Tits and Tats
It’s 1:30 am and Maxx Kelly is sitting at a booth drawing busily in her sketchbook, while still tending to the needs of the few customers scattered throughout the Steak n Shake. Her uniform is concealed by her favorite Marvel comics hoodie and, when she hops up to refill someone’s iced tea, she glides away deftly on her Heelys™.
Maxx, you see, is every 12-year-old-boy’s dream girl come to life: the body of a stripper and an abiding love of comic books, anime, tattoos, graffiti, and motorcycles. And while she’s worked third shift at the Steak n Shake for what she describes as an “uncomfortable four and a half years,” she uses as much of her down time as possible to further her artistic endeavors.
She slides back into the booth, and I glance into her open sketchbook and ask if she’s working on “flash” for Queen of Hearts, the tattoo shop where she is an apprentice. Her unenthusiastic nod of response is not surprising considering she defines flash as “a bunch of cheesy-ass bullshit drawings that people come in and pick off of the walls.”
She pauses to erase a pencil line from a beautiful, inked-in drawing of a butterfly. “No offense to anyone who gets a piece of shit something off the wall,” she adds apologetically. “They’re still really awesome. Every tattoo is special.”
Maxx flings down her eraser and wheels forward to seat a pair of college-aged guys intent on greasy food. “What I like to draw is sexy naked ladies,” she continues when she sits back down, referring to the sultry anime-inspired chicks that are her specialty. “Which is perfectly suited for tattooing, as it turns out.” She proudly tells me the slogan she’s decided to put on her business card: A little tit for tat. “I like to think that’s what I’ll have the market on,” she chuckles as she arches her back to display her own ample assets. “Breasts!!”
She takes up her eraser again, and reflects on her former creative aspirations. “Once upon a time I wanted to be a comic book artist,” she muses. “Before I got accepted to Savannah [College of Art and Design] and then shamed by finding out it was going to cost $20,000 every three months for four years…” She blows eraser dust off the table angrily. “Thank you George Bush,” she says with great disdain (referring to the decreased amount of scholarship money available to her generation). “I’d like to tip a cap to that jerk-off. Good college education for the Americans there; give us all something to be proud of.”
I let out a loud guffaw and remind her that she’s half Canadian anyway. “My dad is an illegal Canadian immigrant, if you can even imagine how that’s possible,” Maxx says with a laugh. “He left a nation that was awesome and came to a nation that was less awesome. I wish he would get deported.” She wipes the page. “And then I wish that they would revoke that whole ‘children born within the United States get to be American citizens’ thing and then they would send me to Canada too.”
She flips through her sketchbook, displaying skilled and graceful illustrations of everything from hand gestures to roses. “Apprenticing is an interesting process,” she confesses, as she touches up a sketch of a hand displaying a middle-finger-salute. “You kind of get to be everyone’s bitch for a year and they revel in that fact. It’s so funny to see the amount of petty amusement everyone gets out of ordering you around.”
But Maxx knows it will be worth it some day. “I like being one of the few and the proud female tattoo artists to have graced the business in the last couple of decades,” she admits. Someday she plans to open her own shop, and she wants it to be the “pussiest tattoo shop humanly possible; just oozing with girlieness.” She knows that a tattoo shop with pink walls, owned by a woman, will piss off the traditionalists—the people with “rock star ‘I’m too big for my britches’ Billy-badass attitudes”—but doesn’t give a damn what they think.
“There are plenty of people who don’t get tattoos because they don’t want to walk into a tattoo shop and be fed to the wolves,” she says of the often-intimidating atmosphere. “It’s some super elitist club where only the people who are covered in tattoos get to be treated with any kind of respect.”
She smiles down at her sketches; sketches that will hang on the wall and which, someday, may be chosen to adorn the backsides and limbs of people from all walks of life.
“I like to think that in the next 20 years tattoos won’t be regarded as this horrible wretched thing that only circus carnies get,” she says ruefully. “Middle-aged women will all have their tramp stamps and their cute little ankle tattoos and that’s adorable. I want tattoos to not just be for young, hardcore, punk emo kids, but for everybody.”
She closes the book and wheels off to refill her soda. “I want my mom to have a tattoo,” she says enthusiastically, as she zips past. “I want to think that when I’m a grandma I won’t look weird, because everyone will have tattoos by then.” She slides into the booth and takes a minute to stare into space, imagining a lovely future.
“That will be fucking awesome.”
Originally published by the Nashville Edge, 2007-2008.
May 6, 2009 at 11:22 pm | writings | No comment