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Living Art

By Anne Weltmer

Thursday, March 15, 2007

A man stops in the middle of the lane on Vermont Street just outside of the Lawrence Public Library, honks at me getting out of my car, pulls his navy sedan into a parallel parking spot, and walks across the street and into Joe’s Body Art right behind me. He greets Joe McGill, the owner of the parlor, and the seven other people in the room, then sits in a tall-backed chair with wooden armrests in the corner of the room next to a shelf full of children’s books and starts sketching out his next tattoo.

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Photo by Sarah Leonard

Joe McGill, owner of Joe’s Body Art, outlines a tattoo on the arm of one of his customers. Each needle McGill uses can make 3,000 holes per minute and fill them with ink.

Chris Lang, the graying, wavy-haired man in the corner doodling an image of the Predator, is one of the people whom McGill works on regularly in his parlor. Working with the people is fun, sometimes out-of-the-ordinary, but his love of the job is more than just meeting interesting people and drawing on them.

“I got fascinated with it because it really is a living art,” McGill says about why he’s been tattooing for more than 25 years. “If people die, the art dies. The artwork’s going with them.”

McGill, originally from Sedan, moved to the Lawrence area when he was 15 years old. He took all the art classes he could in high school in Perry and one more at the University of Kansas. After partying too hard and failing the class, he decided college wasn’t for him.

After that he painted houses to support himself, but continued to draw and paint in his spare time until he met someone who knew how to make a homemade tattooing machine in 1980. It’s addicting to give and receive tattoos, McGill says, so he tattooed out of his house in the late 1980s and early 1990s until a law was passed that tattoo artists had to be certified.

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I got fascinated with [Tattooing] because it really is a living art. If people die, the art dies. The artwork’s going with them.

— Joe McGill

He wasn’t happy about the change and tried to convince the authorities to grandfather him into the new system because he’d had so much experience. But he ended up having to get certified anyway.

McGill’s been tattooing professionally since 1994, but opened Joe’s Body Art at its current location, 714 Vermont St., three years ago.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh)” plays faintly from an old black boombox, but the closest noise to me is the hum of the drill hollowing 24,000 holes per minute into the arm of Travis Baucom, a Haskell Indian Nations University freshman from Cowita, Okla., and filling them in the shape of a lion coming out of fog.

McGill uses eight needles, each with a capacity to make and fill 3,000 holes per minute with ink. He stares intently at his newest artwork through his thick, black-rimmed glasses. He’s wearing an old Harley-Davidson short-sleeved T-shirt with holes around the pockets.

I’m trying to observe McGill at work and question Baucom about his new tattoo, but Lang insists that I be the one interviewed first. He asks me the usual get-acquainted questions, and then if I have a tattoo. I don’t.

Then Lang opens up about himself. I ask him what his first tattoo was, but he says he was young and drunk in China and it wasn’t the best idea, even though he was going to get one anyway. He says a 14-year-old boy gave him a rose-and-heart design on his forearm, but I can’t see the original version when I ask because McGill has reworked it, Lang says.

“Want me to take my shirt off?” he asks after I inquire about his other tattoos. He wants to show me the latest parts of his full-back tattoo that he and McGill have been working on in phases, so he takes off his Harley-Davidson thermal long-sleeved T-shirt and shows me his thick back.

McGill’s quiet demeanor doesn’t hide his amusement at Lang’s forwardness and he shows his orange chewing gum as he grins. But he does agree with Lang that the body is a canvas to express oneself.

Lang’s back looks like a scene from Lord of the Rings: craggy mountains extend from his scapula to his love handles with a lake, a castle and figurines on either side. He says it hurt so bad getting the tattoo on his ribs that he had to take a break. I ask if he planned on doing any more tonight, and he said probably not — he just wanted to stop by and hang out. Like an old-fashioned barbershop, people drop in just to hang out, talk and “see who can lie the most,” Lang says.

Lang says McGill has either created or modified every tattoo on his body, and there are a lot — his arms and back are covered in ink. He says that he didn’t have a master plan when he started getting tattoos, but he’s noticed a pattern of good and evil emerge.

“My body is a battleground. I think we all are a spiritual battleground,” Lang says.

Now he tries to plan his tattoos accordingly. He says he finds out more about himself from them and does them in reaction to big events in his life, such as his break-up with an ex-girlfriend.

Baucom agrees and says he thinks of them as scars. Every time he goes through a traumatic experience, he wants to get a tattoo to remind himself that he survived it. The lion emerging from the fog represents passing through all of the obstacles in his life, Baucom says. He decided to get it after he had a dream about the image and soon after received an acceptance letter to attend Haskell.

While all of this is going on, McGill’s 12-year-old stepdaughter, Haley, is also hanging out in the tattoo parlor with her friend. She fits right in the casual atmosphere with her hooded sweatshirt and jeans on. She calls McGill “Joe” when she jokes around with him; she’s not shy at all. She plays on the computer and answers the phone for McGill while he works. His wife calls to see if he can take Haley to church later that night; he says yes. McGill’s work schedule is flexible. On his business card, it says “open 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. or later.”

“He has a pretty low-key life for such an old man,” Lang says jokingly. McGill is not really old; he’s only 47. He still has a heavy, untrimmed black beard with two white streaks down either corner of his chin, and a black ponytail hanging out of the back of his denim cap.

McGill says he’s not going anywhere. Besides Haley, he has another stepdaughter and a new baby on the way. He plans on staying in Lawrence — although maybe not in his current location because the rent’s too pricey — for the rest of his tattooing days. He says it’s not a physically demanding job, so he plans on doing it until he’s “really old.”

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