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