle the pain,” Sherman said, not really joking. He should know. At age 17, and living on his own, he wanted to know what being tattooed felt like. Well, now he knows. He’s pretty well decorated with body art, and one ear is pierced. Tattooing and piercing go together, he tells me. And all this body decorating makes a man stand out and delivers a message. For Luke Miller, 40, that message is the story of his life. He is a rock musician, an actor and co-owner of Real New York Tours which leads 10,000 visitors a year via subway, foot and sometimes tunnel, around the city. His wife, dancer Amber Cameron, has no tattoos. Not of any kind. But her husband, he’s covered with ink. And he’s poetic about it. “I am extremely tattooed,” Miller says. “My tattoos are a travelog of my life, some expressing angst, sudden loss and change.” Others are more life affirming, like the lotus on his belly. Or Gandhi, whose face is stippled into the back of his left calf. But Miller — who weekends in Falls Village with Cameron, a performer and choreographer for TriArts during the summer — leads a very public life. “I have to blend in with the crowd, sometimes,” which is why he has never tattooed a part of his body he cannot cover up. When Miller was 6, his father died, and his mother, a physician, raised five sons on her own. “Times Square was my playground,” Miller told me. He wanted to be a rock star and wear weird makeup and be famous. He still plays guitar, sings, and records and performs now with the Pale Moon Gang (tattoos bared). At age 13, Miller, with his mother’s written permission, though tattooing was not legal in New York City at the time, got his first tattoo. A skull wearing a hat. “It’s a form of expression,” Miller says. “I did not know any other way to express myself.” So he just kept decorating himself, reflecting both the dread and the joy he encountered in life. “My tattoos are not who I am so much as how I have felt.” For Miller, tattooing is the way to tell his story. And, anyway, “It’s just our skin. It’s a canvas. Why not paint it?” More on tattoos and women, employment, regulations and the joys and dangers of rubbing ink into a mass of tiny punctures next week.