Written By Dave O'Malley
If you have an aversion to displays of blotchy skin from ordinary people; if a man’s hirsute armpits frighten you or you have been living on an otherwise uninhabited island and not yet realized that the once-marginalized art of human tattooing is now an omnipresent social phenomenon that has grown to become part of the social fabric of western culture, then I suggest you do not press on with reading this article.
Let’s be perfectly honest here. I am a 67-year-old man, paunchy around the edges, with an ever-expanding universe of liver spots, fading in self-esteem and I come from a postwar era when non-societally-mandated tattoos were found only on men who inhabited the fringes of acceptable behaviour. There were, of course, societies and cultures on other continents whose culturally important tattooing practices I could view in National Geographic, but the only tattoos I came in contact with seemed to be curiously menacing, largely blurred and faded “pick and poke” concoctions that fit into one category—they all could be traced back to some sort of past military, penal or merchant marine service.
In 1973, as a young 20-something “town planner” assigned to do a facilities survey of Canadian Forces Base Petawawa about 100 miles northwest of Ottawa, I was assigned officer status. I lived in the BOQ and dined at the officers’ mess. Here, as a long haired, snot-nosed civilian puke with no apparent mojo and dressed in flared pants and platform shoes, I was served at the linen covered dinner table of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Mess by 50-something stewards with lengthy military careers written in the lines of their faces—thirty years of heavy smoking and alcohol abuse. As they leaned in to take my plate or pour me another glass of ice water, their tattooed arms would pass before my eyes, drawn across them blue, barely understandable tributes to places, women, events and units they once loved—Latin phrases, waving flags, hangman’s nooses, daggers dripping blood, the crudely etched names of places I had only heard of (Subic Bay, Kyrenia, Shilo, Marseilles), the names of ships long ago scrapped (Haida, Swansea, Qu’Appelle) and the names of women once loved (Rose, Paulette, Sweet Cindy). These men represented the outermost ring of my existence—men who had served in Cyprus; men who had sweated months in a Ferret scout car in the Gaza Strip; men who had travelled the Pacific Rim on some long-forgotten navy tour, never getting deeper into these places than the fleshpots and hard-bitten waterfront dives of places like Manila, Mombasa, Gibraltar and Liverpool. It was evident to my eyes, fresh from 5 years of architectural training, that these were executed by some of the least talented artists known to man.
In 1976, as an assistant to a National Geographic photographer, I boarded the 300-foot icebreaking cargo freighter MV Bill Crosby bound from Montréal, through the Straits of Belle Isle, to Hall Beach on the shores of Foxe Basin—one of Canada’s remotest spots. It was late October and this was to be the last voyage north with supplies for isolated Arctic communities. The crew, save for two young French Canadians, were from Newfoundland and had made their living upon the sea for decades. Nearly all wore tattoos on their forearms, their knuckles or their shoulders. I shared a bottle of whiskey one night with one particularly rough fellow while the ship hove to and rode out a heavy storm off Cape Chidley, Labrador. A chief steward, his “office” was directly behind the galley and right beneath the overhead, where a lashed and massive Caterpillar generator ran at full bore. The cabin was filled with the smell of diesel, bunker oil, fried caplin, paint, vomit and body odour. The temperature was unbearably hot despite the dark icy waters and thrashing arctic storm outside. The ship rolled and pitched violently and the windowless cabin rose and fell forty feet for hours on end. The steward sat at a table upon which he leaned his elbows and filled his and my glass after every shot. On one forearm he wore a tattoo of some vague and blurry coat of arms while on the other was a tattoo featuring two large dice (a pair of sixes) and the word “Boxcars” and the letters “HMP” (Her Majesty’s Prison, in St. John’s).
As we got drunker, his tragic and disturbing story started to leak out of his mouth like a confession. By the time we were near the bottom of that bottle of Jim Beam, he had admitted to me that he had just gotten out of prison where he had served 6 years for attempted murder having botched the shotgunning of his girlfriend in his home. “A crime of passion.” he repeated before he downed each of his last three drinks. By this time, being destabilized by the storm, the overhead roar of the diesel, my murderous friend’s admission, the oven-like heat of the steel box we were drinking in, and eight whiskies I had consumed, I started to fear for my life. Before I staggered out of there, all I could see were his forearms and those blurry, crude and menacing tattoos.
Perhaps now you will understand why, in the 1980s, when tattooing started making inroads into middle class society through frat boys and debutantes, I became alarmed at the practice. I, like many of my generation whose young daughters were contemplating the idea, was appalled by the seemingly careless defacing of youthful dermis, all in the name of fashion.
The first waves of this new tattoo era which lapped the shores of suburbia were not well received by my generation, nor were they understood. Truthfully, even those who got tattoos in those days did not truly come to grips with the true potential of tattooing as an art form, as an expression of personal commitment, passion and as a statement of one’s persona or a recounting of one’s history. The tattoo world that grew in those early years was a clutter of meaningless butterflies, inscrutable Asian lettering, faux gangsta posturing written in Gothic letters, barbed wire, and hilariously bogus tribal designs. To see a twenty-something college freshman in a wife-beater t-shirt with an arm wrapped in a Polynesian tribal tattoo of which he knew nothing (but all his buddies were getting them) made me angry. Worse were the thousands of suburban coed debutantes from Mississauga to Shaughnessy sporting cute little dragonflies, flowers, rainbows and bluebirds. I prayed the craze would go the way of disco before my daughters left home. But it did not.
