Jerry & Company
A tattoo artist longs to be known for their work.
Jerry couldn’t draw a straight stickman. He couldn’t have drawn a proper circle if you’d given him a big silver dollar for guidance. The poor guy couldn’t even transfer an image accurately by way of see-thru, trace paper, that’s how lacking in both natural and trainable artistic ability our friend Jerry seemed. He was probably colorblind on top of all that. And needed glasses. Who knows.
Yet, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, was willing to tell Jerry how awful a tattoo artist he really was. A tattoo artist longs to be known for their work. Craves artistic, badass fame. Jerry was most definitely known for his work.
No one would hint at Jerry needing a little mentoring. Not to his face. Maybe a class? At least more practice? Anything. Especially not his doting granny Erika who’d fronted the cash to start the shop and bailed Jerry “and them others” (us) out when we were short on the rent or the light bill. She didn’t even like tattoos that much since they “sort of trashed up the Lord’s temple”, but keeping sweet Jerry, her one and only grandson, happy, was a priority. She was his artistic patron come hell or high water.
It’s all Jerry ever wanted to do. It’s all any of us wanted to do.
We’d all sit around in classes scribbling tattoo art in our workbooks instead of paying attention to math, or history, or English, inspired by our favorite band albums and movies and ripping our own styles off shots we’d get from ink magazines and anywhere else we found ideas. We had probably 150 very different versions for skulls and bones alone. This is long before the Internet, you have to remember.
Early on we were all pretty bad, along with Jerry, so we all had room for improvement and none of our work stood out. But eventually we could tell Jerry had a talent problem.
Also, Jerry had what you’d call an anger problem. As in, he spent a bit of time at home suspended after beating the living daylights out of a few well-deserving people.
Jerry was no bully. But he also had a bit of a short fuse. He was definitely the big hulk of a guy you wanted in your corner on a bad day. He was also not the sort to tell he had no talent for the only thing he lived for. If any of us had real dreams of becoming tattoo artists one day – like making a real living at it – it was this kid. Yet it looked like he was all dreams, no skill.
We got older and our circle of friends, Max, Jamie, Jerry and me, mostly got pretty good with our art and our dreams got bigger all the way up through high school. But Jerry’s drawings looked like he was stuck back in 9th grade. They weren’t for shit.
Max wondered if maybe he had a shaky drawing hand that might balance out with a tattoo gun’s 2500 beats per minute. Jamie wondered if he was left-handed rather than the right he used. She was the funniest of our group. If anyone ever came closest to spilling the beans right to Jerry’s face it was her. The problem was, none of us could even touch a tattoo gun until we were eighteen. It was one thing to draw cool pictures and quite another to do the same with the real thing. We all had a learning curve once we got to practicing. But Jerry, it was like he was intentionally screwing up. Jamie thought he might be faking it.
“Who’s that bad,” she wanted to know. “Really. I think he’s better than he’s letting on.”
“Who’d go to all that effort to fake being that bad,” I wanted to know. “For that long?”
Max, who took up for Jerry occasionally, reminded us, “You know what they say about a gift horse, don’t you?”
He was right. “Let’s not push it,” I’d said. “Besides, he makes the rest of us look even better.”
No one disagreed.
After graduation, all of us but Jerry had gone out trying other jobs at the mall or convenient stores or with the Wal-Mart. But Jerry, with the financial help of his granny, rushed straight for his dream and opened the only tattoo shop around. It gave him something to do. His granny knew this, so she didn’t mind investing in keeping him out of jail for accidentally breaking someone’s arm, or worse. For reasons you can already imagine, he wasn’t getting much business right off, but he loved running a shop. He was a decent manager. It was like a clubhouse. His clubhouse. People hung out there – including us – more than they hung around spending money on ink.
One by one, the rest of us quit our measly jobs and claimed a chair pod at Jerry’s shop. He’d been open a year and still hadn’t named the place. He just had “Tattoos” stretched across the awning.
“I ain’t having no luck on a name,” he told us. “I thought maybe Jerry’s Ink, Jerry’s Place, Jerry’s Tattoo Club.”
“Lame,” Jamie said. We agreed.
“How about you leave the name off? That might make it easier,” I offered.
“Yeah, like, Inktown, or, The Ink Club,” Max tossed in.
“Ink Masters?” Jerry tried.
“Um, no,” Jamie quickly said.
“Or, J’s Ink?” I said.
“Or,” Jamie said, “How about Ink, Inc.”
Then Jerry said, almost to himself, “Jerry & Company Ink, with one of those squiggly letters for the and.”
“Ampersand,” Jamie said.
“Say what?” Jerry asked.
“Nevermind,” Jamie answered. “I like it.”
