The Mermaid and the Compass: How I Became A Tattoo Artist

These days, this blog is less about universal descriptions of the lwa or aspects of Vodou.  I have been giving monthly Vodou classes through Mictlan Academy, where I dive deep into a spirit or group of mysteries in Haitian Vodou.  I encourage anyone interested in those classes to enroll in Mictlan Academy; you’ll have access to all classes, even past ones, with any paid level of membership.  I don’t want to repeat all that information, and honestly, it’s too much research to do for a weekly blog.  I will gladly talk about the spirits to anyone who turns up at The Serpent.  But in the blog, for now, I’m unpacking my personal experience with Spirit and the spirits.  It’s what got me to my current life as a tattoo artist and tarot reader, and where my Vodou practice began.

It was during the time of tsunami-like upheaval described in my last post that I decided to get my first tattoo, at the age of thirty nine.

As I previously mentioned, I was encountering a divine feminine force I didn’t know how to name or categorize.  She intruded in visions.  One day, during a high conflict time with my spouse (well, two straight years were high conflict), I got out my markers and drew a violently dismembered naked female figure in a circular form, a tumbling, lunar mandala that turned out to resemble the Mexica moon goddess Coyolxāuhqui.  On another occasion, I felt compelled to get up in the middle of the night and paint a red-robed female figure riding a lion, while a persistent voice in my head repeated “you were born to do this, you were born to do this”)… and that image turned out to fit the description of the goddess Babalon as described by Aleister Crowley and the Book of Revelations.  I hadn’t made those connections at the time, being unfamiliar with the iconography, but I did have the sense that these archetypal images were welling up from some subconscious well.

I also had gone way too long without drawing.  I was a precocious artist as a child, drawing so much and with such an eccentric grip that the bones in my left ring finger are permanently bent sideways and overlap my middle finger.  I incessantly drew people; not real people, but figures from my imagination.  This habit continued through art school and through living abroad in Thailand in my 20s but abruptly ended when I joined the spiritual group, met my husband and started my family.  There was no room for art, temporally or ideologically.  In a fundamentalist twist of the Buddhist concept of illusion or samsara, imagination was held suspect in this group as destructive daydreaming.  So there was nothing to make art about.

Now, there was a volcanic pressure behind my need to draw, and also a sense that some larger than life primal being was attempting to communicate with me.  Definitely feminine, and most certainly insistent.

So I decided to make a study and a discipline of my compulsion to make art and this sense of a presence with an urgent message.  As a new year’s resolution, I decided to choose a goddess every day and draw her.  Among the first I chose- not knowing their names, only finding them by googling “goddess”- were Tiamat, the goddess/monster of the primordial, watery chaos from Mesapotamian mythology, and Ma’at, the Egyptian vulture-goddess of decomposition and regeneration.

Around the same time, in keeping with that insistent, middle of the night voice that said I was born to paint, I started to be interested in, of all things, tattoos.  I had none.  I knew no one who had one except for a man in his 70s that had gotten his at age 14 from a sword-swallower when the carnival was in town.  But as I drew, I started wondering if my drawings might possibly make good tattoos.  So, on a whim, I decided to get one.

I’m pretty sure I was inspired by Ma’at in my tattoo choice.  I knew I wanted a night bird, as my life had become fly-by-night, maximizing any cranny of darkness I could grasp for myself.  Somehow I came across an image of a vintage stamp picturing a pennant-winged nightjar, a small African owl with long feathers trailing from its wingtips.  It occurred to me that these pennants would perfectly frame my belly button.

I reached out to the husband of a friend of a friend who tattooed locally.  The name of his business highlighted the ritual element of tattooing, and his shop felt like a hybrid of a tiny temple and the hold of a ship: dark and intimate, smelling of wood, and covered in an eclectic collection of sacred, tribal, and folk art.  It was a place of symbols unmoored from their diverse cultural contexts and brought into the marketplace, a place to explore and grab at whatever resonated.  Hearts, roses, anchors, tears, spider webs.  Women ranging from angels to mermaids to whores to demonesses; the whole spectrum of what is projected onto femininity.  Snakes, fish, birds, and big cats, all figured in the traditional style that moved them from nature into the world of archetype.  The tattooer himself was a man of few words.  He critiqued and redrew my design to make it symmetrical, bold, and durable, explaining the limitations of tattooing as an art form and the rules of readability he’d learned from his old biker mentor.

