make
contact


Tattoos and Stories

We are born with a genetic predetermination for eye color, hair color, skin color, and a predisposition for height, and weight. The blueprints for how we will appear for our entire lives are already drawn when we take our first breaths. Yet as the years of our lives pass, our hearts often change much more quickly and secretly than the lines that visibly etch themselves into our skin, or than the hair that changes to grey. A rebellious and restless spirit may give way to the needs of marriage and family. Young idealists may become pragmatists. Those of us who forget to pay attention to the course of our own lives will forget the path followed, forever losing track of where and who and what we once were. There is no going back without a map. Denial of our past is as easy as looking at our homes, jobs, and selves as we are today and believing that they define who we are. But who we are can never be known without recalling who we were.

More than my photographs, more than my writings, and almost as much as my songs, I treasure my tattoos as signposts pointing backwards in my life. Every day by looking in the mirror, they can return me to times and places where I made a choice that would never be changed. Where I forever captured the spirit of friendship, of changing myself, of enjoying a wild night in a string of wild nights, and never knowing where I was heading - without perceiving that as being a problem. Tattoos are the places where I grabbed an imprint of my life, and I captured the story of who I was, where I was, and who I was with at that one instant.

I believe that every tattoo has its own story. Here I offer mine, and those of friends, co-workers, and willing strangers - those who share my belief that their tattoos are more than just ink, that they transcend decoration, and that they do indeed mark their lives with a story worth remembering and telling...


   

Copyright © 1998 Howard L. Spielman.. All rights reserved.