Montreal Tattoo Exposition

For my Montreal Gazette column, I became an Innocent Abroad at the Montreal International Tattoo Exposition. Marrying a retired tattoo artist didn’t show me much about the world of tattoo. I had to see for myself.

Like the tattoo lover who stood before me proudly showing off his fine-line art work, I was a Hitchcock fan, too. But I thought this guy was carrying his zeal for the Master of Suspense a bit too far. To - you might say - painful extremes. There was the film director's jowly face - bigger than life -tattooed smack in the middle of his back. And when he flexed his latissimus dorsi, Hitchcock arched his eyebrows.

My camera flash was popping. I zoomed in for closeups of the images tattooed in living technicolor around Hitchcock's mug - the haunted-looking old Victorian house in Psycho (remember the stuffed grandmother in the rocking chair?); a shrieking woman being attacked by feathered fiends (The Birds); the crop-duster from North by Northwest; and was that Jimmy Stewart in the wheelchair in Rear Window - or was I dreaming?

Nope, I wasn't dreaming. I was really abroad in Tat City, losing my innocence about the world of tattoos at the Montreal International Tattoo Expo at, of all places, the famous Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono were famously photographed in bed together.

My voyeuristic interest in this ancient design form—which it's now trendy to call body graphics, body illustration or physical graffiti—stems from having married an ex-tattoo artist. I'd seen some pretty weird tattoos in Clément's collection of tat mags, but the people who wore them were harder to imagine.

Bzzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! went the tattoo machines as the music rocked and arms, legs, backs, shoulders and tenderer parts were bared to The Blue Dragon from London, Ontario and Skin Deep from Bristol, England, Tom Tattoo from Ancona, Italy, Shark from St. Etienne, France and Forrest Curl from Philly, et al.

It was like a big costume party. Only the costume was the skin. And it was being flaunted in leather hot-pants and vests and hip-slit skirts as the contestants waited with bated breath for the judges to pick the winning flesh.

I made the rounds, peeking at first shyly, then boldly at the albums of each artist. Like the music world, the tattoo world has its soft and hard elements. There were melodious designs - Celtic knotwork, diaphanous butterflies - and atonal images straight from hell. The designs of Paul (Last Rites) Booth from New York were themost revolting. (Think of Night of Living Dead with rotting zombies and ghouls and you got it.)

When I stopped to look at the album of the Michel 'n' Pierre Tattoo Family from Bordeaux, a nice-looking young man came over and asked politely, "May I help you?"

He was nice-looking except for the Zulu warrior's bone stuck through his nose. For several minutes I tried to pretend that the bone wasn't there. "Oh, I'm just looking," I said cheerily. But then I blurted, "I can't stop looking at your nose. Doesn't it hurt? What if you sneeze?"

Enough of this weirdness, I was thinking. I'm outta here. But then I saw the sign "Dream Illustration." The lady artist in the booth, dressed in white T-shirt and jeans, was tattooing freehand, while her manager, a perky blonde in black leather hot-pants, was showing off the dreamwork inked on her leg.

"Hi there. How are ya?" she called out to me in a comforting Midwestern drawl. Other female tattoo artists at the convention had given off tough don't-mess-with-me vibes, but Kay Davis, tattooist, and Luann Cravens, pierceologist, actually looked wholesome.

20 conventions a year

Kay and Luan were from Chillicothe, Illinois and travelled all around together - 20 conventions a year - pulling a 35-foot mobile home with a hot-shot semi-truck. And they laughed to tell me that they were considered the Mary Poppinses of the tattoo world.

Luann showed me the designs trailing from ankle to hip: the eye of God, Time, Eternity, the Resurrection of Christ, unicorns, birds, an elephant (it shrunk after she lost weight, she said) and whales - Noah's ark.

"You dreamed all that in one night?" I asked.

“No, it represents a composite dream,” she explained - and 24 hours under the needle!

Ouch!

Later on, I talked to Kay about her tattooing. Because each client's dream (or nightmare) was unique, her designs were one-of-a-kind, and drawn free-hand on the skin 80% of the time.Translating dreams into tattoo images was always a challenge, she said, especially if the client spoke a foreign language.

Once, with the help of an interpreter, a West Indian man asked her to create a scene depicting a gypsy caravan, flamenco guitar music around a campfire, and an animal she thought was a dog. Coming up with the design took three days.

When the client saw the dog sketched on his back, he freaked out. But without the interpreter, he couldn't explain what the problem was. Using gestures and picture books, he got the message across: dreaming of a dog was a very bad omen. What he wanted beside the gypsy campfire was a dancing bear!

Kay told me about the weirdest tattoo she was ever asked to do. A client engaged to be married had commissioned a portrait of his fiancee's face. But the day before the tattoo was to be done, he called up to say the wedding was off.

"So we'll forget the tattoo," Kay said.

"Oh no, I still want it," he said. "But I want you to put a hatchet through her head."

Kay, flabbergasted, flatly refused.

"So what's the tattoo scene in Chillicothe?" I wanted to know.

"We're it." Kay said. "Most of our customers drive from three to seven hours to see us. But when I'm not tattooing, I'm busy with the farm."

"The farm?"

"My husband and I own a pig farm. We farrow pigs."

Kay Davis was a tattoo artist and a pig farmer. The connection between the two occupations seemed obscure. Until I thought of how Clément had told me how he'd practice his tattooing on potatoes. (That explains that french fry I got last week that had ``Mom'' on it!)

I was dying to ask Kay if she'd evolved to the standard of her art by practicing on pigs.

Fine parchments

Luann, who owns a horse farm down the road from Kay, later gave me the answer. Although it wasn't the raison d'etre for pig farming, pork bellies did make fine parchments on which to practice dream rendering.

Travel, tattoo, travel, tattoo. Where next? Kay and her husband have just booked a flight to Samoa in January, so he can get his paya done by the tattoo artist Paulo Petella.

“What's a paya?” I asked.

“Paya is traditional Samoan legwork tattooing, but in Illinois English, it boils down to a pair of checkered pants.