The City Under the Skin (9 page)

 

14. THE FLASH

“Old tattooists never die, they simply lose their flash.”

The person delivering this piece of hoary tattoo wisdom to Marilyn Driscoll was an old woman by the name of Rose Scarlatti. They were sitting in Rose's small, dark apartment, the air clouded with the sweet, marginally corrupt smell of clove cigarettes. Marilyn had found Rose online. She'd been looking for somebody who knew some history and wasn't afraid to repeat it. Her initial word searches had combined “tattoo artist” or “tattooist” or even “tattooer” with other relevant terms, such as “knowledgeable,” “scholarly,” “erudite,” “cerebral.” There had been no shortage of hits, and so to limit the field, she'd added the word “female”—a shot in the dark, but she sensed it would be easier to talk to a woman about this stuff—and Rose Scarlatti was the only one within a hundred miles. Marilyn wanted a face-to-face meeting.

There was a small, unruly, neglected website, graced with a banner—
Rose Scarlatti: The Lady Tattooist and Scholar
—and a small online gallery that showed her work and the woman herself, and although the site suggested she'd hung up her tools, there was also the implication that if the right project, the right body, came along, she'd be perfectly prepared to get back to work.

Marilyn e-mailed her. Funny how if you're a young woman and you send an e-mail to some old person and say you're really interested in their work, and that you'd really love to talk with them in person, they're likely to say come right on over as soon as you like.

Rose Scarlatti lived alone in an apartment building called the Villa Nova: low-rise, coated in French-blue stucco that had seen better days, but the sign on the front was in a cursive faux-retro typeface, and the individual apartments had balconies where many of the residents were trying hard to establish some greenery.

Rose's apartment was on the third floor, in the very center, right above the gap between the words “Villa” and “Nova,” and as Marilyn pedaled toward the entrance, she looked up and saw Rose sitting out on her balcony, surveying the street, smoking. She was a thin, dry, neat woman, careful with herself, but not delicate. She peered down, saw Marilyn, waved with her cigarette, and went inside to buzz her up.

Rose's den was part personal museum, part smoking lounge. Marilyn's eyes darted around the place, not knowing where to settle, scanning the items of tattoo memorabilia: framed newspaper articles and photographs of tattooed men and women, carnival posters, design sheets, shop signs—too much to take in all at once, though a fierce-looking crossbow mounted above the door to the kitchen was hard to miss. Needing something else to focus on, Marilyn let her eyes settle on an old photograph of a woman who would have appeared severe, respectable, even matronly, if it hadn't been for the patterns inked all over her.

“That's Nora Hildebrandt,” said Rose Scarlatti. “The first tattooed lady to be exhibited in America. Daughter of Martin Hildebrandt, German immigrant and tattooist. His glory days were in the Civil War. He went from camp to camp tattooing soldiers on both sides. In his downtime he obviously tattooed his daughter as well. But maybe he thought that would seem a little strange, or maybe not strange enough, so when she went on stage they made up a story, that they'd both been kidnapped by the Sioux, and the Injuns had forced Daddy to tattoo his daughter, every day a new one, once a day for a whole year, 365 of them. Then they set 'em free.”

“Nice story,” said Marilyn.

“Sure. Everybody needs a story. Doesn't need to be true. Why don't you sit down, tell me what's on your mind?”

Marilyn sat down in an unstable, swamp-colored recliner. Her mind was racing. It was an unsettling experience to sit in a room with this trim, benign-looking, gray-haired lady who was dressed in corduroy pants and a crew-necked, long-sleeved cashmere sweater, and to know that beneath the corduroy and cashmere there was a riot of brilliant, obsessive tattooing: the usual in some ways (snakes, flaming skulls, dancing girls, birds of prey, pirates: no maps as far as Marilyn was aware), but with something special and flowing, free-form and spontaneous about it.

