Page 1108 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

the next room. I’ve come here to ask Sarah about the memorial
tattoos she has created over her fourteen-year career. Before Sarah

was a widely respected, award-winning tattoo artist, she was a

painter, and she still is. She specializes in realistic portraiture in her

tattoo work, inking sepia or brilliantly colored images of people’s idols,

pets, or grandparents into their backs or arms or chests. A lot of

people who want memorial tattoos want portraits. End result: Sarah
Peacock does a lot of memorial portraits for people. They probably

account for 10 percent of her business.

When Sarah creates tattoos to memorialize the dead, it usually goes 6

like this: Earlier this year, she inked a man whose wife had died of a

fluke illness at the age of thirty-eight. Sarah worked from a photo the
man had. “And he said that getting the tattoo was his last stage of

letting go. So when I finished that portrait, he cried.”

Or it goes like this: In the spring she did a pair of tattoos for the father 7

and brother of a man in his early twenties who attempted to hang
himself, failed, and then died in the hospital a few days later. “And

when the father came in to book the appointment, he was nearly in

tears,” she tells me. “So I was expecting it to be a really emotional

experience, but actually, when he got the tattoo, he was able to talk

about it. And it was interesting, psychologically, because I think the
booking of the appointment was his letting go. So actually getting that

piece was a celebration.”

This idea of letting go of someone by having that person permanently 8

set into your own skin seems counterintuitive. After all, that image is