Memento: Records, Authenticity,
and Constructed Social Memory
in the Inked World
Terry Baxter
@terryx666  #saa12
...while lit up by the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned
like Satanic blue flames on
his body.
[P]rimitive tribes were certainly convinced
that the spirit, having escaped from the
body at death, retained a replica of its
earthly tenement. They therefore used
tattoo marks as a means of identification
in the next world and a passport to future
happiness.
Ronald Scutt
A man without tattoos is
invisible to the Gods.
Iban proverb
“A tattoo is a true poetic creation,
and is always more than meets the
eye. As a tattoo is grounded on
living skin, so its essence emotes a
poignancy unique to the mortal
human condition.”
V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Modern
Primitives
“I understand. I’m not your
type, too many tattoos. Thing
is, there isn’t much to do in
prison except desecrate your
flesh.”
Max Cady
“Just because there are things I don't
remember doesn't make my actions
meaningless. The world doesn't just
disappear when you close your eyes,
does it? Anyway, maybe I'll take a
photograph to remind myself, get
another freaky tattoo.”
Lenny Shelby
Ötzi
once were warriors
I’ve Done It
“Memory can change the shape of a
room; it can change the color of a car.
And memories can be distorted.
They're just an interpretation, they're
not a record, and they're irrelevant if
you have the facts.”
Leonard Shelby
Suicide Nixon
Birkenau Boy
We were born to make Kafka reality
Artoria and a
life of her own
choosing.
Gulag Kitteh
Crime Scene
[…] But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a
winning! Yessirree! It's love that's won, and
old left hand hate is down for the count!
”It was a very, very long time ago, when only sailors and Hell’s Angels were tattooed,
honestly, and prisoners and I decided to get a tattoo because it was the most shocking
thing I could think of doing…And now I’m utterly disgusted and shocked because it’s
become completely mainstream, which is unacceptable to me.”
Hey girl
“A tattoo should never be
meaningful, because at a certain
point you’re going to hate it, and
it might as well make you laugh.
One of my tattoos is supposed to
be a monster’s hand dropping a
bloody heart but I did it myself
with a tattoo kit so it looks like a
cactus.”
“From this time on, participants
will be known as ‘words,” they
are not understood as carriers or
agents of the texts they bear, but
as its embodiments.”
Anonymous archivist submission
without story.
I have several tattoos, but the attached one is
probably my most meaningful.
My middle names are Mary Kathleen, and she
was my grandmother. She died from breast
cancer, after a double mastectomy and several
rounds of chemo about 15 years before I was
born, and when I was a a teenager I felt a real
disconnect from my living family, my dads
family. My mother gave me a ton of family
things including my grandmothers wedding ring.
This started my genealogical/archival quest to
learn about the women I was named for. My
tattoo is the symbol for Saint Barbara, the patron
saint of women's cancer, and it commemorates
the grandmother I never got to know.
Ciara Ward, Cobourg Archives
I am a first generation Southerner, born
and bred in New Orleans. I grew up in a
large, creepy old Victorian house that I
grew to love. It seemed like only seconds
after I graduated college, leaving them
with an empty nest, when my parents
decided to sell the house and moved to
California. I mourned the loss of that
house (and, for a little while, my bearings)
when they left the city. So I got this tattoo,
the fleur de lis, a symbol of the city. To
always remind me of home.
Cheesy, sentimental, but true! I keep
threatening that my next one will be a
giant magnolia, the Louisiana state flower.
Jennifer Waxman, Center for Jewish History
I got this tattoo in the 90s when it was the
rage. I chose one with no meaning just a
beautiful image and I’m glad because I still
love to look at it. It’s from an illustrated
collection of Japanese fairy tales, specifically
the story of the Green Willow. The full
image includes a samurai on a horse riding
over a hill with a full moon in the sky. You
can see that the tattoo artist included a bit
of the outline of the hill on the trunk of
the tree which I think makes the image
more abstract. It’s an example of a mistake
making the end product more interesting.
Heather Fox, Kentucky Historical Society
Archivist
I got this tattoo in 2007 as a little
present to myself for leaving the
teaching field and pursing my
MLIS. Contrary to popular belief,
the goose does not symbolize my
mean personality (I'm not!), or that
I poop everywhere (I don't!), or
that I'm Canadian (this, I wouldn't
mind...). The imagery is purely
sentimental-- I grew up in a house
on a river and geese were always in
our yard. Their honking reminds
me of home and fall, my favorite
season.
Sarah Dorpinghaus
Digital Projects Library Manager
University of Kentucky Digital Library
Services
Here's a shot of my arms. One is the
"Temperence" card from a tarot deck
based on the art of pre-Raphaelite
painter Edward Burne-Jones. I'm an
aquarius, so the waterbearer symbolism is
quite fitting, and it's a personal reminder
to maintain balance-- work/life balance,
introversion/extroversion balance,
mind/body balance. The other is a
design by Austrian artist Kolo Moser. To
me, the hourglass is a reminder that
"tempus fugit," and the ourobouros ties
me and my fleeting sands of time to the
greater cycles of the universe. In my
own mental shorthand, I think of them
as "patience" and "balance"-- two things
for which I am constantly striving!
Kit Messick, Manuscript Specialist, New York
Public Library
I affectionately refer to
this as my "information
sleeve." The card catalog
represents libraries, the
skull & book archives, and
the birds and an open
book the dissemination of
information. The banner
on the card catalog reads
"Peace & Knowledge" - I
strongly believe that
knowledge is powerful
and is the strongest
weapon against
intolerance & injustice.
