Peacock works for a cover up

Sitting up late working, maybe its not tattooing, not painting… Strangely, its writing, one of the first art forms I ran to, after I had read the lyric sheets for everyone from 7 Seconds to The Smiths, even as I recoiled from the reading assignments in english class… school sucked. I had my friend draw green sharpie tattoos on me so at least i’d look cool and have something to stare at while I was bored to tears in class…. now the writing serves my website, supports my true work of tattooing… you can’t just tattoo anymore, now you have to post pictures everywhere of what you did and where and when and sometimes even why. And then you’re expected to stay glued to your phone and look at what everyone else did. it’s exhausting work, truly. I shouldn’t complain. The work gets out there. It gets seen. I remember when photos of my work only sat in a portfolio on the rail, living in darkness, until a rare customer wandered in to flip through it’s pages in a manner somewhere between disinterested and distracted… And I do, I love it when customers come here to my site, my little corner of the cyber world, and digest the words I’ve thrown out … SO many flashbacks from a life in tattooing, the thread could spin from any of a number of years, of time and space and sphere of influence… California, Amsterdam,  practically anywhere in Texas… Hardy, Corbin, I was always fascinated with SF… although as a young punk I longed for Berkeley, the people’s park, telegraph avenue, copies of cometbus in used bookstores, modern primitives I happened across in one I visited… in Oakland as a young hitch hiker I walked by the field the Raiders played at… it was off season… we sat outside the stadium on benches and bummed around, homesick… but for where? For what? We still didn’t know, we were searching… The next day we went to the trainyard and lay in wait by the tracks, eating wild blackberries… Already I had these little tattoos, little homemade marks of home, of homeboys, of truth, at least to me… We all wore them, our little gang, the girls and the guys alike. It was our time . we were eighteen, nineteen years old. Revolution was at the tip of our fingers. We looked each other in the eye as we talked. We sent out mail in decorated envelopes with stamps we soaked in alcohol to remove the postmark… We met friends out on the highway, in tiny clubs in huge cities or out at the Grand Canyon… Looking back it was true freedom… And I still believe it is true freedom we are chasing, in getting these tattoos…