Ink

His body reads like a page torn out of Rand McNally. Swirling lines span years, speak of pain and turmoil, heartbreak and brotherhood. Most of his work was done while he was locked away at Folsom with a single sewing needle and a busted black Bic ink-pen core melted over a Zippo. " Hell, there wasn't much else to do" he says. At night, by candlelight, his Aryan brother, who went by the moniker “Hound,” would laboriously spend hours hunched over his bunk as the dull needle threaded in and out of his skin, the whole while he’d simply lay still as a corpse laid out on an autopsy table, relishing the pain, with eyes fixed on the ceiling thinking about the open road, old ladies, and cold brews.

Each tat tells a story. His body is a book, a collection of shorts - different time periods, different characters, but all equally significant. All interwoven as the ink on a medieval tapestry are all interwoven. As ancient blood, shit, and plant pigment long ago dried on a cave wall tell tales of the hunt. They all contribute to what he later became. Autobiographical scribbling. The best way to describe it is in his own words. He’d often tell me the following:

“Kid, it ain't the destination but the journey. It’s the roads you choose and the sights you see. It’s the cow shit and hay you smell as you ride on by with the wind in your hair, chillin' your bones.”

A barely there, faded picture of a woman’s face. Below this are inscribed the words. “Dainty Deb.” With distant eyes he recollects, sifting through dusty drug addled memories kept under lock and key in the attic of his thoughts: " A shotgun wedding at the county courthouse circa 1976. A damned fine girl who could out-party anyone. Yep… she could hang with the big dogs.” He tells me with pride and a sparkle in his eye.

I ask him about the spider web on his right elbow - 1981, when he served time for cocaine possession. “ I was a courier. Ain’t nothing more, nothing less. But I never ratted. I ain’t no fuckin' rat.” I ask him what it means. His expression darkens. He tells me it symbolizes being trapped in a “god damned cage like a god damned dog.”

On his left pec, over his heart, is a profile pic of a skull. Sprouting out of the skull a set of ornate wings. Black and white, about the size of my hand. A truly awe-inspiring sight. Only a select few are permitted, or would even dare, to own this tattoo. “You KNOW what that is right boy?”

“Yeah… I definitely do.”

“It was 1988. The year I joined the club. I was riding a Harley dynaglide with an evo. A damned good bike.”

I’ve always found it interesting how guys like this keep track of time by the bikes they own or the tattoo’s they acquire. Time, to them, is a linear series of bikes, women, parties, and jail time.

“ Would you do it all again?”

He peers at me out of the corner of his eye, Budweiser raised to his lips.

“ Does a fat baby fart?”