Elizabeth Skene, Arab
American National Museum
I was in New Orleans right before the first Mardi Gras after Katrina with
my boyfriend at the time. I was 22 years old. We were visiting his dad, and
it was kind of emotional and intense because there was rubble everywhere
and many parts of the city were deserted. We would drive around at night
and whole neighborhoods would be completely dark.
We decided to get or first tattoos together. Rick drew a little figure based
on the Minor Threat First Two 7"s on a 12" cover where Ian MacKaye is
sitting down looking depressed, which was kind of Rick’s vibe. I found an
illustration of an accordion that I thought looked cool. I thought of
accordions because we were in New Orleans, and because his dad Pat was
learning the accordion, which I thought was totally rad. Pat was a doctor at
the VA hospital in New Orleans, and saw a lot of crazy shit go down
during Katrina. She is also a transsexual, and a hilarious person. The first
time I met her was in New York. We ate about $200 worth of sushi, then
bought a large pizza, two of those big bottles of wine, and rented Crash at
Two Boots in the East Village. We went back to Rick’s apartment in
Brooklyn and she fell asleep about 30 minutes into the movie on the floor
with a slice of cheese pizza on a paper plate balanced on her large breasts. I
miss hanging out with her.
Anyway, I found this image of a devil wearing a tuxedo playing the
accordion and we took it into Electric Ladyland on Frenchmen Street. I
told the guy I just wanted the accordion, but he said he would do the whole
thing for free if I included the devil. I thought about it, but decided not to
take him up on it. It didn’t really matter anyway because Pat helped me pay
for it. There are other stories related to this tattoo, but this is the best one.
Oh, and I’ve been going to Mardi Gras pretty much every year since.
Kate Dundun, Occidental College
The best part about the tattoo on my right arm is how tough it is to explain. It is an
image copied from a page of Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives. Within
the context of the novel, it is a poem, the only one ever published by the longvanished founder of a poetic movement to which the novel’s two main characters
have ostensibly devoted their lives. Seeing it for the first time, they perform a sort
of ecstatic exegesis that confuses more than clarifies and, satisfied, resume their
travels.
The personal story is that I acquired this tattoo at the tail end of my first stint in
graduate school (M.A. Humanities, NYU). As the program progressed, so grew my
suspicions of the professional field I was training to enter. I think my essential
beef was with the demand for elucidation, while the qualities I value most in texts
and art are evasion, vagary, and absence. I balked at the prospect of a career spent
synthesizing things better left in pieces. Answers are boring when compared with
questions. So I came upon The Savage Detectives, which, like all of Bolaño’s work, is
deliberately elusive. At the height of my little crisis, I found Bolaño questioning,
omitting, implying rather than stating. And at the center of this novel was this
graphically alluring poem, which simultaneously means a whole lot and very little.
Now that it resides permanently on my body, I get asked about it. I bask in the
moments when I have to choose which explanation to give. I can offer one of the
characters’ interpretations - “a joke covering up something more serious” (page 398
in the Picador paperback), three ships, three coffins, something about Zion, or the
Mexican colloquialism simón, etc. I can tell my own story, which is long and maybe
a little boring. Often I just mention that it is a neat image prevalent in the work of
a writer I deeply admire (he had used similar imagery at least 15 years before
publishing The Savage Detectives), and which happens to look nice on my arm. That
last one probably makes the most sense to the most people who ask, though it feels
just as inadequate as the others. That choice I make, and that whichever tact I
choose means no more or less than any of the others, is probably the most
accurate summation of why this thing is on my arm.
Nicholas Martin, New York University
The story behind this tattoo starts during my senior year of undergraduate studies at Hunter College, when I took a class on William Blake. At some
point during the class, my professor read the quote that's now on my arm, paused, and said "now there's something to ponder." That class was one of
the highlights of my undergraduate career, and I totally had my mind blown by Blake's radical openness of spiritual thought and expression, but that
particular moment really stuck with me. For a long time, I had that quote above my bed so I'd see it last thing at night and first thing every morning.
The decision to get it as a tattoo is a little harder to explain. I've wanted to get a tattoo for a while, but always stopped short because I felt like I didn't
have a good enough idea of what to get. One day, it just occurred to me that this would be the perfect thing to get permanently inked on my body. I'm
not a vegetarian or a vegan (just because something is holy doesn't mean you can't eat it), but I think the quote begs some provocative questions about
what holiness is, what it means to be a living thing, and what the implications are for our relationship to the world around us. I probably don't need to
make the obvious point, but I feel like these questions are particularly relevant for archivists.
I've only had this tattoo for a couple of months, but I'm finding that it's a real conversation killer in certain situations, which is interesting. I get a lot of
questions about what it says, but very few people are interested in engaging further once they've read the quote. Most people just say "oh" and find
something really interesting to do on their smartphone. I have had some good conversations with people about it. Someone recently told me it's a way
of weeding out thepeople I want to know from the people I don't, which seems totally reasonable. My theory is that most people are fundamentally
uncomfortable with the word "holy" and don't know how to react. Which, honestly, I kind of enjoy.
Hillel Arnold, Rockefeller Archive Center
Tattoo the pristine flesh
What is permanent anyway?
This ink only lasts 'til the grave,
Skin and ideas decompose
That which we did compose.
Corri Alius