She knew all this from the pictures on the website that showed Rose as a much younger woman, more or less naked, more curvy, more arrogant, wilder. But there was also something unfinished-looking about Rose's tattoos, still a lot of bare skin. Marilyn had seen those pictures of people whose tattoos were like bodysuits of ink, neck to ankle and wrist to wrist, but Rose's weren't like that. Hers were limited to certain areas: the legs, the chest, the right arm, while her back, her buttocks, and her left arm were all completely bare. The asymmetry created the effect of a work in progress, not that she'd lost interest or been forced to abandon it halfway through, rather that she was still awaiting new ideas, leaving space for fresh possibilities and inspiration.

Marilyn Driscoll liked that the tattoos were covered up now. It showed a certain reserve, a sense that Rose's tattoos were a private matter. In public Rose might pass for a retired schoolteacher, but get her alone and naked in a room and she would become something very different.

“I'm doing a project on tattoos and tattooing,” said Marilyn as innocently as she could.

“A project, eh?”

“That's right.”

“Are you thinking about getting a tattoo?”

“Not really, no.”

“Why not?”

“I think I'd live to regret it.”

“What's wrong with that? That's the whole deal with tattoos. You make a choice. And if it turns out you made a bad choice, you live with the consequences, you take responsibility, you don't blame anybody else. That's life, right?”

“Sure,” said Marilyn. “Unless you didn't actually choose to have the tattoos done.”

“Ah right, now you're talking,” said Rose, and something in her brightened. “Enforced tattooing. A long and shameful tradition.”

“Yes?”

“Oh sure, the Greeks and Romans used to tattoo the words
I'M AN ESCAPED SLAVE
across the foreheads of their slaves so they'd never be able to become escaped slaves. Clever, huh? And the Nazis, of course. And outlaw bikers sometimes tattoo
PROPERTY OF
on less than willing girls.

“In India before the British Empire, they used to tattoo convicts with images of their crimes: a bottle if they were drunks, cock and balls if they were adulterers. I guess it might have been a deterrent
before
the event, but once you'd got the tattoo on you, there wouldn't be much incentive to stop being a drunk or an adulterer, would there? You might as well live up to your image. And then, of course, some criminals tattoo themselves to show what crimes they've committed. They're proud to wear their crimes on their skin. And I don't even want to think about what those damn Russians get up to.”

Marilyn could feel that Rose was looking her over intently, professionally, not undressing her with her eyes, but coating her with imaginary ink and imagery.

“You sure I can't talk you into letting me tattoo you?”

“Really, no,” said Marilyn.

“That's okay,” Rose said. “It's good not to pretend. Some people would have come in here and tried to butter me up by saying they wanted me to work on 'em. I don't care. I like talking about my work, and I like talking to young women; so y'know, I ain't complaining. Besides, I'm retired.”

She laughed, as though this were a joke she'd repeated many, many times, to the point where she was the only one who still found it funny.

“Why did you retire?” Marilyn asked.

Rose put her cigarette to her mouth and Marilyn could see that her long, thin, pale fingers were knotted tightly at the joints.

“Physical things partly,” Rose said. “Arthritis in the knuckles, carpal tunnel problems, and my hand just wasn't as steady as I wanted it to be. And you know, the sad fact is, a lot of young people don't want to be tattooed by some old lady. They want somebody their own age, from their own tribe. But the real deal, the real reason I quit: the area where I had my studio, it got
gentrified
.”

She spat out the word as if it implied a combination of moral degeneracy and self-inflicted disease.

“The rent kept going up,” she continued, “and the yuppie scum kept moving in. There was no room for any of the old trades. We all got driven out. Like rats.”

Marilyn Driscoll pictured a procession of knife grinders, rag-and-bone pickers, button molders, hounded from one part of the city to another, a contagion being driven to the borders, Rose reluctantly but defiantly bringing up the rear.

“Have you tattooed a lot of women, Rose?” Marilyn asked.

“Sure.”

“Is it very different from tattooing a man?”

“Well, it's a lot more fun, if you like women. But I couldn't afford to be picky. I didn't discriminate.”

“How about maps? Did you ever put a map of a city or a country on somebody?”

