I wrote this story for a Winter Term course in Literary Journalism that I took during my freshman year at Middlebury College.
February 2016
The first thing you will notice upon entry into Frog Alley Tattoo & Leatherworks is the sickly sweet odor of some anonymous cleaning product, which floods the nostrils and briefly overwhelms the senses. Next, you will descend two short steps and land on a sparse linoleum floor with an unconvincing woodgrain motif, at the center of which usually sits a sign reading: “CAUTION: WET FLOOR.” This is no false advertisement—every so often, a hulking figure will emerge, lumber over to the room’s center, aim his bottle of blue liquid in the general direction of the floor, and mop to and fro. As you step forward and fix your gaze straight ahead, he should be there to meet it, standing behind the counter and leaning forward with both wrists pressed against the glass. He is fairly tall but immensely wide. He has a brown goatee and a shining bald head. “Hi there,” he calls out—his voice is high-pitched and husky; his tone is friendly but he doesn’t smile. “What can I do for ya?”
Pierre Vachon is Frog Alley’s chief piercer and co-owner, alongside Christin Eaton, his girlfriend, or wife, or partner—I never learned exactly which. Christin handles the tattoos, and her domain lies off to the left, separated from the main area by a waist-high wall. On a typical day, the persistent buzz signaling a tattooing-in-progress permeates the shop, as it does the afternoon I arrive to begin my observations. Old-school hip hop plays at a reasonable volume as Pierre tidies up the vast array of piercing jewelry kept in a display case under the counter. Today, Christin’s tattoo realm is surrounded on all sides by Japanese-style folding room dividers. I learn later that this precaution was taken due to the customer’s sensitive tattoo location: “high up on her inner thigh.”
I’d been to Frog Alley a handful of times, accompanying friends as they inquired about piercings and purchased new accessories. I hung by the door during those visits, attempting to make it abundantly clear that I was nothing more than a visitor. This time I’m alone, and I’m out of my element. The world of “body modification”—the proper term within the tattoo/piercing industry—is, as far as I’m concerned, the antithesis of most facets of my personality. I purchase my clothing from Gap and J. Crew; I favor grey shirts and navy blue sweaters. Oftentimes, I’m more comfortable around adults than people my own age. I attended an elite private high school, but never felt repressed. I don’t stand out in photographs. I support Bernie Sanders, but with reservations.
I discern disembodied voices from behind the Japanese screens.
“Darwin’s theory is that we evolved from apes,” says an unknown male, presumably related to the woman being tattooed. “That part is debatable. But there is evolution; everything is evolving.”
The same voice moves on to Caitlyn Jenner: “I don’t appreciate the fact that he, and it’s still a he, won the woman of the year award. After the last winner was part of the Civil Rights Movement or some shit!”
Some time later, the man emerges; he’s wearing patchy jeans and a flannel shirt, with a large nose piercing and even larger gauges stretching his earlobes. His backwards baseball cap reads, succinctly, “MURDER.” He makes small talk with Pierre and gestures over to me. Pierre shrugs and mutters something; the man nods. I fiddle with the dozens of novelty items on a tall rack in the middle of the room. Pickle Gumballs, Finger Tentacles, Mr. Bacon Air Freshener, Zombie Devil Ducks. I contemplate an exit strategy.
Sources differ regarding when, precisely, body modification began to puncture the American mainstream. Some contend the shift began in the 1970s, when individuals trained in the fine arts began to embrace body modification as its own distinct art form. Others contend it was within the past decade, thanks to celebrity spokespeople and media including the reality program Miami Ink, that the percentages of modified Americans began to meaningfully rise. Whatever the cause, the general progression is clear: tattoos and piercings have evolved from a stigmatized indicator of deviance often associated with sailors, bikers, and prisoners to a commodity possessed by large portions of the populace. About 36 percent of Americans aged 18 to 25 are tattooed, according to a 2014 Fox News poll, and about one third have piercings in areas other than the earlobe. Anthropologist Maria Abeyami Ortega Dominguez, reviewing a book on the history of tattoo culture, summarizes the shift. Once an affirmation of “social dissatisfaction and individuality,” she writes, tattoos have since “emerged from the shadow of the fringes of society to join the light from the reflectors of mainstream culture’s ‘alternative’ elites.” Today, celebrities such as Justin Bieber and David Beckham sport limbs coated in ink, and one wonders whether these “alternative elites” need even be alternative anymore.
