The Wormlips Scrapbook

Here’s the story of Yo-Nenny’s second tattoo. She got it about a month after her first one, when she’d just turned sixteen.

I went straight home after getting my first tattoo, looking for inspiration for my next one. I got the idea off a mirror that my brother gave me from The Met. I looked in my backpack and I had this teeny little hand-mirror and it had this design on the back of it, of Hokusai’s The Wave.

This is when I still actually cared about what the tattoos looked like. I wanted it to be attractive and meaningful. I’d seen the design a thousand times before. It didn’t speak to me but I realized I could put it on me and then I’d have another tattoo. It satisfied my need for a tattoo that looked somewhat interesting.

In the back of my mind I knew it was silly for me to get something like this because I thought of it so quickly. But because it was my second tattoo, it meant so much less.

This tattoo resides just to the left of her first tattoo (the lotus), on her left shoulder. I asked her why she chose that location.

It wanted it to be easily hidden but still easily visible. I think it shows how impulsive I was. The first one I spent a lot of time getting it exactly centered. This one I just slapped in on my shoulder. Since then I’ve tried to balance out my tattoos. I’m funny about symmetry now.

Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave at Kanagawa from A Series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji circa 1830–32 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)

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In the beginning, Yo-Nenny had plain old skin that glowed a rich shade of Greek-olive green. Yet even while still in her single-digit years, she talked about wanting to adorn it with inorganic materials. I wasn’t wildly happy about this, which undoubtedly made the idea more appealing. I’d hoped the tattoo of my own reckless youth might serve as a deterrent. Silly me.

Here’s the story of Yo-Nenny’s first tattoo, which she says she acquired when she was 15. I didn’t know that.

It lives between her shoulder blades and is about two inches in diameter.

Why did you do it?

I wanted to be rad. All my boyfriends had tattoos. It wasn’t as much that I wanted tattoos as I wanted to be a person with tattoos. I wanted the tattoos to have stories that I wouldn’t want to talk about … so if someone asked me, I’d go silent and stare off into space — that was the fantasy. I wanted to have tattoos that I regretted. Of course, now I do.

What about the design?

It’s a lotus. At the time I was really into midwifery. Lotus means “fertility” and all that. I came in with a drawing … I think I got it from a midwifery book I had and my boyfriend drew it. I was proud of not having picked a design off the wall.

How did the tattoing go?

I didn’t sleep the night before. I was shaky all day. I wan’t afraid of the pain as much as what it would do to my brain. I mean, I’d heard you, like, zone out and go way out there, with the endorphins or something. The tattoo artist was this short, squat guy with black frizzy hair and a bald patch. He didn’t even wear gloves. I didn’t see where he got his needle. I remember being uneasy but I wasn’t saying anything. I trusted him. And the minute he put the needle to my skin, I don’t remember him saying anything except, “I just popped your cherry.”

How did you feel right afterwards?

I took care of it like it was a baby. I slathered ointment on it every three hours on the hour. I uncovered it every few minutes and looked at it over my shoulder.

I remember being petrified of my dad seeing it. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I didn’t want to feel far away from him even though the point of doing it was to make me feel like a big girl. I was getting out of Dad’s small car and I had to duck, and my shirt came down a little in the back. Dad said, “Is that what I think it is?” He asked to see it closer. And then he just sort of snorted. I don’t think he had the energy to be mad any more. All that worry was for nothing.

What about later, once it was healed?

Previously everyone had said that getting tattoos was addictive. I though they meant the physical response, the endorphins, as you got the tattoo. But it wasn’t that. A week later I wanted to be covered in them. I felt naked without them. I started desperately thinking about getting another. At that time I was into the images and symbolism. Later I was more into the location; I started wanting to get tattoos that were visible, that couldn’t be hidden.

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