Tattoos Are Forever Yours—

Building A Career In Ink

By Kendra Bobowick

Tattoo: the act of marking the skin with indelible patterns, pictures, legends, etc, by making punctures and inserting pigments. Why do people get tattoos? The Newtown Bee has decided to talk with those who have them, as well as tattoo artists, to learn the meaning behind the choices of their body ink.

Pinching cellophane between his fingers, Brian Galian twisted lengths of the clear wrap around black cushions.

“Anything I touch I have to make sure I can clean or throw away,” he said. “It’s a barrier between myself and blood-borne activity.”

Mr Galian is the owner of Patience Rose Tattoo, located at 236 Roosevelt Drive (Route 34) in Monroe, just over the Newtown-Monroe town line. With a coffee cooling on the counter, he prepared the tattoo bed for client John Sikorsky. Beside his coffee sat a flipbook of client photos: upper arms, torsos, legs, necks, and even one inner lip, all decorated with ink.

The heart-shaped inner lip design had been a compromise.

“I don’t like tattooing the insides of lips. They’re usually [nonsense] tattoos … the girl was 18 and wanted a profanity there.” He talked her out of that, he said. Thinking of his trade and training, he added, “[Tattooing] the inside of a lip is just not satisfying.”

Beside the flipbook of images was a hardcover nonfiction publication, sketches, CDs, a painting on canvas, a bag of mini doughnuts, and a menagerie of small plastic bottles that dispense fluids he uses for his indelible work.

Mr Sikorsky settled onto the tattoo table, face down, his left arm stretched toward Mr Galian.

Working and talking, Mr Galian’s story unraveled. He and his girlfriend traveled to see the Grateful Dead as soon as she turned 16 and got her driver’s license. He was 15. They also wanted a tattoo.

“In a lot of places we got laughed at, so we needed a scheme,” he said, explaining that without their parents’ consent, no parlors would accept them as clients.

The couple soon took another trip to Bridgeport, posing as a brother and sister. They claimed their mother was sick, “swiped her license” to show to a tattoo artist, and asked him to call her. He called and “my sister pretended to be my mother,” he said. His affair with ink began that day.

“I hung with [the artist, Jim Naylor] all day. I liked the way his life seemed at the time; I romanticized it. He was living for himself.” Recalling his impressions of Mr Naylor, Mr Galian said, “He owned his own business, he was an artist. I was impressed with his freedom.”

Skipping topics, he said, “I had seen my dad draw. It was architectural, but was always with a pen and pencil.”

Regarding tattoos, he said, “I knew I would need a hand for it, a steady hand is a requirement; you need patience and to understand artwork.” With the spark of a dream beginning to burn, he said, “As young as I was, I was willing to do anything, and I was captivated that the guy was living a dream. “

He wanted to be a tattoo artist. “I had to see if it was possible,” he said.

Persistence Pays Off

“I came back to [Mr Naylor] with crude drawings,” Mr Galian said. Trying to prove he could make copies of images — one of his first artistic efforts — he showed the artist his work.

“I asked him if I could learn to tattoo. He said, ‘No.’”

Rather than becoming discouraged, Mr Galian, then still a teenager, bought tattoo equipment. Returning to Mr Naylor’s parlor, he said, “I am doing it anyway, and he said, ‘That’s what I was waiting for.’” With his new equipment in hand and new chance, Mr Galian had another surprise waiting.

“He asked to see what I bought, then he took all the stuff away and put it in back. He said ‘You’ll get it back in a year.’ ”

Mr Galian had to earn his equipment back. Since then, he said, “I eat, sleep, and drink tattoos.”

Now in practice for more than 15 years, he said, “I have not gone more than five days without tattooing — it’s an addiction.”

He named his tattoo parlor after his daughter, Patience Rose, and works alongside his wife Jessica, who also tattoos.

Loving The Work

“Tattooing is a good way to be artistic, make a living, and straddle the line of being on the edge and having a life,” he said. “You can integrate art into life.”

Working artists are “hard to come by,” he explained.

Running his needle over the lines and curves in Mr Sikorsky’s tattoo, Mr Galian said, “It’s a wonderful feeling for someone to trust you to put your mark on them forever. It’s immortalizing.”

Dispelling some assumptions, he said, “[Tattoo artists] are not a bunch of tough guys; it’s a lot of creative individuals pushing the boundaries of where art is going. Our next Michelangelo is going to be a tattoo artist.”

The tattoo Mr Galian was finishing for Mr Sikorsky late in 2010 was based on the original drawing done by Mr Sikorsky’s friend and Oxford resident Crystal D’Aiuto. She put on paper a collage of his ideas involving “deviating from the norm,” he said.

Relaxing on a lunch break from work recently, Mr Sikorsky explained his nine tattoos.

“I started because … things in my life strike me that I want to keep forever.” Pointing out one tattoo representing a favorite band, Biohazard, he laughed, “It’s a band I like, and when I go to my grave I’ll be a biohazard.”

He prefers using his own ideas on his skin.

“I don’t want to see my tattoo on someone else,” said Mr Galian, who also said that many of his tattoos represent music he enjoys or moments in his life, although two are from tattoo parties.

“Sort of like a Tupperware party? Yeah!” he said. “Guys are talking about tattoos, doing tattoos.”

He has a black rose in memory of his father. He chose the death flower, appropriately for his father’s love of gardening, he said.

Continually glancing at his arms, he said, “I like doing my arms … it’s funny, I always have my arms in hot engines, getting scraped up.”

He also has tattoos on his shoulders.

“I have a devil on each shoulder,” he said. They’re telling him, “Be bad, but not bad,” he said. “That’s where I deviate!” The tattoo Mr Sikorsky had done at Patience Rose recently is a figure 8 with a woman/dominatrix peeking out from inside.

Trying to explain why people get tattoos, Mr Galian said, “You get as many reasons as why anyone does anything. Something good happens or something bad happens, they mark the occasion,” he said. “They do it because … it’s a freedom of owning yourself and being proud of that.”

Mr Sikorsky, who won’t enter a parlor without a 90 percent idea of what he wants done, offered his observation on tattoos: “If it means something to you, you’ve got to respect that.”

Contact Kendra Bobowick, at 203-426-3141 or Kendra@TheBee.com, if you have a tattoo with an interesting story behind it.