Pierre and Christin heartily embrace the cultural shift. “We have a more clean, light, look,” Pierre says. “A lot of tattoo shops you go into are very dark, they play a lot of death metal, they’re covered in tattoos, stretched ears, that sort of thing. That’s just not our style. The industry is changing; it’s going away from those seedy, dark-looking places to more open, mainstream, inviting places. People understand that what we do isn’t scary; it can be very clean and very presentable…Business-wise, it makes more sense to be more open to the public than to close them off.”
Behind this good business sense, however, a more important principle is operating. The proprietors of Frog Alley are characterized by an almost aggressive attitude of non-judgement. “We have people walk into this shop and tell us that they don’t think there should be a tattoo shop here,” Pierre says. “I don’t care. The difference between people who don’t have tattoos and modifications and those who do is that the people who do, don’t judge you for not having them. But the people that don’t have them will immediately judge you for having them. I don’t judge anyone if they come in and tell me they don’t have them. Good for you… You don’t want them, you don’t have to have them—that’s the beauty of it, nobody forced you to do it…If that offends you that badly, you have a lot more issues than I’ll ever deal with.” He repeats a similar monologue several times. Indeed, “the fact that you can do what you want and nobody will care,” Pierre says, is one of the community’s biggest attractions. “In the body modification community, no one cares…You look how you want, because that’s how the subculture grew. There’s a sense of freedom there, you kind of blend in and you’re no longer a freak.”
“Everything we do is a body modification,” Pierre and Christin declare as a sort of mantra, and tattoos and piercings are no different. Pierre cites shaving, haircuts, and weight loss. Christin mentions breast implants, dental surgery, and “even the latest trend in clothing.”
“It’s just a way to decorate,” they both say separately. Pierre has dragons on his right arm and comedy/tragedy masks on his left, featuring a diamond stud in the bicep. (Christin was the artist responsible for the masks; they first met while Pierre was in the chair). Muppets and “an Elvis zombie” adorn his left and right legs, respectively. Dressed in black with a vest, tie, and slacks, Pierre looks like a candidate for World’s Strongest Waiter. Before entering the body modification industry, he was a professional wrestler for eighteen years—or was it sixteen? He’s not sure. Wrestling prepared him well for his current occupation, he says, by teaching him “how to read people very easily and very quickly, and how to assess situations.” Today, aside from his physique, the only sign of his former occupation is a grade-four shoulder separation, which will be operated on “someday.” Pierre’s transition to body modification was apparently smooth. “I figured that it was a good thing for me to get into ‘cause I knew I was gonna stop wrestling at some point,” he says. “I’ve always loved tattoos and body modification, so I just met people and got an apprenticeship.” He shrugs. “Pretty straightforward.”
Christin’s tattoos—numbering fourteen in total—commemorate her son, her sister, and important life events. “You just want to feel good about yourself,” she explains. “Growing up in San Francisco, I saw piercings, I saw tattoos—it was art on people,” she says. “And I thought, ‘That’s fun. When I grow up I wanna have a tattoo!’” She’s been doing them herself for nine years now. She would’ve started earlier, she says, but “back in the ‘80s, it was really a hard field to get into. It wasn’t as accepted to have a tattoo, so the people who did them didn’t want competition and they weren’t willing to train anybody.” Christin wears a black hoodie, has dyed red hair, and sports seven earrings in each lobe. She’s friendly, and she smiles, too. Once, she glances at my notebook and sees I’ve mistakenly described her leggings as sweatpants. “I would never be caught dead in sweatpants,” she exclaims. “I have a rule that you will never, ever see me in the grocery store wearing sweatpants. So I don’t own a single pair.” She smiles. A pause. “But hey, if you wanna wear them, I won’t judge you!”
Cultural acceptance of body modification has done little more than facilitate their customers’ latent desire to express themselves, insist Pierre and Christin. “I think a lot of people feel the need to be accepted in society and they’re not gonna go do something that’s gonna make them not accepted in society,” says Christin. “So now that society says it’s okay to do it, they’re more likely to do what they would’ve wanted to do anyway but wouldn’t have done.”
