"Doc"

I am not a big fan of tattoos. It has always seemed to me that after a mother spends nine months of her life doing everything possible to assure her newborn baby will be healthy and perfect in every way, that baby has no right to grow up and destroy his or her perfect skin with a bunch of ink and graven images. I feel the same about most unusual body piercings, too, but those will fade away in time if the person takes out the metal object, unless it is a hole the size of a carrot in his or her ear lobe. Tattoos, on the other hand, are there to stay without extensive laser surgery or the removal of the body part where the tattoo exists.

I read an article written by a psychiatrist that said people get tattoos of things they are basically afraid of: Grim Reapers, skulls, daggers, etc. I’m not sure if I agree with this because my own son had a tattoo of a buxom cowgirl on his chest and knowing him as I did, he was not the least bit fearful of buxom cowgirls. But I digress. The point I was beginning to make was that there must be some great inner obsession for anyone to endure having a needle pounded into one’s flesh over and over just to express his or her desire to communicate something to the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to take out an ad in the newspaper or have a tee shirt printed with the same picture or slogan?

Well, maybe not. There are very few inmates that I ever came across, maybe two percent, who did not have tattoos. It’s like the jail smells, it seems to go with criminal activity. However, you would inevitably find a six foot four inch, 350 pound fellow, covered from head to toe with tattoos and piercings, his forearm dotted with dozens of needle marks and scars from the various concoctions he injected into himself, who would then faint at the sight of the tiny needle we used to test for TB exposure. Go figure.

Some of the tattoos really are works of art, though. I’ll admit that. Not the ones that come out of prison. Usually those are done with sharpened paperclips and ink from a ballpoint pen or Kool-Aid and tend to be fuzzy and resemble the artwork my five-year-old grandson brings home from kindergarten. But the tattoos that are professionally done can be honestly amazing in detail and color. One fellow had an entire scene from The Hobbit etched across his back in fairyland colors so detailed you could see the hair on Frodo’s toes. On the other end of the spectrum, though, was the jovial, aged biker who sported Give Me Head Until I’m Dead engraved around his bald forehead in fading black ink. To each their own and if the truth be known, the biker’s message was easier to decipher than that of the man with Frodo on his back.

There was also a young man who, when being booked in, was asked the usual question of “Do you have any scars, marks or tattoos?” He proceeded to proudly display his penis to everyone in the booking area and explained “It gets really cool when I get a hard-on!” He was speaking of the cobra tattoo on his penis, a truly amazing work of colorful art that must have taken hours of excruciating pain to complete. None of us knew quite what to say. I still wouldn’t know, even after all these years. As far as I know, none of us ever got to see it in its fully-intended glory. I was curious but not driven.

The first truly amazing array of tattoos I got really close to came when I had been working at the jail about a week and my shift sergeant decided I was ready to learn to take fingerprints. Trust me here, folks, taking fingerprints is not as simple as it looks on TV. The process of taking fingerprints is something akin to performing frontal lobe surgery, they have to be clear enough for the Feds to read without error and it’s very difficult to get a set of un-smudged fingerprints when you’re nervous and sweating and trying to print bloodied fingers! But I digress once again. It was not the lesson on finger printing that sticks in my mind, it was the first inmate I ever had to print.....