Indelible Link
Lives Lost to Tragedy Linger In the Flesh of Those Left Behind

By DeNeen L. Brown
Sunday, August 31, 2008

Liquidity Jones dips the rotary needle in black ink and injects it between the second and third layer of Jimmy Robinson's skin. Robinson pushes back in a black chair and closes his eyes, sinking deep, deep in memories. The ink pulsing now inside him, his dead brother's face begins to appear.

"It feels good knowing I got somebody on my arm I can trust," Robinson says.

Liquidity Jones, whose real name is Kris Burnette-Bey, the owner of the Liquidity Jones Tattoo shop, has already washed Robinson's left arm with green soap. Rubbed Speed Stick along the skin. Pressed on a carbon stencil sketch of the dead brother onto Robinson's left arm, providing a template she will fill in with permanent black tattoo ink.

Robinson looks at his brother's picture: "The killing, I think it needs to stop. It's bad. We blacks are killing off each other. It's pathetic. Someone needs to do something. I know plenty of people who died from gunshots or whatever."

They found Robinson's brother in front of a store near New York Avenue NE in May. "The ambulance picked him up. He died seven days later."

Burnette-Bey disinfects her hands and pulls on black latex gloves. "I just want to keep him with me at all times," says Robinson, 38.

Now she is painting the lips. She wipes away the excess ink. Now she's tracing the right cheek. She wipes more excess ink. Now the nose. A constant song from the rotor buzzes for nearly an hour. Robinson winces at the stinging pain.

She smears Vaseline on his skin. Now the left eye. The eyebrow. Now the right eye. She stretches the skin and wipes away the ink.

"His face is on you now," she says quietly.

In D.C., where so many have been killed that not all of their stories make the evening news, portrait tattoos have become another way to memorialize the dead. Allow those who survive to acknowledge the epidemic of violence, allow them to carry the dead with them so that they can't forget. Permanently.

As the blood spills, so does the ink. More and more people are pushing open doors of tattoo shops throughout the city to get such portraits.

The catalogue of Liquidity Jones's work looks like a funeral program: a girl with silver hoop earrings and red lipstick, her hair cornrowed up. A young man in a blue track jacket, kneeling with his pit bull. A man with dreadlocks, chin length, and a square jaw -- now he lives on a girl's broad back, near the neckline, where she wears a thin gold chain.

The photos of the tattoos depicting those two men are side by side in the catalogue, supplied by the two young women who came into the shop together recently to get portrait tattoos of their dead boyfriends.

"Both boyfriends got shot at the same time somewhere on Naylor Road," says Burnette-Bey, a graphic and mural artist who opened her shop on Pennsylvania Avenue SE last November.

She came up with the shop's name herself. Liquidity is a kind of ink. Jones means a strong, compulsive craving. The name works. "Liquidity Jones is her alter ego," says her husband, Michael Bey.

She inked her first tattoos on some kids who worked at the McDonald's down the street. "Then after that," Bey says, "people just started coming in looking for Kris and her talent."

About 10 people a week come to her shop, often bringing with them photocopies of the dead. It's interesting how you can look at a photograph of a person and know that he or she is already dead, like their soul has already seeped out, the image fading even though it is clear.

"People are killed all the time," she says. "But you never hear about them. There is a lack of ritual in our society now. To me, tattooing is spiritual. It's a spiritual way to carry that person with you."

The rotary tattoo machine is still spinning. A constant wailing song.

* * *

Tattooing is an ancient art, and throughout history, different ethnic groups have marked their bodies with ink to celebrate life, death and to honor their gods.

"In Polynesia there is a tradition of taking the ashes of the departed and mixing them in with the ink," says Bob Baxter, editor in chief of Skin & Ink magazine, based in Portland, Ore. "Some artists I know have done that, have mixed cremation ashes with the ink. I'm not talking about two cups. I'm talking about enough in the ink so that it mixes with the ink. The ink is sterile anyway."

Zulu, owner of Zulu Tattoo in Los Angeles, says tattoos have become like lockets, those tiny trinkets of gold or silver hung from thin necklaces that held a portrait or a lock of hair of the dearly departed.

"They want a permanent picture they will never lose," says Zulu, who says he uses only one name. "That ends up being a tattoo."

Fela Sekou, 36, of Northeast Washington, got a tattoo portrait of his father, Lawrence Turner, who died of lung cancer. "His death was a very tragic and emotional time," Sekou says. "Getting a tattoo soothed the pain. It brought the love back. It was like a closure for me.

"I was a walking zombie for six months. I gave myself a year to mourn. It was like a rite of passage."

There's been an evolution in tattoo artistry. Now we find former fine artists sketching the lines of a portrait on a canvas of skin.

"In the last 3 1/2 years, you see a whole lot more portraits," Zulu says. "The point is you have to know how to draw. . . . If you want to have a picture of your mother tattooed on you, and someone walks up and says, 'That's a great picture of a Doberman pinscher,' it isn't good."

