Tattoo Tribute

Firefighters line up for body art honoring fallen 9/11 comrades

By PETULA DVORAK
WASHINGTON POST

The drone of the needle fills the tattoo parlor as Chris Smith etches the biceps of a young tough sitting wide-eyed and frozen in one of the red vinyl chairs of Smith’s Washington, D.C. shop.
That drone — somewhere between a dentist’s drill and an electric toothbrush — is usually the only sound breaking the gruff sang-froid of this tattoo parlor.
Lately though, firefighters have been the ones sitting in the red chairs, baring their skin — and their souls — to the bald, tattooed and laconic Smith.
The subject, not surprisingly, is the extraordinary toll Sept. 11 took on their comrades.
“This guy, a firefighter, he has a huge Pentagon across his back,” Smith says. “It has Jesus and flames coming out of it. The piece is big, and he has to keep coming back to get it done in parts. When he comes in, he talks about all the firefighters who died in New York and all the people who died in the Pentagon, and all the firefighters who could’ve died in the Pentagon.”
That kind of scene is being repeated across the country as tattoo dens become therapy suites for firefighters who are having their skin adorned with images of crying eagles, planes crashing through the World Trade Center, three firefighters raising the U.S. flag amid debris and, always, the numbers 343 and 9/11.
These are new genres of tattoos and customers — from stodgy old-timers who scoffed at body art to young volunteer firefighters who consider themselves veterans if they’ve been to a barn fire.
They all want to feel closer to the 343 firefighters who died in New York on Sept. 11.
“I don’t know what it is. Everyone wants to feel the pain somehow. The needles, the blood, it reminds us of the pain,” says D.C. firefighter Jeffrey Wright. “But it’s like the saying in fire departments: ‘Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.’ ”
At least his new tattoo is forever.
“If you told me a year ago that I’d have a tattoo today, I’d say you were crazy,” says Wright, whose left shoulder is draped in a dinner plate-size tattoo that was finished last month.
It looks like a precise black charcoal rendering of a photo than ran in newspapers across the nation, showing a New York firefighter hunched over, head hung low, with his gloves dangling from his hands. But instead of gloves, Wright had his tattoo artist put a vividly colored American flag in the firefighter’s hands. And the number 343 is at his feet.
Tattoo parlors across the nation were flooded with requests for patriotic tattoos shortly after the terrorist attacks last year.
There were plenty of American flags on the bikini lines of California girls, cartoonish Osama bin Ladens — usually with a meat cleaver in the head — on college boys, and every version of pro-USA slogans, the sort of thing heard or seen in beer and truck commercials.
“It’s kind of nice to see the old stuff coming back, after years of all the trendy stuff these Generation X-ers have had done,” says Chuck Eldridge, a Berkeley, Calif., tattoo artist and historian whose shop has a temporary exhibit of patriotic tattoos throughout history.
Eldridge arrived in San Francisco as a sailor in the early 1960s. He’s now seeing a renaissance of the kind of artwork he saw then.
“In America, for years tattooing has been MTV-influenced stuff, like tribal, Celtic, Japanese stuff. Now we’re back to some of the old-fashioned stuff — flags, eagles, anchors, sailors, bulldogs.”
That late autumn swell of needlepoint patriotism among civilians has waned, tattoo artists say, but it is now raging among firefighters.