A week later we got to work.  The stomach is not a placement for the faint of heart.  I lay in the vintage dentist chair peering down at the heavy coil machine- the same kind that had been in use since tattooing was for carnival freaks and drunk sailors- carving up my white belly- the same one that had swelled to contain my babies.  As he silently engraved it, a river of black ink quivered over the line until he wiped it off.  Then I could see the remaining ink in the deep scratch, mingled with upwelling droplets of plasma.  Line by line, in slow, definite, even strokes, the nightjar emerged.

I was transfixed.  I had chosen an image lightly, not obsessing over meaning, simply knowing it was what I wanted.  I was now having it permanently engraved in my skin.  The process was methodical, graphic, like the linocuts I had done in art school.  It required hours of intense concentration, and an intimate yet impersonal connection between the artist and the client.  I wanted to learn how to do it.  I walked out of that session knowing I wanted to be a tattoo artist.

I knew I would be entering an alien world.  I had worked with groups of children for fifteen years.  I told them what to do and what not to do.  I arranged curriculum and field trips, made decisions about what would be good for them.  As a teacher, you’re expected to be an exemplar of child-appropriate behavior, even when off duty, out in the community.  Your job is to mold the psyche of children, and to create a protective, safe space for them where they’ll be exposed to the RIGHT things.  It’s about being very careful about what you etch into them.

Tattooing is the wild west. You never know who’s going to walk in the door, but whoever it is, and whatever they want on their body, it’s not yours to judge. They are adults, and their bodies are already bulging suitcases of memories, beliefs, thoughts, and traumas.  These are all welling up from their psyche, wanting to announce themselves on the surface of their skin.  Skulls, knives, insects, sexy women, teardrops.  The sun of this world won’t develop them like a photo, bringing the unconscious to light through the power of its rays, showing us what is inside a person.  But the tattoo machine will.  And while we can refuse certain projects on moral grounds (it should be obvious which), what a person wants on their skin is theirs alone.  It’s about bodily autonomy.  It really is about saying fuck you to what’s on the outside, and allowing what’s on the inside to show itself.

Maybe a week after that first tattoo session (after which I immediately started obsessing about changing my career, which I knew would mean changing my whole life), a parent at my school pulled me aside and told me she had dreamed I had pulled up my skirt to reveal a giant rose tattooed up the side of my leg.  She was horrified.  I was unsettled.  The cat was out of the bag already somehow!

I don’t know the name of any specific spirit of tattooing within Haitian Vodou, although there IS one in the Mayan pantheon.  From what I have found, their name is Acat.  As a tattoo deity, they link the physical and spiritual realms.  They bless the ink and needles, and keep the hand steady through the tattooing process.  Accounts differ on whether this is a male or female deity.  I seem to remember as well that there is a tattoo goddess who is said to have passed the art down to humans in the South Seas islands but I can’t currently find anything about her online.

My theory, though, is that if there are spirits who work with tattoo artists in Haitian Vodou, they are Agwe and LaSyrenn.

Think about it.  LaSyrenn dredges the wealth of images up from the subconscious.  With them, she dredges up the money that’s made in the profession.  And Agwè, LaSyrenn’s steadfast husband, navigates the hand.  He has the patience, gravity, and steadiness to create a smooth line between point A and point B.  And once you board the ship of actually getting the tattoo, that is all there is to do.  Everything else- the pain, the revelation, the blood- is surging under the surface.

Ship stencil by George Burchett

Tattooing has long been associated with sailors, and mermaids have been a theme all along.  That marriage between the depths of the spirit and the surface of the body that we explored with LaSyrenn is what tattooing is all about.  And mirrors figure heavily in tattooing, as the instrument by which the client determines whether the placement, design, and size accurately reflect what’s begging to come out of them.

Please drop a comment below about what you feel tattooing has to do with spirit!