I almost got a tattoo. It was the summer of 1985 and the artist, an old friend, was going to engrave four vertical black bars — the logo of the pioneering L.A. punk band Black Flag — into my upper chest. I chickened out.
Back then, only a few of my friends were tattooed, and all of them were punks or outcasts of some sort. Today, the vast majority of my friends and family members have tattoos, from hidden hearts to full-sleeve narratives. My wife has several tattoos. My daughter has beautiful, graceful birds fluttering across her chest. Even politicians, CEOs, and other mainstream professionals have tattoos. San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi sports a green dragon on his right shoulder.
By the early '90s, as more and more people joined the ranks of the tattooed and pierced, the idea of not having a tattoo seemed more daring to me than having one, so I never got that Black Flag tat. Or maybe that was just my excuse for continuing to chicken out. Whatever the case, tattoos remain fascinating to me. They can be complex works of art or minimalistic patterns. They can be as personal as haiku or as empty as a self-help mantra. They can tell stories — or not.
When the SF Weekly staff decided to do a photo essay on tattoos for this issue, we couldn't think of a more appropriate theme than San Francisco — people who have chosen to tell their stories by having images of some aspect of this amazing city permanently etched into their skin. The people featured in these pages live everywhere from Bernal Heights to Brooklyn, N.Y., Tokyo, Japan, to El Paso, Texas, but wherever they go, they take a little bit of San Francisco with them.
Interviewers: Matt Saincome, Julia Carrie Wong, and Peter Lawrence Kane
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