Tattoo portraits provide lucrative work for previously struggling artists. Locally, a portrait tattoo could run you from $85 to $200. "Cheap tattoos are cheap," a sign in Liquidity Jones says.

Zulu, who has tattooed Hollywood celebrities including Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera and Queen Latifah, demands a rate of $250 an hour, but his minimum fee is $1,000.

Skin is a unique canvas that allows no room for mistakes. "On canvas if the nose is crooked, you can repaint it," says Zulu, who studied fine art. "You don't have that option on the skin. . . . You need to study the Old Masters' work if you are going to do portraits. Nobody wants a portrait that looks like Picasso's work. They don't want three eyes and two mouths. They want da Vinci, Michelangelo."

Many portrait tattoo artists blend into their sessions philosophy and psychology and messages about life and death -- preaching to young people as the rotary machine whizzes, preaching that one must elevate oneself despite the code of the street.

Charles "Coco" Bayron, owner of Nu Flava Ink in Southeast Washington, says he tries to teach his clients that what they ink on their bodies should be meaningful. "Some people want 'Thug Life' on their stomach," Bayron says. "I don't do whatever on somebody if it is not art. A thug is not going to promote that he is a thug."

He refuses to do gang tattoos as well. "If somebody comes in and says, 'I want Young Gunner on me,' they say that's what I represent. I say, 'I don't do anything to empower a gang.' "

Also on the forbidden lists are memorial portraits of known neighborhood drug dealers. If a client brings in a photo of a younger person, "I ask them who is it. It has to be a relative. It can't be nobody like a homeboy from the neighborhood. I say no. You don't make those boys martyrs."

He says they need to learn about real martyrs: "A lot of kids I talk to around here don't even know who Martin Luther King is or Malcolm X. They really don't know."

Still, there are kids who have been made into martyrs. Stories are told about the 17-year-old girl known as Little Cindy who was shot, execution-style, in 2006. Police say Cynthia Gray pushed her 7-month-old godson under a parked car before a man walked over to her and shot her point-blank in the face, head and neck.

The baby wasn't hurt. Little Cindy's attempt to save the baby before she died has made her into an urban heroine.

"She put the baby under a car," says Tommy Thayer, a tattoo artist at a Silver Spring shop. "You'll see all kinds of people with her portrait."

* * *

The Liquidity Jones shop attracts an odd collection of young people, some seeking to be different, to resist the imperatives of conformity. Technicolor hair, piercings, tattoos.

Nicole Moss, 18, of Alexandria, brushes away her red hair as she explains how a black ink drawing of a man came to appear on her right calf. "He's a good friend of mine. His name was Todd. He was an inspiration. He had green hair," she says. "But he was on a path of destruction. He had been sober four or five years. Then he decided to do drugs again."

Her friend, Todd Robert Scovill, moved to California. Lived on the streets. "We kept in touch through e-mails," Moss says. "Then one day, I checked his MySpace page. A community group had put up an RIP. I called one of his friends and they said he had overdosed."

When she found out he died, "at first I was upset at him. I was angry at him. To this day, if I saw him, I would punch him in the face. How could he leave us?"

Still, the tattoo is a reminder of the good in him. "He was an amazing writer. People will ask questions, then I can tell his story. His story doesn't have to stop. It can keep going."

A story running through the strokes of ink, now running beneath Nicole's skin.

People push open the glass doors all afternoon, seeking adornment. A teenager with a red flower in her hair and a baby in her stroller wants her breast pierced. The baby sits there entertaining himself as his mother gets the piercing. And walks out happy.

Two young men come in, Donnell Jones and Terry Johnson, who have already pulled off their T-shirts, displaying sculpted ebony skin.

Who are you getting a portrait of?

"My friend," Jones says. "He got killed."

When?

"July 16."

Where?

"Sixteenth and F Northeast."

Jones and Johnson say they ran when they heard gunfire and thought nobody got hit, then came back to the corner to find their best friend, Robert Mallory, had been caught by the bullets. He was 19.

Jones has come in with two other men, each carrying their own photograph of a friend or relative who was murdered.

Curtis Cormack is saying he is getting a tattoo of his sister: "She was shot in the head in the house. I think it was a robbery. Her name was Terrian Felecia Cormack." Her sons came home from school and found her.

Dominique Watson is getting a tattoo of his cousin. "He was shot at 14th and C streets Southeast. Shot in the chest and behind the head. March 2006, I think.

"I've been wanting to get a tattoo. Get it on my arm. That way, he's going to always be with me."

You ask Jones why he's there. He stares ahead with cold eyes. "Same reason."

Johnson fills in: " 'Cause he was my friend. We grew up together. Went to school together."

"I mean," says Cormack, "it ain't much to explain, you know, your feelings when someone passes away. You want to always remember them. Sometimes you might not have a picture of them. But if you have a tattoo, you can say, 'Look, this is my sister.' It becomes a part of you. You go through everyday life. Somebody will say, 'Who is that right there?' And I let it be known."

He extends his arm, and his sister's face appears.