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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 18, 2003)
L Human canvas Two of Portland’s top tattoo artists get some ink by Andy Mangels hey’re two of Portland’s most in-demand artists, and chances are you’ve seen their work at Pride, the beach, the bars or just about anywhere. But their art isn’t hanging on a wall in a frame. The canvas that Jacki Randall and Fish use is skin, and their tools of the trade are most often tattoo guns. T Besides the artistic trade they share in common, Randall and Fish are also two out-and-proud dykes; Randall even has the word “dyke” tattooed across her back in huge let ters. And growing up, they never imagined they’d be ink-slingers. Bom Suzanne Shifflett, Fish grew up in a small town in Maine and studied art at a school in New York. She majored in sculpting and pursued painting on the side but struggled with her developing artistic expression. “Friends of mine in San Francisco were always asking me to draw tattoo designs for them,” Fish says. With few female tattwists in the city at that time, she began to train under famous gay tattooist Wayne Bruce Lee, also now a Portland resident. “He's heavy into the leather community,” says Fish, noting that her first solo tattoo on someone was a Leather Pnde flag. She would do two more tattixis before she ever got inked herself. Randall was bom in Pomona, Calif., and grew up in Chicago, Ohio, California and Pennsylvania. She says, “When I was in grade schcxd, kids used to say, ‘Hey ■■ I’ll give you a quarter if you’ll W draw something on my arm with a Sharpie marker.’ ’’ “If they k didn’t sting a ■little bit, I every wuss would I would *hardly be worth Continued on Page 25 —Jacki Randall ot that long ago, you could tell if a man was gay by where he put his hole: Pierced right ear, that boy’s queer; pierced left ear, just likes beer. N Nowadays, it’s a little more complicated. Apart from ears, queer and straight people alike get all kinds of body parts pierced—from tongues to nipples, from navels to genitals. In the past 20 years, piercing has become something of a happy national panic, and the queer community has been most actively involved in it. “1 got in touch with my body through piercing,” says Alisa Williams, a Portland lesbian and events ticketer. “I’m still coming to terms of acceptance with my body: what its capa- bilities and limits are. Piercings are the frame that com “Making these ownership and control Adam Rivers just thought they looked so cool. I loved the way a big fat dick head looked with a gleaming piece of jew elry coming out of it.” The fact is, queer people get their bod ies pierced for uncountable reasons now: rebellion, self- esteem, sexual stimu lation, sexual identi ty, even to make a cultural statement. “Most people get pierced to let the inside come out. To be themselves,” claims Snakie, a piercing apprentice at Continued Optic Nerve Arts. 26 on Page