“Sure. This is a service industry. If a customer asked for a map, I'd give 'em a map. People want to be reminded of where they come from, or where they did a tour of duty, or where they met their wife, or whatever. Doesn't seem to me it's the kind of thing you'd forget, but I was happy to do the work.”

“Did you ever tattoo a map of Utopia?”

Rose filled her lungs and looked skeptically at Marilyn.

“Nah. But I once did a map of the planet Mongo—y'know, Flash Gordon. You'd be too young to know what I'm talking about. But sure, the world's a big place. So why not a map of Utopia, whatever the hell that looks like. The fact is, somebody somewhere is having the most idiotic thing you can imagine tattooed right across their chest at this very moment.”

“Or across their back,” said Marilyn.

“Well, the back's always a strange choice, if you want my opinion. You never get to see it except in a mirror, and even then you see it left to right reversed. All those guys with gang names or American flags or Stations of the Cross on their back: they never see them as the world sees them, except maybe in photographs. What's the point?”

“I can see that,” said Marilyn. “And all tattooists have their own style, right?”

“If they're any good they do,” said Rose. “If they're not any good, they just buy some flash and copy the designs, which is no more than tracing, if you ask me. You might as well buy a coloring book.”

“So if I showed you a picture of a certain tattoo, could you maybe tell me who did it?”

“Jeez, girl, you want a lot. I call myself a tattoo scholar, not a psychic. Sure, the ones who are really, really good do stand out, but given the number of people in the world who do tattooing, it's a tiny percentage. The ones who aren't any good, and that's most of 'em, the work all looks pretty much the same as far as I'm concerned.”

“Want to try anyway? I'll show you a photograph of some tattooing, and you tell me if you recognize who did it.”

“Do I get a gold star?” said Rose.

“You get my deepest gratitude.”

Rose's face indicated that she didn't consider that much of a prize, but she didn't object as Marilyn got out her laptop and showed Rose the same image that she and Zak had pored over. Rose stared at it with concentration, then incomprehension, then growing distaste.

“What exactly is this?” she asked suspiciously.

“You tell me.”

“First thing, it's fucking incompetent, is what it is. But you don't need me to tell you that. The guy who did this wasn't any kind of tattooist. He was an amateur. I'd say he was a butcher. In fact, I'd be inclined to say he was a fucking lunatic.”

“Do you know any amateurs-slash-incompetents-slash-butchers-slash-lunatics?” Marilyn asked.

“Who are also tattooists? Nah.”

Rose concentrated even harder on the image, and suddenly reacted as though she'd received a sharp sting somewhere in her lower back.

“Wait a damn minute,” she said. “What's that?”

She jabbed her cigarette toward an area of the laptop's screen and Marilyn zoomed in on a detail of the image.

“That's not right,” said Rose. “That's very fucking wrong. See there, that thing there?”

She peered hard at the screen, at the tattooed woman's backside.

“It's called a compass rose, isn't it?” said Marilyn, pleased to have some useful knowledge.

“Yes. That's what it is, all right. And it's mine. The compass rose is Rose Scarlatti's fucking trademark.”

Rose pulled up the right sleeve of her sweater, to reveal on her forearm a small circular tattoo of a compass rose. It was intricate, delicately done, and bore very little resemblance to the one in the photograph as far as Marilyn could see, which was why, she supposed, she hadn't noticed it when she'd looked at Rose's images online.

Rose tapped her forearm and said, “That's the first tattoo I ever did on myself.”

“I don't get it,” said Marilyn. “So whoever did this is copying you?”

“Copying, stealing. They've made a lousy job, whichever it is.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don't know. But if I found him I'd slap his head till I found out.”

Rose was about to say more, perhaps much more, and then she stopped herself. It was abrupt and defensive, as if she'd realized, suddenly, out of nowhere, something crucial and secret, and maybe forbidden, and she wasn't remotely convincing when she said, “Okay, leave it. You know, I'm probably being silly. I'm overreacting.”

“I don't think so, Rose.”

“Yes, I am.”

“What's up, Rose, what do you see? What have you realized?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“What is it? What's going on, Rose? What's happened?”

“Nothing's happened.”