Wearing your heart on your sleeve…no, literally.

09Feb10

You should not get your boyfriends name on your ass because you never know how long it will last.

Someone has made or heard a joke like this before and it usually involves the question, “But what if it doesn’t last?” or “What if you two break up? Get a divorce?”. But chicano tattoo artistry involves just that–people getting portraits or names engraved into their skin of the people that they love and care about.  And this got me thinking about relationships.

photo by Jocelyn Bresnick.

I went to do a story with my colleague Jocelyn Bresnick about a chicano tattoo artist named Tony Edwards. He allowed us to watch as he tattooed the word “Anita” into one of his customer’s biceps.

As I watched him lightly follow the lines of the letters, I began to wonder about who this Anita woman was. She must have been a real catch for her man to decide to self-inflict pain upon himself by etching her name into his arm. Tattoo’s are no funny business, they are permanente. And that got me thinking about culture.

photo by Jocelyn Bresnick

Edwards explained to us in the interview about how chicano art involves lettering and names a lot, and even highly-detailed portraits. Many times, men and women would come in and ask for the names of their loved ones or designs of their portraits.  I think this says a lot about the traditional relationships in the Latino culture. There is this idea that it is strong, that the families stay together and that they don’t break up or get divorced. The people that they love, the ones they choose to marry, it’s intended to be for life, just like the ink in their skin. I found the tattoo’s to be a huge representation of their intentions for the relationships in their life. This guy must have been damn certain that Anita was the woman for him and would be for life. And this simple tattoo of her name was a representation of just that.

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