Linus Owens never wanted to be accepted. A professor of sociology at Middlebury College, his entire body is tattooed with horizontal black stripes, about 3/4 of an inch in thickness and separated by gaps of 6 1/2 inches. The most recent addition—an unbroken line running across the five fingers of each hand, between the knuckles—was completed six years ago. The stripes themselves have no inherent meaning, he says, outside of the “stark, simple, minimalist aesthetic” that he has always valued. Owens dropped out of college in the the early 1990s. The stripes began around then, in San Francisco, within the “anti-authoritarian subcultural space” of which Owens was a part. Everything touching Owens’s body is black; from his socks, pants, sweater, and skullcap to the gauges that stretch his earlobes wide. He reclines in a swivel desk chair. His office is small and narrow, and trinkets clutter his desk and bookshelves. It’s overcast outside but the lights are off, so we talk in half-darkness.
“Some kind of acting upon self, some kind of control,” Owens says, was an initial motivator for his modifications. “The other,” he says, “is to mark oneself. There’s a timing element: when I started in the early ‘90s, it signified something different than it does now, because it was much rarer. In the ‘90s it marked you as some kind of social outcast and you would expect to be branded and treated as such. To some extent it was a conscious decision to exclude yourself from ever being gainfully employed, which is changing. I don’t think anyone thinks about that in the same way anymore.”
Pierre and Christin’s judgment-free modification utopia is the stuff of Owens’s nightmares. “Tattoo talk was the worst,” he says. “People who had tattoos felt they should talk to people with tattoos, and I just find it incredibly boring. I have no interest in why anyone else does what they do, as an individual…That’s the downside. You mark yourself as belonging somewhere, even though for me, it was more marking that I didn’t belong. I never found any great affinity with tattooed people more than anyone else. It was more self-exclusion from the mainstream, which, of course, I’ve now been completely recuperated into.”
With every passing year, Owens loses even more of the otherization he had desired so deeply. “Certainly,” he says, “it’s lost any sort of sub- or countercultural meaning…It doesn’t have the same kind of excluding effect that it promised or threatened 25 years ago.” These “cultural shifts” are hardly limited to body modification. “We’re these total cultural omnivores,” he explains. “Like, ‘I listen to all kinds of music’—that’s not how it used to be, where you had a genre you’re committed to. Now we have thousands of songs on our various devices. We shuffle through them, we move easily from pop to classical to rap without thinking about it. Nothing marks you in the same way anymore, which is unfortunate, I think. Maybe not for normal people, maybe they like that. But for those of us who don’t identify as normal, it would be nice to be marked. There’s some pleasure in it, at least for me.” He speaks softly and slowly, gazing at some spot in the background behind me. “Like, ‘I have a butterfly on my ankle’—all these things that are easy and boring. But most people are and that’s fine. What are you gonna do?”
The next day at Frog Alley, Christin is tattooing a giant butterfly onto a woman’s back and 1950s rock ’n’ roll is playing on the radio. The woman leans face-down on the black leather chair; Christin places her left hand firmly on the woman’s exposed back and holds her device with the other. Tattoo artists embed their creations into bodies using what’s usually referred to as a tattoo machine: a hand-held instrument powered by an electromagnetic coil. After being dipped into a pool of indelible ink, a spring-loaded set of several tiny needles vibrates rapidly, sometimes as much as 150 times per second. They puncture the epidermis—the outer layer of skin—and deposit ink in the dermis, a stabler layer of tissue that lies underneath. There, the pigment will rest in perpetuity, gradually penetrating even deeper into the flesh. I inch forward to the edge of the waist-high wall, attempting to see as much as I can of the process without being intrusive. The butterfly looks essentially complete by the time I arrive; it’s entirely black with streaks of motion emanating from the wings. The allure of tattooing as an art form is not hard to perceive: the freshly-laid ink is darkly radiant and the machine buzzes with ruthless efficiency. When told of my project, several suggest with smiles and raised eyebrows that if I really want to learn about the process, I might as well get a tattoo myself. I laugh and shake my head, instinctively. It’s the same instinct that tells me I ought to buy another J. Crew sweater.
