Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [52]
OFTEN THEN, having finished my post office work, I would go to spend my money on food. I would sit down, always on my own, at some restaurant selling foreign cuisine, and, with my eyes closed, would set off on great imaginary journeys inspired by the taste of those strange platefuls. And as I sat in an Indian restaurant,11 sweating from the dish in front of me, I opened my eyes to see a framed poster of a young girl from that part of the world with henna tattoos upon her. That was it. That was what started it. And then, with discreet enquiries into the tattoo of a carrier pigeon on old Postman Coovin’s right hand, I first heard of Pig Mikel.12
Pig Mikel was responsible for burrowing under the skin and depositing colours there with sharp needles for people who voluntarily subjected themselves to this torture and who even paid him for the privilege. He had illustrated his clients’ bodies with samurai warriors, cherubs, serpents, Celtic bands, popular cartoon characters, wings, claws, motorbikes, naked women, numbers, skulls, Zen signs, swastikas, flowers, thunderbolts, any breed of birds, any breed of animals, a few Greek gods, personal messages of love and hate in five different languages, a thousand different names, fake scars oozing fake blood, and on one occasion a verse from the Bible, to be precise Leviticus 19:28, ‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh or tattoo any marks upon you,’ written onto the back of an alcoholic priest, who hooted with laughter throughout the process. Was there a thing in the world that he had not drawn on human skin? And there was scarcely a corner of the outside of a human being which he had not at some time or other been bent over, bothering with his needles. But Pig was not just a tattooist, he was also an expert at body-piercing. In his time I estimate he had punctured several thousand ears—some as many as fifteen times—several hundred noses, a good number of tongues, a fair quantity of nipples, numerous navels, a few lips, a collection of eyebrows, a score of foreskins, half a dozen slits at the tip of the glans penis and a vulva or two. And afterwards he always inserted a ring in these holes, and from those rings people jangled every type of object from the standard crucifix to the shrivelled hand of a chimpanzee—but that was their business, not Pig’s.
Pig’s person too was a great advertisement for his shop. His nose was pierced in the centre and a large silver ring hung down like a bull’s, both his ears were thrice looped with thin bands of gold and his right nipple had a Celtic cross dangling from it, which he liked to fiddle with whilst he was thinking. On the top of his head, always thoroughly shaved, were two sentences in bold capitals flowing around his skull in a circle, so that it looked like the toque of some obscure holy order: the first, in the semi-circle facing the front of his head, said, I AM AN ARTIST; the second, to be read only when Pig had his back turned to you, unbashfully informed, I LOVE MYSELF. And in the centre of his forehead, in the same place that Rabbi Leow of Prague, Czech Republic, wrote on his famous golem, Pig had had inscribed the word ‘PIG’, which everyone called him because with his little eyes with their thick white eyelashes and his large upturned snout he resembled that beast, and was for some reason proud of the resemblance. I do not know what his real first name was, perhaps he was even christened Pig.
Into this man’s world, one day, I arrived uninvited.
I stared at the decorations around the walls: a thousand photographs of different examples of tattoos. Often the customers entering Pig’s domain would point at one of those designs and Pig would prepare his inks and his needle, take out a new pair of perfectly disinfected latex gloves from the box, the same gloves that surgeons wear, and let the torture begin. Often the client with his new disfigurement would say as the blood dried on his skin, ‘Never again, never again.’ But, or so Pig