Within a few months we were all four working at the shop.
We were the only shop in all of Partin County. I don’t know why there weren’t other shops, and there had been, but they couldn’t stay in business. I saw plenty of people with ink, so we knew everyone wasn’t against them like Jerry’s granny. Where else were they going? Jerry & Company Ink, we hoped. We were quickly busy. Bikers. Students home from college. Kids headed to college. People with birthdays. Anniversaries. Marriages. Band members. You name it.
Max liked old traditional sailor style tattoos. Jamie was into cartoonish Japanese Manga and watercolor effects. I liked tribal and dark patterns. Jerry? Ever heard of someone bringing in their child’s scribbles from the refrigerator and having it duplicated as a tattoo? A lot of Jerry’s work appeared to be just that – kid-drawn tattoos – but intentional. Maybe it was his natural thing, we couldn’t tell, and most people didn’t want near the stuff.
We tried keeping Jerry buried in paperwork and other responsibilities, too busy to do much tattooing. You’d be amazed how much time could be burnt going to the post office to check the mail, paying bills, balancing ledgers since the shop got 15% of our take, business licensing, paint choices for the walls, furniture arrangement, straightening the office room, greeting guests, drinking beer, deep cleaning, researching tattoo guns, and advertising.
Facebook and Instagram kept Jerry the busiest. He didn’t mind a good social media “ass whoopin,” so if he got wrapped into an argument early in the day it could stretch into the afternoon or evening before someone finally gave up, if at all. Anything to keep him from actually doing tattoos, we figured. Besides, fighting on-line was a lot better than him punching someone out. Jamie even kept a dummy FB page just to rile Jerry up occasionally. She knew what buttons to push to get him agitated: pizza debates, best tattoo guns, DC vs. Marvel, and shipping all our manufacturing overseas. He loved trolling other tattoo shops.
Yet, Jerry was destined to take the needle to someone occasionally. We had to keep things fair and balanced to prevent him from getting jealous of us getting all the work, which we were, and for keeping him from realizing we were playing him behind the scenes. We were busy most of the time, which as the manager of the shop, made him happy. We told him we were successful only because of his extremely busy schedule (non-tattoo related).
Somebody had to take that hit. Those somebodies were sourced from our pool of tattoo friends (and enemies, if we could swing it). And us, of course, we weren’t immune. We couldn’t just drag poor schmucks in off the streets but spare our own flesh? Even we had to sacrifice our bodies to Jerry’s lack of talent. Usually in a location coverable with t-shirts and shorts.
My first sacrificial tattoo from Jerry was a simple smiley face. On my back so I never had to see it unless it was by accident. I told him I only wanted it an inch-and-a-half in diameter, filled in yellow, and frowning, on my left shoulder. I knew we were in trouble when he asked what diameter meant and then wanted to know if I meant his left or my left or left with him looking at me which was my right, etc.
By then, everyone was gathered up to watch. I said, “Jerry, bro, put your right hand on my left shoulder.” He thought a beat and did it. “Which shoulder blade is behind there?” I quizzed. “Your left,” he said, maybe feeling like this was a trick questioning. “Put the tattoo there.”
“Okay,” he said, giggling to himself, “I’m just so nervous.” Great. That made me feel so much better.
We spent two hours, which should have been no more than thirty or forty-five minutes, under his heavy gun, getting turned to yellow hamburger meat as Max and Jamie winced and made painful sounds every time Jerry fouled up, which was the whole time. I had Max take a picture of the finished product. That’s the last time I looked at it. I had Jamie cover it with a Sublime sun without Jerry knowing.
Jamie got a unicorn from him once. Max got a pirate skull and bones. I eventually did both of their cover-ups.
When we needed a sacrifice from the community, they could sense our desperation. We had a code phrase. We’d put out the word: “Uncle J’s in town.” Meaning, of course, one of you lucky sons-of-bitches need to come in and get a Jerry tattoo in the next week. They’d moan and groan, but they’d know it was worth it in the end. Our cover-up work was pretty dope.
As you can imagine, while we were having the time of our lives doing what we’d dreamed for years, we were nervous wrecks trying to keep Jerry occupied.
We finally talked to granny Erika. Jamie went first, expressing how thankful we were for having jobs doing what we enjoyed and how passionate we were about tattooing and how her supporting the shop was so wonderful. All the right things.
“But what?” she asked, sensing something was on our minds.
“It’s about Jerry,” Jamie started.
“Oh no, what’s he done now? Did he hurt one of y’all?” she asked, sounding truly concerned, like it could happen at any time, even as a circle of friends.
“No, not at all!” I said. “He’s a great guy.”
"Yeah, he’s great,” Jamie continued, “and he’s organized and responsible.”
“That’s my Jerry,” she beamed. “But?”
Jamie just came out with it. “But he’s a terrible tattoo artist, Ms. Erika.”
Erika went quiet for a moment.
“He just isn’t good.”
Erika laughed, almost sounding relieved. “Honey, I’ve known that since he was a kid. I asked him once if he thought maybe another career besides tattooing might be better suited to him and I thought he’d have a nervous breakdown. He didn’t eat for four days.”
“You’re saying you’ve known this the whole time?” Max asked, sounding annoyed.
“Yes. But what do you want me to do about it, tell him he’s bad?” she laughed.
Did we really think his own granny would break Jerry’s heart like that? What were we thinking?
“Seems to me, other than trying to keep Jerry occupied, y’all have a pretty good gig going. Let’s not fuck it up,” she suggested.
I think it was Max that let out a little gasp at her language.
“Oh, don’t be such a prude. You have jobs you like, Jerry’s not out getting locked up. Seems like a pretty good arrangement.”
She was right.
“Though,” she added with another laugh, “his style of work would fit right in with some of the messy prison ink I’ve seen.”
She had a point.
Wouldn’t you know it, one of his favorite types of tattoos was not only his worse, but the most difficult of tattoos to do well – portraits!
A guy snuck in under the radar one day when the rest of us hadn’t gotten to the shop. He’d brought a photo of his one-year-old boy. By the time we were getting there it was terribly obvious that the kid on the man’s shoulder wasn’t his kid. It might have been someone’s kid, but it wasn’t his precious boy, Logan. The head wasn’t the right shape, the nose was crooked, the eyes were too close. What’s more, at a glance, this baby was definitely turning out to be Asian. Little Logan was not Asian. We were able to intervene just in time before all hell broke loose. Money back and a free coverup. Man, we did a lot of cover-ups back in the day.
Occasionally, someone wanting a better deal on their tattoo threatened to let the cat out of the bag, until we reminded them we were the only game in Partin County and how we’d all be glad to bring flowers to the ICU once they’d explained away and destroyed Jerry’s lifelong dream.
Ace “Crazy Needle” Baker just waltzed in one Saturday afternoon. No call ahead. No appointment. Just him and four others in his entourage from his Knoxville shop, Dystopian Ink.
They were all gathered around, including Max and Jamie, laughing and whooping it up when I got there. One of Ace’s buddies, Winky, was getting a rendition of SpongeBob on his inner wrist, right out in the open where everyone could see it. The lines were squiggly. The eyes were off. One leg was longer than the other. It looked like a fifth grader was doing it. That’s exactly what it looked like, a grade school doodle. And the further Jerry got, the more Ace and his buddies made on like they were in the company of greatness.
“Ahhh, classic, man.”
“Wow.”
“Fantastic, Jer!”
“Okay, right, I see what you’re doing there.”
I looked at Jamie, like, What the fuck?
She got up and whispered to me.
“They just walked in. Said they’d heard of Jerry’s work all the way over in Knoxville and had to come check his shop out. Something about messy doodling being all the new rage.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Ace was talking while Jerry worked, pontificating in his odd accent, a hybrid of something between East Tennessean and the Londoner swank he hadn’t quite lost after fifteen years.
“This new genre of tattoo artistry, if you will, mate, is akin, all at once, to an intentional naiveté…brut art, mixed with a child’s innocence, hybridized alongside, say, certain early century North American prison ink motifs. It’s uncommon to see a new branch of American style develop, yet here it is, eh, gaining its sea legs in a tiny rural town in East Tennessee. Lovely. Just lovely, innit?”
Jerry was all smiles, of course, barely catching a word the guy was uttering. I’m surprised he hadn’t peed himself by now. We all new “Crazy Needle” Baker. We’d copied his art from magazines, read his columns, seen him on TV, heard the legends. He had shops in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Vegas, LA. Now here he was, singing the praises of the guy whose work we’d been suppressing.
Wouldn’t you know it, by the weekend, Jerry had boxed up his tattoo guns and files of sketches from the shop and packed a suitcase from his granny’s place and was on his way to big ‘ole Knoxville. Jerry, the untalented, but lucky dog was out there in the world growing famous and earning money as an absentee business owner. With what Ace promised to pay him at Dystopian Ink, Jerry was convinced he could keep our shop open, especially with still pulling in a percentage of our work, but gone were the days of granny Erika bailing the shop out if we were short for the electric or water.
We might have been on our own, but we were still Jerry & Company Ink.
Larry D. Thacker is a writer, artist, and educator. His publications include three short story collections, six books of poetry, and a book of folk history. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com
