PERMANENT

What happens when the needle is in the wrong hands

REGRETS take many forms: a missed baseball game, a failed test, marriage proposal met with a “no”. But with time, and effort, most can be pushed out of sight and out of mind.

That is not the case with the regret that Joe Kregel tries to hide most days.

But with each glance at his left wrist, he is reminded again of the poor decision he made many years ago. Near the crease above his palm, sits a sloppy-looking black-and-red tattoo. It is supposed to say “LOVE.” Instead, it looks like “LOYE”.

The 29 year old from Herndon, Virginia, knows it’s so bad he wears a watch over it and sometimes a long-sleeved shirt over that. Even then, enough of the red peeks out that it often draws attention, and Kregel finds himself, yet again, explaining what it is.

“It was poor placement when I was 18,” he told me when I saw it. I tried to avoid wincing. I failed. I cringed.

I’m sure he noticed, but after all, that’s why we were here, standing next to a portable stage in a Crystal City hotel in Arlington, waiting for three judges to signal they were ready for him.

The judges at the Nation’s Tattoo Expo, in its summer debut, had just declared winners for best arm, leg and overall tattoos, and now it was time to shine their table lamps on the bravest in the room: the men and women competing for the worst tattoo.

Bravery in its most cringeful form is owning one’s embarrassment.

Before Kregel stepped on stage, a trophy and plaque had been handed to the man who won for overall tattoos. He had a dad-bod belly, but when he took his clothes off and stood on a chair, wearing only underwear and tattoos from his collarbones to his toes, the audience looked on in awe. The emcee called his body “beautiful”.

There are many people who believe tattoos are dangerous or tasteless or that the body shouldn’t be defaced.

Those people were not at the expo. Instead, it was filled with people who spoke about the process as the ultimate form of self-expression, an art for which they felt honoured to serve as a canvas.

But even they would agree: not all canvasses end up in Picasso’s hands.

Sometimes those hands belong to a drunken friend or a stranger at a party or a tattoo shop employee who is available and cheap for a reason.

Artist Kristel Oreto said she spends more time covering up tattoos than creating new ones. She recently worked on a woman who told her fiance she couldn’t get married because she didn’t like the large letters inked into the skin above her chest that would show in a wedding dress. Those letters spelled out: “No regrets”.

In a portfolio of before-and-after photos Oreto shared, the letters were concealed under bold, vibrant flowers.

In another, a sad looking display of candy was turned into a colourful, inviting ALTHOUGH a tattoo is imprinted onto your skin and is considered a form of personal expression, a third party could potentially lay claim to the artwork.

Adams & Adams Attorneys argues that copyright lies at the heart of this contentious issue.

Nicole Smalberger, a senior associate at the law firm said this was because unlike other artists such as those working on canvas or clay, a tattoo artist’s rights were less straightforward as they were working on skin attached to a living human being. “Although a tattoo is an artwork which has been reduced to a material form, the material form to which it has been reduced is on a human body,” she said.

“A tattoo is an artistic work. If it is original and reduced to a material form copyright subsists.”

Smalberger said in the case of artistic scene of sweets. Gregory Piper, who put on the expo, said one of the main reasons behind cover-ups are trends. People look at what’s popular, and later chastise themselves for choosing a design that feels far from unique.

In the 1990s, that was the half-moon, half-sun tattoo. Last year, he said, it was a feather that flowed into a bird.

“Right now, the tattoo trend is ‘I want it upside down so I can look at it’. In 10 years, this is what we’re going to be covering up.”

Piper has his own permanent regrets. Among them is a stack of skulls on the inside of his leg. The image carries a stigma that doesn’t match who he is, he said, and so he wears pants whenever he speaks publicly or goes to his 9-year-old daughter’s school. “If I could start over, I would have traditional Japanese sleeves and chest panels,” he said.

He said he often advises young people to wait to get tattoos, especially when their designs involve faces, necks or hands. He has discouraged his daughter, who will soon turn 20 and wants to study law, from putting any ink on her body.

The prize for the worst tattoo contest, which was officially called “My Tattoo F’n Sucks”, was a $250 (R3 255) gift certificate to Piper’s shop, Exposed Temptations Tattoo. Five people lined, and Kregel stood at the front.

Behind him was a young man from San Antonio who had given himself a tattoo on his lower thigh of a heart with the word “cold” in it. Get it? Cold-hearted.

Yeah, most people don’t either, which is why he was there.

Standing behind him was a man from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He had a large works, it was the artist or creator of the work who owned the copyright, namely the tattoo artist and not the person on whom the tattoo appears, irrespective of the fact that the latter has paid for his/her tattoo.

“In short, when you pay your tattoo artist, you pay for the tattoo, not the copyright subsisting in it.”

As the controversial debate around who owns the rights to a tattoo continues, prominent figures including those from South Africa, are now being urged to seek assignment of the copyright in their tattoos from their tattoo artists.

“The National Football League in the US has already been making similar recommendations to its players to avoid them getting into hot water and our local sports stars in South Africa would be well advised to follow suit,” said Smalberger.

● Do you have a tattoo you now regret getting? Tell us your story and send a picture to kashiefa.ajam@inl. co.za or karishma.dipa@inl.co.za tribal symbol on his back shoulder that could contain an insightful message – or not. He wasn’t sure what it was supposed to symbolise. “Someone had a tattoo gun at a party,” he explained.

The sole woman in line pulled down a corner of her waistband to reveal her regret. “A lion?” I asked.

“Everyone’s question lets me know how bad it is,” she said.

In the end, the tribal symbol won. Kregel shrugged off the loss. He pulled up his sleeve to show that, even without the gift certificate, he is well on his way to fixing his regret. On his 29th birthday, he had a large bear tattooed on his upper arm. He now plans to have it coloured in and surrounded by things that symbolise people in his family: a butterfly for his grandmother; an infinity knot for his father; and for his mother, a tree with roots that hide his old tattoo.

By next year, he said, his arm would be covered with everything he “loves” – and not loyes. – The Washington Post