Bill & Ann Have Nothing to Hide

Bill is 81 and Ann is 73, although I didn't know either number when I started talking to them at the Golden State Tattoo Expo, which probably helped, since numbers have a bad habit of giving your brain instructions before the people attached to them get a chance to screw those instructions up. I knew I wanted to talk to these two, both heavily tattooed, and wearing hats that would make half the people I know look like they were trying way too fucking hard, completely comfortable standing there without any apparent concern for whether the rest of us understood the package. A few questions opened little pieces of their lives, a couple answers completely changed what I thought I was looking at, and pretty soon my interview brain was loading questions faster than I wanted to fire them.

Their former professional lives were nothing I would have guessed from the photograph, and I'm keeping that shit locked up along with several other things they trusted me with after agreeing to sit down for The Wipe Down. Giving it away here would turn two very interesting lives into trivia before I've had the chance to hear the stories attached to it, and I'd rather leave a few locked doors standing in front of you than kick them open just to make this introduction more interesting. I already know what's behind a couple of them, and trust me, the photograph isn't giving you much help.

They did offer up something I don't mind sharing, mainly due to what happened inside my own head when they said it. Bill and Ann casually told me they would be comfortable modeling nude for me, and the internal guardrails came flying down with a very clear, dude, what the fuck, I'm not shooting a porno here. LOL. The smarter section of my brain caught the translation before the dumber section escaped through my mouth, and their offer suddenly became far less weird than my reaction to it. They were talking about art, their bodies were available to that art if it required them, clothing wasn't carrying any special authority in the equation, and there was no wink, sexual undertone or little performance waiting for me to react.

At 81 and 73, they were talking about their bodies as things that still belonged entirely to them, tattoos, age and everything else included, without any declaration about being young at heart, refusing to grow old or the other greeting card shit people reach for when an older person refuses to follow the script. Bill and Ann didn't appear to be fighting their ages at all, which is probably the part my brain needed a few extra seconds to encode, since fighting age and giving very little authority to it are two completely different animals.

Look at the photograph and I really want to use the word permanence here, wrap it around tattoos and aging and start writing some intelligent sounding shit about the human body, but nope, that word is too lame for me and pretty soon I'll sound like I'm stretching to boost my intelligence. I'm a dumbass doing my best to translate whatever my on the spectrum brain encodes into words other people can understand, so I'm going with agefuckery. Not my word, but that's the word I'm using.

I do make words up when regular English isn't getting the job done, so quick squirrel interruption, I invented pimpathetic, a word I'm particularly proud of, and if you think I'm full of shit, check Urban Dictionary. LOL. Yeah, I do that shit all the time, and agefuckery is close enough to what I'm trying to describe here that I'm stealing it for Bill and Ann.

Eighty one and seventy three arrive carrying a whole pile of expectations about how people are supposed to dress, behave, think about their bodies and occupy the space in front of them, and these two don't appear terribly interested in cooperating with any of it. They weren't trying to appear younger, rebellious or edgy, and nothing about them felt like two people proving they could still hang with the tattoo crowd. The tattoos, their clothes, the great hats, all belonged there, and apparently being willing to lose the clothes belonged there too if the art required it.

Tattoo culture loves warning a twenty-year-old that whatever gets put into their skin will still be sitting there when they're seventy or eighty, treating old age like a parole board where your future body will examine the evidence and ask what the fuck the younger idiot was thinking. Bill and Ann have already reached the age everybody keeps using in that warning and their ink isn't even close to the most interesting shit about them, especially after hearing the small amount of history they handed me at Golden State. Who they were before much of that ink arrived, what they did professionally, what parts of their history would completely screw with the assumptions people make from this photograph and how those lives produced the two people standing in front of my camera are staying untouched until their Wipe Down.

That photograph also exposes a problem tattooing has created for itself online, where people carrying decades of history, personality, skill, bad decisions, great decisions and whatever else built them get compressed into little squares, follower counts, bios and whichever image survived the algorithm long enough to land in front of us. Inker has built better ways through that mess by narrowing discovery around tattooing itself, letting style, geography and the work do their jobs without asking an artist to become a full-time entertainer first, but getting people connected is only valuable if we leave enough room for the human attached to the profile to come through.

Bill and Ann gave me a pretty good physical representation of that without trying, with their skin looking like an old map covered in marks collected across decades I haven't traveled through, little pieces sitting in plain sight without telling me what happened between them. I know a few of the destinations now, including a couple I absolutely wasn't expecting, but I don't know the roads yet, and that's the part I want from their Wipe Down rather than a collection of dates, professions and clever little facts arranged underneath their photograph.

Inker can give us better coordinates inside tattooing, help collectors locate artists they otherwise might never see and give artists another route toward people already looking for what they do, but coordinates aren't the place and a profile isn't the person, any more than the ink covering Bill and Ann can tell me what happened during the decades underneath it. Their photograph gave me enough to stop, the conversation gave me enough to stay, and everything they haven't told me yet is sitting between those marks waiting for us to ask the right fucking questions.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker