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John’s).Īs we got drunker, his tragic and disturbing story started to leak out of his mouth like a confession.

On one forearm he wore a tattoo of some vague and blurry coat of arms while on the other was a tattoo featuring two large dice (a pair of sixes) and the word “Boxcars” and the letters “HMP” (Her Majesty’s Prison, in St. The steward sat at a table upon which he leaned his elbows and filled his and my glass after every shot. The ship rolled and pitched violently and the windowless cabin rose and fell forty feet for hours on end. The temperature was unbearably hot despite the dark icy waters and thrashing arctic storm outside. The cabin was filled with the smell of diesel, bunker oil, fried caplin, paint, vomit and body odour.

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A chief steward, his “office” was directly behind the galley and right beneath the overhead, where a lashed and massive Caterpillar generator ran at full bore. I shared a bottle of whiskey one night with one particularly rough fellow while the ship hove to and rode out a heavy storm off Cape Chidley, Labrador. Nearly all wore tattoos on their forearms, their knuckles or their shoulders. The crew, save for two young French Canadians, were from Newfoundland and had made their living upon the sea for decades. It was late October and this was to be the last voyage north with supplies for isolated Arctic communities. In 1976, as an assistant to a National Geographic photographer, I boarded the 300-foot icebreaking cargo freighter MV Bill Crosby bound from Montréal, through the Straits of Belle Isle, to Hall Beach on the shores of Foxe Basin-one of Canada’s remotest spots. It was evident to my eyes, fresh from 5 years of architectural training, that these were executed by some of the least talented artists known to man. These men represented the outermost ring of my existence-men who had served in Cyprus men who had sweated months in a Ferret scout car in the Gaza Strip men who had travelled the Pacific Rim on some long-forgotten navy tour, never getting deeper into these places than the fleshpots and hard-bitten waterfront dives of places like Manila, Mombasa, Gibraltar and Liverpool.

As they leaned in to take my plate or pour me another glass of ice water, their tattooed arms would pass before my eyes, drawn across them blue, barely understandable tributes to places, women, events and units they once loved-Latin phrases, waving flags, hangman’s nooses, daggers dripping blood, the crudely etched names of places I had only heard of (Subic Bay, Kyrenia, Shilo, Marseilles), the names of ships long ago scrapped (Haida, Swansea, Qu’Appelle) and the names of women once loved (Rose, Paulette, Sweet Cindy).

Here, as a long haired, snot-nosed civilian puke with no apparent mojo and dressed in flared pants and platform shoes, I was served at the linen covered dinner table of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Mess by 50-something stewards with lengthy military careers written in the lines of their faces-thirty years of heavy smoking and alcohol abuse. I lived in the BOQ and dined at the officers’ mess. In 1973, as a young 20-something “town planner” assigned to do a facilities survey of Canadian Forces Base Petawawa about 100 miles northwest of Ottawa, I was assigned officer status. There were, of course, societies and cultures on other continents whose culturally important tattooing practices I could view in National Geographic, but the only tattoos I came in contact with seemed to be curiously menacing, largely blurred and faded “pick and poke” concoctions that fit into one category-they all could be traced back to some sort of past military, penal or merchant marine service. I am a 67-year-old man, paunchy around the edges, with an ever-expanding universe of liver spots, fading in self-esteem and I come from a postwar era when non-societally-mandated tattoos were found only on men who inhabited the fringes of acceptable behaviour.

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If you have an aversion to displays of blotchy skin from ordinary people if a man’s hirsute armpits frighten you or you have been living on an otherwise uninhabited island and not yet realized that the once-marginalized art of human tattooing is now an omnipresent social phenomenon that has grown to become part of the social fabric of western culture, then I suggest you do not press on with reading this article.

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