What began to happen was that the plethora of tattooing going on led to better and better tattoo artists, better and safer parlours, and best of all, a greater generational understanding of the artistic and commemorative potential of permanently inking your body. Tattoos are no longer something you and your buddies do when you are drunk in Manila. They have become choices. You make appointments with artists with great reputations. You view their portfolios. No longer selecting from a visual menu posted on the walls or in laminated books, you bring sketches and ideas and you discuss them with “your” tattoo artist, much the way you would meet with your interior decorator or architect. Between the two of you, you come up with a design on paper and book successive appointments to begin and finish the execution. Many have a relationship with their tattoo artist similar to the one that they have with their hairdresser.
Some people who commissioned artists to “paint” on their bodies began to think not of themselves as tattooed, but more as “collectors” of art and sponsors of great artists—modern day Medici if you will, funding and encouraging artists, fostering and inspiring the renaissance of body artists. Their bodies, over a lifetime, become a minor art gallery, showing a form of art long reviled by traditional artists. Like any art form, there are the good and the bad, but when it’s good, it is indeed impressive. I have grown to embrace tattooing as a viable form of expression, as permanent as it is. I say this with the full knowledge that I would never do this to myself nor am I entirely happy that my daughter did it. But I love her and am satisfied that she thought it through and chose to connect her tattoo with a part of her that is important—her family.
True, the aviation tattoo art niche is decidedly illustrative in character, as opposed to painterly or expressive, but if you visit anyone of the websites for tattoo studios and parlours mentioned in this story, you will see works of exceptional creativity, expression, and complexity.
Over the past five years, three things have happened to change my mind. First, my daughter got her first tattoo—a simple line drawing of a Supermarine Spitfire in plan view on her lower back. She did this to commemorate her grandfather’s RCAF wartime service as a BCATP instructor and Photo Reconnaissance Spitfire pilot as well as her dad’s passion for all aspects of aviation. She would go on to add a Corsair, a Harvard and a Mosquito. Secondly, while researching the web nearly every day, I began to come across some outstanding airplane and aviation tattoos, beautifully crafted by talented artists. Despite my dislike of tattooing as I had known it, I began to grudgingly appreciate the good stuff. Thirdly, I came across Ryan Keough’s website called Tattoos in Flight. Ryan, an avowed tattoo fan and an aviation historian of some repute (he is an Associate Editor with the Warbird Information Exchange and the Warbird Resource Group) had been seeing, long before me, the powerful growth in the niche art form of aviation-themed tattoos. It was a revelation.
Ryan’s Tattoos in Flight website can be described as what you get when you mate Ray Bradbury’s short story compilation The Illustrated Man with the novel Twelve O’Clock High and John Wayne’s film, Flying Tigers. It is filled with hundreds of images of aviation-themed tattoos combined with excellent and well written historic and social histories of the aircraft depicted. It is clear that Ryan is in love with aviation as much as he is with the art form that is high-end tattooing.
One thing I saw clearly during my research was that not all tattoos are well done or well advised. I saw lots of human wreckage and some pretty scary things, but I saw a lot of glorious things too. Oddly, I did not see many bad aviation tattoos.
What follows is a collection of just some of the tattoos that Ryan and I found on the internet, thanks to tattoo forums, tattoo portals and websites like flickr.com and, in Ryan’s case, from reaching out to the tattoo art community via Tattoos in Flight. Tattooing as an art form may not be for you. That’s OK. You may think this story has nothing to do with aviation. That’s where you would be wrong.
Aviation is more, so much more, than power settings, pilot reports, factory outputs, acronyms, performance statistics, aircraft markings, technical minutia and squadron movements. It is wrapped in passion, culture, sharing, boldness and family.
Related Stories
Click on image
Featured
Post Script
Dave
Not a long time ago, I was considering to be inked on the forearm with a warbird, so I searched the web for inspiration. But aviation tattoos are not really easy to find, and for most of them, not worth a find, for I’m really demanding on shapes, and realism. As you know, planes are all angles and lines, that are unfortunately hard to reproduce on something as soft and elastic as the human skin…
And then I found your article. Really interesting, and in a way, inspiring. The gathering of tattoos, the different styles you showed in it allowed me to think about what I was not looking for and actually, looking for. The black and white silhouette of the B17 struck me: such minimalism capable nevertheless to make people think immediately: “this is a vintage bomber”. No need of much details, rivets, joints, even turrets. I found it brilliant!
Well, thanks to this find of yours, I pinned down what I wanted to ink on my forearm, and went looking the web for “warbird silhouette” and such things. It came out with a project, and then, the inking.
So here is my “little friend”, a P-51D from WW2 (not a Canadian one, sorry!)
For this fellow is now part of me until the day I die, I felt like I was going to the web, find your article back and write you a little something to thank you for your help.
Kind regards,
Gauthier B.
DONATE NOW
and keep ‘em flying!
All together…
VOLUNTEER TODAY!
Learn the benefits of
MEMBERSHIP
culture
Dave O'Malley
