Advocacy in ink
Trouble Bound’s support for Daffodil Place is more than skin deep
When Joan Barry signed up last year to take part in this past weekend’s Daffodil Place fundraiser at Trouble Bound Studio, she didn’t know she’d have another personal reason to support the cause.
At last year’s fundraiser, Barry got a pink ribbon tattooed on her arm in brushstroke style on with the word “hope” over it.
“The first one is in memory of my two aunts, Aunt Joan and Aunt Theresa. And both of them passed away with breast cancer,” she told The Telegram while lying on a tattoo bed on the Water Street studio’s top floor.
Trouble Bound owner Dave Munro gave her that tattoo. Saturday he added a second ribbon to her arm — this one in purple with the word “love” over it.
“The one I’m getting today is in memory of my Aunt Cecilia, who passed away in May of pancreatic cancer,” she said Saturday morning.
“I booked it last year with no reason in mind to get it done this year, and now I have extra special meaning.”
The toll cancer has taken on Barry’s family is certainly one of the things that motivates her to take part in the tattoo fundraiser. And though her aunts never stayed there, she also feels good about supporting Daffodil Place, a 24-room place for cancer patients and caregivers to stay in St. John’s when undergoing treatment.
“Cancer, somehow, in some way, has touched everybody in some form,” she said.
On the bed next to Barry, Remona Manuel was getting a pink and grey ribbon tattooed on her arm by artist Alicia Vocke. The pink was for her grandmother, who survived breast cancer, and the grey was for her uncle.
“My uncle passed away this summer from brain cancer. He was fighting it for a long time. He was only 53,” she said.
As Munro said, you can’t throw a rock in Newfoundland and Labrador without hitting someone who’s been personally affected by cancer. Several staff members have lost loved ones to the disease.
Munro’s brother, Will Munro, was 35 when he died of glioblastoma in 2010. The tattoo artist said he gets pretty emotional around his brother’s birthday, which is Feb. 11. The fundraiser began in 2011 near his birthday.
“I couldn’t be left with my own thoughts, and we just decided this was how we were going to handle it. The few months after my brother died, Alicia lost her aunt. Two years prior, Mike had lost his dad. It had just been a very strong progression of people who worked at the shop who were very touched by it,” he said.
“I didn’t necessarily want to give money to research or something that can disappear. I wanted to see some kind of immediate gratification to the people who need it, and we came across Daffodil Place.”
He said the fact that Daffodil Place, run by the local branch of Canadian Cancer Society, is privately funded was one of the reasons he wanted to support the cause.
“There’s no government money going into this. There’s no external support from our health-care community for these people who are ill,” he said.
“And this is a contentious issue. If you’re going to have people who are sick who are like 500 kilometres from their ability to be taken care of, how do you get around this? How do you work around this? And if there’s that loophole, people are going to fall through it and they’re going to die. And that’s an issue.”
Saturday’s fifth annual fundraiser was the biggest yet, taking in more than $8,300. Almost every space was booked, and with seven tattoo artists taking part, Munro said he expected 70 or more people to get tattoos this time around.
The studio also sold eventspecific merchandise this year to people as far away as Australia.
“The amount of devotion that other people have shown to what we’re doing is phenomenal,” he said.