Stick to the Script: Fonts, handwritten tattoos and the women who love them

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Stick to the Script: Fonts, handwritten tattoos and the women who love them
Sept. 24, 2010
Derek McCormack
National Post

hink Hollywood and text tattoos, and Robert Mitchum’s Love/Hate knuckles in Night of the Hunter (and later, Cape Fear) probably come to mind, or Guy Pearce’s body memoranda in Memento. But script ink has lately become trendy with starlets off-screen.

“Fox of foxes,” Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human. He was not referring to Megan Fox. But Fox’s tattoos refer to him (or, try to).

Fox, the actress known more for her va-va-voom than her acting, is a fan of Nietzsche’s. Lately she’s been showing off this text tattoo: “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“I have a tattoo that is a Nietzsche quote that sort of basically is about marching to the beat of your own drummer and not being afraid to do that,” she told MTV News at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

There are a couple of problems with this. Problem One: It’s not a Nietzsche quote. Often attributed to the philosopher, it does not appear in any of his works. Problem Two: The tattoo itself is terrible. It’s broken up into four cursive lines that run across her right rib cage, from above her hip to beneath her breast. Spaces between words and between lines are uneven. The placement is poor — Fox can’t read it without straining her neck — but where else could it go? Fox has tattoos all over her body; she’s running out of flesh pages.

Susan Sarandon inked the initials of her children down her spine in the New York Times font (daughter Eva Amurri opted for the Latin conscientia on her wrist, written in the font of her vintage childhood typewriter). Lindsay Lohan wears these words on her inner wrist: “Stars, all we ask for is our right to twinkle.” But at the moment, Fox is probably the most famous celebrity canvas of the text tattoo. Besides the non-Nietzsche quote, she bears a fumbled quote from Shakespeare: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” (the actual line from King Lear is, “So we’ll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies …”).

“I don’t know when it began,” Halifax tattooist Lydia Klenck says about the recent trend toward text tattoos, “but it’s getting more and more popular.” Over the past four years she’s worked out of the studio at Utility Gallery in Halifax, Klenck has watched text tattoos become one of the most common requests among young women in their twenties. The most popular spots: ribs and wrists. The most popular texts: therapeutic or inspirational sayings.

But why not write meaningful mottos in a diary, on a Post-it or on a Facebook wall? Why place them permanently on the body, and often in places where they can’t be read (save for in a mirror — where they’ll be seen backward)? Are we as a society so exhibitionistic that we must show off our inspirations, so amnesiac as to forget the words that mean the most to us unless we mark them on our skins?

Klenck is the picture of diplomacy. “There are a lot of different reasons to get tattoos,” she replies, carefully.

And there are lots of different people who get them, as Ina Saltz writes in her photographic book Body Type (Abrams Image, $25.95). She describes “a newly defined stratum of the tattooed: affluent, culturally aware, sophisticated and highly educated young people.”

Saltz is particularly interested in those who adorn themselves with typographic tributes. Many of them are graphic designers who tattoo parts of their favourite fonts onto themselves: a woman with an art-nouveau alphabet running down her leg, or a woman with a semi-colon below her bellybutton.

Natasha Koifman, a publicist who works in fashion and film, thought long and hard about her tattoo. It’s on her inner wrist, and consists of the word “gratitude” and the numeral 26. Gratitude to the 26th power?

“The tattoo is a personal reminder to be grateful and to stay grounded,” she explains. “The number 26 is for my son Justin’s birthday. That number is an important one in my life for other reasons too, but that’s between me and the tattoo. It’s just for me.”

She designed the tattoo herself. She tried it in more than 100 fonts until she found the ones she wanted (the “g” is a different typeface than the “ratitude”). She wore a fake version of it for a few weeks before having it needled into her by a tattooist who specialized in fine print.

Sakeena Noureddin had a hard time finding just the right tattooist to do her job, too. Noureddin, a retail coordinator for Aveda in Canada, boasts a tattoo in Arabic script on her forearm. “At first I couldn’t find anyone who could freehand Arabic script,” she says. “An extra dash or dot could change the meaning of a word. In the end I stencilled what I wanted and took it to the tattooist.”

The words are from an Arabic poem that’s recited at mourning ceremonies. Her grandfather recited it to her pregnant mother every day; to be specific, he recited it to her unborn baby, Noureddin. Gravely ill, he realized he wouldn’t meet his granddaughter, but believed that by imparting the poem to her, they could bond.

Lydia Klenck understands that people impart great emotional importance to their text tattoos; but she’s not sure that they make good graphics. “I prefer classic tattoos,” she says. “Women come in here and want the tiniest writing and the smallest print. Really small print doesn’t age well. Skin sags and words mush into each other.” They forget that tattooists aren’t as exact as laser printers, and that people aren’t made of paper.