Chris stepped out of Ajmer station into a throng of taxi drivers, all trying to get the tourists' attention. It wasn’t yet dawn. Chris's hotel owner had been insistent about finding the right driver, and Chris excused-me'd through the crowd, declining the offers for rides to Pushkar. Finally, someone asked if he was Chris.

"I am," he said.

"Follow the boy," he was told, and the lad took him to a taxi where two Swedish girls with huge backpacks were already waiting.

He took off his own pack, sat on it, and breathed. Chris was practised at arriving in a new town now. He wanted to drop his things at the hotel and find breakfast. The two girls introduced themselves, although he only caught Lara's name. She explained they were both students and asked what he did. He mumbled that he worked in an office because he was tired and didn't want the conversation that came from his real job.

For three years, he'd run a tattoo removal shop. He'd got into it because there was less competition – no more being undercut by cheap cowboys badly replicating flash. It felt like a defeat until he opened the shop, and discovered it was even more interesting than tattooing.

Whenever someone new came in, if it wasn't obvious, he'd try to guess where the design might be, what it would be. He knew better than to ask for the stories, but some customers offered them up as the ink was lasered, the molecules broken up to be reabsorbed by the immune system.

He had erased names, even a few memorial tattoos. He'd removed cartoons and art. The tattoos that seemed worthwhile as a young man, when you wanted to push the world away, but were less enjoyable when you'd come to rely on that the world. He'd removed beautifully crafted designs and felt like a barbarian. It was hard work for the client, more painful than getting the tattoo in this first place.

The woman had given her name as Ellie and arrived in long sleeves and a long skirt, looking like a corporate senior manager. He guessed she had a lot of designs, but the big question was what she wanted removed. In the treatment room she showed him a map on her lower forearm. Over several sessions he erased the design but remembered the names and looked them up online – Udaipur, Pushkar, Jaisalmer – and, seeing the photos, wanted to visit them himself. He had enough saved for an airline ticket and blocked out a couple of weeks in his calendar.

Sitting outside that taxi, tired from the overnight train, Chris wished he'd asked Ellie about the map, and why she'd paid for it to be removed. He wondered whether she had other maps, a whole atlas, maybe. Chris had removed so many tattoos – all those stick-and-pin swastikas – and had never considered copying a design until now. He wasn’t sure what Ellie might think if she knew.

Background

I’d imagined writing a much longer piece about a tattoo remover, and ended up doing a lot of research for it. None of that reading is apparent in this short piece. David Keenan once said ‘Research is an excuse for not inventing.’ While I like my pieces to be as accurate as possible, it’s all too easy to get caught up in research at the expense of actually writing.

I don’t have any tattoos and I find them fascinating. I can’t imagine being so committed to a piece of image or text that I would want to keep it for decades. I love the way people plan and cherish their tattoos, and some friends have amazing designs. It’s just not for me.

Self-Promotion

My friend Dan has just successfully completed a kickstarter for his book Nice Weather for Fish (as discussed last week). As part of the promotion, Dan and I recorded a short podcast where we spoke about role-playing games as literature and the joys of small publishing. You can find the episode here, along with links to follow the podcast for future episodes.

The pages for the podcast are incredibly plain. We put them up in a hurry, going from plan to publication in only a few days. Despite various corporations trying to ‘own’ podcasts, they seem to have survived as an open format. In the end, it’s just audio and a few files. If you know what to do, you can easily host one. Not every listener will want to figure out how to access it without Apple/Spotify, but any real podcasting app knows how to read the RSS files.

There’s a lot of sneering about podcasts, particularly how many of them emerged in the pandemic, and how many of them seem to be by men. But I like the fact that you can record and distribute a podcast easily. It’s a little glimmering of the punk/DIY spirit.

Recommendations

Certain ideas stick in my head and won’t leave. Among those is the work of artist Tehching Hsieh. I first encountered him on a wander through the Tate Modern gallery. There was a something called Time Clock Piece, produced over the course of a year. Every hour during that year, day and night, Hsieh punched a time-clock then took a photo of himself.

Of course, the work was Hsieh's experience, not the documentation of it, but those photos are harrowing. The thousands of photos of Hsieh seemed to ask me questions about what life means.

I read up on Hsieh's other work, and all of it had that same intensity. His early work, 1973’s Jump Piece involved jumping from a second floor window, resulting in him breaking both ankles. Between 1978 and 2000 that Hsiesh performed six year-long durational works. In 1981 he spent a year in New York without entering buildings or shelter. He spent a year tethered to another artist, Linda Montano.

Hsieh's works are plainly ridiculous. But there's something glorious about Hsieh completing these ridiculous challenges for no other reason than 'art'. They would be striking things if they appeared in a novel - and you could imagine them in something by Paul Auster or Don Delillo. The fact they actually happened feels incredible.

After his sixth major durational piece, Hsieh retired, but he’s now finally receiving the acclaim he deserves as an important artist. MIT Press have released a book on his work and there have been some good interviews such as this New York Times piece (archive link).