The Tattoo

When I was about ten or eleven, my cousin and I were told of a way to make a tattoo from the juice of a fig tree. You could take a small new stem, slice it up the stem so you would have two flat pieces of stem to work with. You would put the cut side of the stem against your skin and hold it there for a little while. After we had done this and couldn’t see any tattoo, we stopped trying. It wasn’t until later in the day when it would start to itch and you could see that there was a red welt showing that you began to think that it might work after all.

I had made a cross on my arm. It was sore and itchy. My mother looked at it and was worried that I might have gotten into some type of poison like poison ivy or something. When my father came home, she had him look at it. He examined it and said he would put some KIP ointment on it. I’m not sure what it was, but my dad put it on everything from scrapes, cuts, poison ivy and a myriad of other problems. My mom was worried, but Dad said I would be just fine. He then looked at me and told me not to be putting plant sap on me again. I think he knew what I was doing, and how I had done it.

One of the things that interested me about tattoos was a neighbor who had a tattoo, the only one that I remember ever seeing. I’m sure there were many more, but Curly was the only one that I knew that had one. He loaded his own ammo for hunting, and some of the boys would go to see him do that until he would shoo everyone off. I went to see his tattoo. I didn’t really care about loading your own ammo. When we were very young, we would take the papers that had pictures to be transferred to eggs for Easter and put them on our arms. We were not all that brave to let someone actually do tattoos on us.

The next time that any type of tattooing ever came up was when I was sixteen. I had my own car and would load up friends and head down to the lake quite often. There were some girls that came to stay with relatives during the summer, and their grandparents or aunts and uncles would let our family know that they would sure like to go out and do something, and did they know any young men with outstanding morals that could possibly take them out. My parents didn’t know anyone like that, but they would send me and one of my friends to see them and take them out.

I’m not sure which friend it was that went with me to take them out. It was probably Richard or Rulon. We had decided to get a quick tan. There was a product that was supposed to be something that would hurry up a tan. We put it on and it turned our bodies a type of orange. It was not a color that I thought was very appealing, at least not to me. When you bathed and tried to wipe it off it dyed the towels orange, and left you looking like you hadn’t gotten out of the way of a can of spray paint. It did not deter the young ladies we were going out with so we continued with summer activities. We had gone on a few dates to the lake and to a couple of ward activities and enjoyed each other’s company. On one occasion when we had got down to the lake to swim and have a picnic. The girls had been in swimming and when they came in and dried off, they asked if we would put sunscreen on them. I still had part of a bottle of the dreaded orange quick tan. We decided to put the lotion on their backs, but to write our names with the orange dye without telling them. It was all fun and games until the girl’s grandmother called my mother and said that I had written my name on her granddaughter’s back. My parents were not that thrilled with what I had done. My father said that he guessed that I would need to take the granddaughter out for the rest of the summer until she went home. That didn’t seem like too much of a punishment to me or to my mother, but my dad thought it was just the right consequence. We had a pretty good time for the rest of the summer.                                                                                                                                                

On Cataract Canyon 

After I was married and Joy and I had a child, I got a summer job working for Tour West, a travel agency that had permits to run the Grand Canyon, Cataract and Salmon rivers. The pay was great and I enjoyed the work. It was hard to leave Joy at home, but I was oblivious of anyone else’s feeling or needs but my own. Like I said the pay was very good. I could make more money running river in three months than I could teaching the rest of the year. It was while running the river that I got my final tattoo. I would come home with areas of dark tan on my arms and head with red sunburn on my upper arm and the rest of my body was as white as a ghost. We called it my Neapolitan suntan.

That was pretty much the end of the tattoos unless you count scars from surgery and misadventures. I have scars on my head, elbow, shoulder, hip and back. All of these made it so I didn’t need any other types of tattoos.