On the computer screen behind the counter, Pierre scrolls through Facebook. I quote a few of Linus’s responses and Pierre cuts me off midway through. “It’s the hipster mentality,” he says. “‘I was there first, blah blah blah.’ Who cares? Things evolve, things change. If you’re that worried about being different, find something else to make you different… There are a lot of old guys who get bitter and weird because it’s so popular now. The reality is, if it’s popular, it pays my bills, so I’m not gonna be that upset about it.”
“Just find something else. That’s what evolution is: you find other things that create what you want.” He’s on a roll. “People were doing surgery on the field first too, but now doctors do it and we’re not mad at them. People aren’t saying, ‘I say we cut our arms off when we’re sick!’ There will always be people mad about evolution…But that’s why you find something new, and there’s always something. That’s why body modification pushes itself to change constantly.”
“What makes you not normal by societal standards,” he concludes, “is your outlook on things and how you want to present yourself. This [gestures towards his tattoos] is all superficial. So just do what you wanna do…You don’t get as stressed out.” Satisfied, he turns his back to me and resumes his scrolling.
Christin has the same message with less caricature: “If that was [Owens’s] way to rebel, you need to look for other ways to feel happy, buddy…You have to look at why you’re rebelling: what are you rebelling against? Just be happy. Live your life… That’s how I feel, I’ve never felt the need to rebel.” Then again, she admits, “For me to rebel against my family, I would’ve had to become a Republican and join the military.”
Tina, a short-haired Middlebury freshman from West Texas, had her septum pierced at Frog Alley in September. On a weekend trip to Montreal several weeks later, she got a Texas-themed tattoo on her upper arm, complete with cacti and a cow skull. “I chose to get my nose pierced because it’s something I wanted to be brave enough to do,” she says. “I also wanted to be more confident in myself and be set apart from the more standard beauty.” As for the tattoo, “It’s home, it’s where I’m from…it makes me feel happy because I know that, although it’s permanent, I wasn’t afraid.” The tattoo was “kind of a rushed decision,” she admits, but she regrets nothing. Her parents, who “hate tattoos,” remain unaware. “I got it to show that I’m not my parents and I don’t care if they think they’re ugly,” she says. “I did it for me. And also to rebel, but that’s neither here nor there.”
I ponder the consequences of putting a small shape somewhere on my own body; I can’t think of many drawbacks. I move from spiral, to triangle, to circle. From forearm, to calf, to thigh. Friends are intrigued but cautious. Do I understand what it means, they ask, for something to be permanent? I nod without much vigor. Either I don’t understand, or I don’t care. I’m not sure which, and I’m not sure if it matters.
The next day I watch Sanja, another Middlebury freshman, get her nose pierced. On our way to Frog Alley, she grills me about my project and a friend comments on her apparent confidence. She shrugs. Inside the shop, Pierre leads us behind the counter (“C’mon back!), sits Sanja down and circles a spot on her nose. “Why don’t ya take a look in the mirror and see if you like that spot, we can move it if you like,” he says breathlessly. Satisfied, she sits back down, leans back and closes her eyes. Seconds later, she motions for her friends, who rush over and take her hand.
“Am I allowed to document this?” one asks.
“I ask no video, but you can take as many pictures as you like,” he responds. He pushes the hollow needle through the skin and threads through the remaining steel thread. “Too many people watch YouTube videos of piercings and think it’s like a how-to.” The friends nod.
“Now why don’t you wipe your eye before I close it,” he says to his patient. “Cause I know it’s gonna make your eyes start to water right about… now.” The tears flow—an automatic response. “There it goes,” he smirks. The friends giggle.
“Aftercare on this is pretty simple. You’re gonna want to use a mild soap on this. Lather up your fingers, put it on the ring, turn it back and forth through the piercing. Use warm water to rinse, and if it gets crusty yellow stuff…” Sanja leans back with her eyes closed and takes deep breaths. “…other than that, keep it clean, be very gentle blowing your nose, and you should be good. You OK? Nauseous? A little dizzy?”
“I just need some water.”
“Yeah, you had a little bit of a pasty look.”
Friends escort the subject to another seat as she sips slowly and color returns to her face. Pierre lumbers around the shop, checking in as he passes. “Probably an adrenaline surge,” he calls out as he moves back behind the counter. “Just relax and take your time”—friendly without a smile.
