Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— When I crossed to the Cape with Blue Flue we hit a storm so big it put us back a week. A week I tell you, in this day and age, isn’t it madness. The thing would not let up. Not that I’m complaining, mind, I thought my number was being called. Waves bigger man Cader Idris, I tell no lie.

It was honour and accomplishment. It was a maritime record like a ship’s log. When Cy first apprenticed with Eliot Riley, Riley had told him that he’d been tattooing so long he’d even done a few hold and fast tattoos on the knuckles of old-timeys on sailing ships and clippers. As if he’d been born before the age of steam! Riley could have shipped ice to the North Pole though, until he got too drunk to make feasible his lying.

The shop in Morecambe had witnessed its fair share of naval customers. They were the old uncles and true souls of the industry, perhaps the rational explanation of Riley’s riparian assertion that tattooists gravitate to water. Here on board the ship there were old retired navy boys, who had sailed with the empire’s fleets since before the war and during, who had come back to the country with the decorations of the world, Japanese love-dots and ukiyo-e, traditional south hemisphere markings, and now they couldn’t stop dressing up their skin. They came to him and filled up the last little pieces of clear flesh with ornamentation. Some of their existing work had even been done using a woodcut technique with the ink chipped and rubbed in, but with all the vernacular skill that Cy had not possessed when Riley demanded he do it to his own leg. These tattoos were primitive, effective, beautiful, in his time at Morecambe he had even seen some done on faces, Maori moko style, though Cy knew that took a man who had lost something of his country to the different one, as if he knew his blood was journeying wrong and he was trying to find its source. The old sea-travellers who had collected foreign marks were exotic, alligator-skinned men, men who had passed through a spiritual threshold and met something sacred head-on in the delirium of pain. They were strong, strong in their discomfort, strong in their minds, men for whom the tapping of ink blocks into skin might in their heads become the beat of a song, clung to like a chanty to get them through the strenuous endeavour. It was true engraving, disparate at the edges so you could know it was a deep art, deeper than it needed to be for permanence — the colour and the scar coming together in something ritualistic. This was the most painful method of tattooing Cy knew of, and he knew of it all right as Eliot Riley got him to begin his training that way, raking off skin on his shins with that piece of blacked bamboo and a mason’s mallet, not sixteen years old and already scarred up like a battle-torn soldier. Having to hammer ink down on to his bone before he got anywhere near the helpful electric needle or exaction. The pure agony had him hating Riley, hating the man for the pedantic devils within him, the humiliation of that initial pedigree, and for crying in front of his master who had knelt with his hands pushing down on Cy’s feet, roaring at him to continue when the pain got too much, slapping his face softly like he was a blathering girl. Yes, he could respect these men, these sailors and travellers who’d seen the method through to the full torso pattern, black nippled, with knots of red along their hipbones and thighs, backbones crackling like the spine of a lizard. Because the pain was immeasurable, the blood loss was fantastic and any infection could be lasting, occasionally deadly if it wasn’t treated quick enough. Sailors had sometimes come into Pedder Street with whole stories on their backs, right down to their calves. Maps of where they’d been without the need for countries, or seas. There were the markings of Japan, New Zealand, Fiji. He would try to decipher what had been put on them. He would pull away a shirt and sit and smoke a cigarette and interpret them, respectfully, before he started adding anything else.

Open ocean was a reflective, ponderous, dangerous place to be. A place of sickness and cabin-fever and contemplation, where it was said a person might meet up with their own self at a central axis travelling from another set of coordinates in life. There was something about the swollen surge of the sea that set the mind free, gave it a queer loose balance and direction like a compass riding on gimbals on the ship’s bridge. So that time spent alone seemed amplified by significance and conversations with fellow passengers, while often very welcome, could take on prematurely intimate or confidential proportions.

— Afternoon to you, Mr Parks. Looking a tad vexed today, if you don’t mind my saying.

— Hello, Harry. It’s a long way back now, isn’t it, England? Will we miss it, I wonder?

— I should think in the end we’ll manage without her. I’ll not miss the Scrubs, which is where I’d be residing presently if it were not for the ingenious garter of my good lady. Just a shame she missed the boat really. I’ll not mention her name in case the authorities tackle you anon about meeting me in the middle of this old stone boat called fate. Still, I’m sure America has its fair share of ingenious women.

— We’ll keep our fingers crossed, shan’t we?

Luckily for Cy, and perhaps because he had inherited his father’s sea-legs and nautical tolerance, he suffered from neither the sickness nor the fever. But he did fall into thinking, fell into the condition with heaviness. Or a great, weighty thinking fell on him, like a piano slipping its fastening as it was hauled up a building and landing on his head. Either way they met. In his slim bunk at night, to the churning purr of the engines and the ruck of propellers through dark water, in a cabin of twenty other snoring men, his mind went out to the things that had formed him and been farmed from him. In the deep baths of the washroom, with the soapy water mirroring the sea’s external motions, he could lie for hours and be oblivious to the minutes that passed, annoying the steward who had others queuing for the facility. As he dressed the bodies with ink stolen from the Captain’s helm or the first-class lounges, he thought of his life, its gains and losses. He thought of Riley and his mother. There were memories like artefacts, half-there and jagged, suggesting a shape that was apparent but unfinished, as if misused or harmed by something, or waiting to be completed. At the rail of the Adriatic, outside her glassed-in walkways, salt-water smeared like the windows of the Bayview, with Riley’s lyrical rain on the waves scented strongly like a woman in the throes of love, and the deck made slick and slippery, he leaned looking out with his face on his fist, as if stopped in time in a position of self-battery. The whole Atlantic surface was like a blue and white tablecloth to the edges of nowhere for him to lay his memories upon like dashed apart, salvaged crockery. And he thought about who he was and what he did and why.

What was it that had drawn him to the occupation of painting flesh, of permanent living art, and had kept him there through all the shit and shovel of Eliot Riley? What was he that he went to it and stayed put while the gentle humour of Morecambe evaporated around him in all but the tattoo barker’s showroom comedy? There were times when he could take no more from the man, no more abuse or inclusion in his province of mind, his wretched damaging honesty, the butchery of esteem, and he could have smashed Riley’s head against the wall like a turnip until his sneering voice stopped once and for all. There were times when he had looked at his dwindling bundle of money and got as far as the train station. Then turned back. Where was the reward for all that masochistic persistence and endurance? The dispatching of his youth. The decay of his happy childhood. The reluctant temper that was made unobstructed by following the big man’s example. What was it about the trade that was day to the night of Riley? Suddenly Cy wanted an answer. Without it he was a piece from the past in the ruins of a decade. But like the bawdy pauper king himself had once told him it was impossible to pin down the exact appeal and beauty of their folkish profession, butterfly-captured and gorgeously open for all to see. You couldn’t find the marrow or the quick of it to suck out, or set a flame to the wick of it and illuminate a room. Tattooing was like being called by a siren song, or the music of the spheres, impossible to resist, impossible to explain.