The boy liked Ladies’ Man Lars. Jack’s mom had almost never taken him to the Chinaman’s shop in Toronto. Although Jack knew a lot about her skills and training as a tattoo artist, his mother had never been keen for him to see her work. But there was no Lottie to look after the boy in Copenhagen, and until Tattoo Ole found them two rooms with a bath in the chambermaids’ quarters of the Hotel D’Angleterre, Jack and his mom slept in the tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17.
“I’m sleeping in the needles again,” Daughter Alice would say, as if she had mixed feelings about it.
Despite reservations, she had let Jack play with the electric machine before. To the boy’s eyes, it resembled a pistol, although its sound is more comparable to that made by a dentist’s drill, and it is capable of making more than two thousand jabs a minute.
Until Jack and Alice went to Copenhagen, what little needlework Jack had been allowed to do was practiced on an orange or a grapefruit—and only once, because his mom said fresh fish were expensive, on a flounder. (A fresh flounder, Aberdeen Bill had told Alice, was the closest approximation to human skin.) But Ladies’ Man Lars let Jack practice on
Lars Madsen was a little younger than Jack’s mother, but he was a whole lot greener as an apprentice; maybe that was why he was generous to the boy. After Tattoo Ole saw the needlework Alice could do, poor Lars was strictly limited to shading. With some exceptions, Ole and Alice let Lars color in their outlines, but Ladies’ Man Madsen let Jack outline
This was a bold, even a reckless, thing for Lars to let a four-year-old do. Fortunately, Jack was restricted to the area of Madsen’s ankles, where some “scratcher” (a bad tattooist) had etched the names of two former girlfriends, which were now an impediment to Lars’s love life—or so he believed. The boy was given the task of covering up the old girlfriends’ names.
Actually, twenty percent of all tattoos are cover-ups—and half the unwanted tattoos in the world incorporate someone’s name. Ladies’ Man Madsen, who was blond and blue-eyed with a gap-toothed smile and a crooked nose from a lost fight, had one ankle wreathed with small red hearts budding on a green thorny branch—as if an errant rosebush had grown hearts instead of flowers. The other ankle was encircled by black links of chain. The name entwined on and around the branch was
With the tattoo machine vibrating in his small hand, and making his first penetrating contact with human skin, the boy must have borne down too hard. The client, unless drunk, is not supposed to bleed, and Madsen had been drinking nothing stronger than coffee. The needles should not draw blood—provided they puncture the skin no deeper than one sixty-fourth of an inch, or even one thirty-second. Jack obviously went deeper than that with poor Lars. The Ladies’ Man was a good sport about it, but with the thin sprinkling of the ink and the surprisingly more vivid spatter of the blood, there was a lot to wipe away. Madsen was not only bleeding; he was glistening with Vaseline.
That Lars didn’t complain was more than a testimony to his youth. He must have had a crush on Alice— possibly he was trying to win her affection by sacrificing his ankles to Jack.
While Alice was in her early twenties, and Lars in his late teens, at their age, almost any difference takes on an unwarranted magnitude. Moreover, Madsen’s facial hair did little to help his cause. He wore with a misplaced arrogance the merest wisp of a goatee, which seemed not so much a beard as an oversight in shaving.
The Madsen family business was fish. (Selling them, not tattooing them.) The fish business was not one that Ladies’ Man Lars longed to join. His talent at tattooing may have been limited, but, in the tattoo world, Lars Madsen had found a measure of independence from his family and the world of fish. He rinsed his hair with fresh-squeezed lemon juice every time he shampooed. The problem was not unlike Kirsten and Elise, the former girlfriends who clung to his ankles; Lars believed that the smell of his family’s business had permeated even the roots of his hair.
Tattoo Ole closely examined Jack’s cover-up of Kirsten—the one entwined with hearts and thorns—and announced that Herbert Hoffmann in Hamburg could not have done better. (Despite this accolade, Lars Madsen kept bleeding.)
Alice’s method of covering up letters consisted of leaves and berries. Out of every letter, she told Jack, you could construct a leaf or a berry—or an occasional flower petal. Some letters had more round parts than others; you could make a berry out of anything that was round. The letters with angles instead of round parts made better leaves than berries. A flower petal could be either pointed or round.
Kirsten yielded more leaves than berries, and one unlikely flower petal. Together with the untouched hearts and thorns, this left Lars’s left ankle wreathed with a confused bouquet; it looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden.
Jack had higher hopes for covering up Elise, but those black links of chain made a startling background to any combination of leaves and berries—besides, an
The four-year-old had chosen a sprig of holly for his second effort on human skin. The sharp, pointed leaves and the bright-red berries struck him as ideal for a name as short as Elise; yet the result called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration that someone had mockingly affixed to a chain-link fence.
Nevertheless, Tattoo Ole’s only comment was that the legendary Les Skuse in Bristol would have been envious of Jack’s needlework. This was high praise, indeed. Only Ole making some remark about Aberdeen Bill sitting up in his grave to take notice could have been more flattering, but Ole knew Alice was sensitive to references that placed her dad in his grave.
She’d not been there to scatter his ashes through the fence guarding the graveyard at South Leith Parish Church, although her father had arranged for a fisherman to scatter his ashes in the North Sea instead. And Ole only once mentioned the sad fact that Aberdeen Bill had drunk himself to death, which every tattoo artist in the North Sea knew.
Was it his daughter’s disgrace—her running off to Halifax, to have her wee one out of wedlock—that drove him to drink? Or had Aberdeen Bill always been a drinker? Given the weekend when everything went wrong in Aberdeen, maybe his daughter’s departure had merely exacerbated the problem.
Daughter Alice never spoke of it. Tattoo Ole never brought the subject up again, either. Jack Burns grew up with hearsay and gossip, and the boy got a good dose of both at Nyhavn 17.
In typical four-year-old fashion, Jack had left to his mother the cleaning up and bandaging of the Ladies’ Man’s ankles. A tattoo usually heals itself. You keep it covered for a few hours, then wash it with some nonperfumed soap. You never soak it; you should use a moisturizer. Ole told Jack that a new tattoo felt like a sunburn.
While the four-year-old’s cover-ups may have failed in the aesthetic sense, the names of those two girlfriends were successfully concealed. That Ladies’ Man Madsen had encircled his ankles with a shrub of what looked like body parts—worse, with what Tattoo Ole called “anti-Christmas propaganda”—was another matter.
Poor Lars. While Ole had nicknamed him “Ladies’ Man,” the opposite seemed true. Jack never saw him with a girl or heard him speak of one. Naturally, the boy never met Kirsten or Elise—only their names, which he covered in ink and blood.
Like any four-year-old, Jack Burns didn’t pay close attention to adult conversations. The boy’s understanding of linear time
Even Ladies’ Man Lars remembered meeting William Burns, although Tattoo Ole had done the needlework and there was no shading of the musical notes. William’s tattoos were all in black; there was
“Everything about him was all in black,” as Ole put it.
What Jack might have made of this was that his father wore all-black
As for Ole’s nickname for Jack’s dad, the boy had correctly overheard the tattooer call him “The Music Man.”