I visit the shop again on Monday and make an appointment for myself. I’d like a black circle on my leg, about the size of a nickel, I explain to Christin. I expect a smirk or raised eyebrows, but she only nods, and marks me down on the calendar for Wednesday at 5 PM. My parents voice their approval, as do most of my friends. “As long as you’re sure,” say several, and for whatever reason, I feel that I am.
The first thing I notice when I descend the two steps and walk to the counter is the country music playing on the sound system. Pierre and Christin scroll through Facebook together and he taps his fingers on the glass. Christin prints out the design for my tattoo: a thin black ring about 3/4 of an inch in diameter. She hands me the requisite forms. No, I have not had hepatitis within the last year. Yes, I agree not to sue Christin Eaton and/or Frog Alley Tattoo and Leatherworks in connection with any and all damages, claims, demands, rights, and causes of action whatever kind or nature, based upon injuries or property damage to, or death of myself, or any other person arising from my decision to have tattoo-related work done at this time. I understand that tattooing is permanent. I have not used alcohol or drugs within the last eight hours. I am not pregnant.
I indicate the desired area: the outer side of my left thigh, about six inches above my knee. She sprays disinfectant and rubs the spot for longer than I’d expect. Using carbon paper and an adhesive, she leaves a blueprint to be filled in. “Alright, there’s no room for error on this so don’t move,” she instructs. I find out later that a circle, which I chose for its simplicity, is in fact among a tattoo artist’s most difficult tasks. (“If you’re doing a flower or something and you slip a little, it’s still gonna look like a flower. A perfect circle, not so much.”) She slips on black latex gloves and puts her left hand on my leg, placing her canvas in the space between her thumb and index finger. She grips the machine with her right hand and places a foot on the small pedal that lies on the floor.
The next things I notice are that famous buzz and a barely perceptible pinch. Then a very perceptible one. This alternation continues throughout the ten-minute procedure; with each hard pinch my leg twitches a bit and I wince at the possible consequences. Christin soldiers on. I look down and there’s not much to see. She holds the device firmly and the needles vibrate at lightning speed, well past the point of visibility. It looks and feels like I’m being marked with a loud, sharp, intricate ballpoint pen. She does rotations around the blueprint; once, twice, three times—I lose count. Pierre stays behind the counter and chats with some bearded guest; apparently, my transformation from detached interviewer to tattoo recipient doesn’t interest him much. Eight minutes in, Christin wipes off the blueprint entirely to get a better sense of her progress. There’s not much more to be done. A couple more minutes, and she stops abruptly: “You’ve got a freakin’ circle on your leg!”
She disposes of the materials and recites her aftercare instructions as I get up to look in the mirror. It’s aesthetically pleasing—a vibrant black, bold but not overbearing. The untouched skin surrounding the ink is reddish and slightly swollen; Christin reminds me that it’s an open wound, though it may not look like one. She affixes a gauze patch to the spot, and I roll down my shorts and put on my jeans. If there would be a time for pangs of regret, this is it, but all I feel is vague self-satisfaction. We proceed to the counter and I swipe my card; Christin hands me my receipt. Pierre discusses stand-up comedy with the bearded guest. I try to think of some broad question to ask, but nothing comes to mind. Christin looks down at her calendar, reviewing the next few of the 400 or so tattoos she creates each year. I sense a slight throbbing a few inches above my knee; within an hour I feel nothing at all. I call out a thanks as I head for the door and ascend the short steps, my fresh branding tucked safely under a layer of denim.
I recall a quote that Linus Owens had referenced, apocryphally attributed to William S. Burroughs: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. “It was this kind of moment in time where you felt constrained, where the Man was keeping you down,” he explained. In his San Francisco days, he had used the phrase as a sort of maxim. “But if you broke through that, you could do whatever you want. Now it feels like we’re in the inverse of that: you can do whatever you want, so now nothing is true…When I was in high school, I imagined this world: ‘We can all be artists, we can all be creative, and it would be great.’ And now that we all have tattoos and Instagram accounts, it feels even more boring than the stifling conformity of the 1980s.”
I close the door behind me and pop in my headphones, music already set to shuffle.
Nick Garber 