When I was a teen, I used to play tennis. All tennis courts, indoor and outdoor, have
an artificial clay surface. I have a profound attachment to objects that only have a single
purpose, those that were created for one unique task; in the world of tennis, there
is one that has always fascinated me. Before each game, you can use a special broom
on two wheels and whose brush is exactly the same size as the lines of the court.
Every now and then, I would stay and watch a match only to be able to use the
magnificent thing, but above all, I loved – still love – watching someone do it, to see the
white lines reappear on the ground; there were shapes beneath the red dust, there
is surprise, like a kind of preview.

She is lying on her stomach, asleep. I have pulled back the sheets and in the
darkness – thanks to my mobile phone (that I regularly reopen to light up the
screen) – a kind of tropical flower appears. It’s base sprouts somewhere between her
hip and her right cheek, then the drawing develops vertically along her lumbar
vertebra, always slightly on the right flank, before ending under her shoulder blade.
The  tattoo, compared to the size of her body is quite substantial. Without really
believing it, I start looking for starting point, the place where the blade first cut into
the skin. After having going back and forth a few times, I realize that beyond the
drawing itself, it is the way I am looking at it that keeps me going. If I were using a
candle, it would definitely not be the same. Everything convinces me that this
moment matches the erotico-kitch representations that movies or television have
brought me: the swinging glow of the flame would draw keen shadows, emphasizing
her curves and the texture of her skin would cradle the ink where it is not; in the
end I would be looking at her and not at the drawing. The white light of my phone
attens everything out; in a clinical manner, it puts me face to face with the grooves:
for an instant it is as if she were dead.

During the Second World War, the wife of the Buchenwald concentration camp’s director,
Isle Koch, would ride through the squares and alleys of the camp, looking at the
different tattoos prisoners had. When she found one she liked, she would have it
removed when the prisoner’s died, which – in general – would not happen long
after her discovery, and she would keep it in a jar filled with a pharmaceutical solution.
When the camp was liberated, she had a collection of 142 tattoos.

Does a tattoo have the same value on a dead body than on someone alive? I mean a
human having had the capacity to decide (or even deserve, depending on the context)to have it engraved into his own body.

Sitting on the floor, under the window, I smoke a cigarette while I look at the bed, she
is on it (I can barely make her out). I think of the tattooist’s work, and of all the
sessions necessary to achieve such a thing. What does one think about when one is
tattooing? The drawing, without the person?
Is the concentration such that, for the tattooist and for the person being tattooed, the very idea of life disappears and only the concept of framework remains?…

Text : Michael Facchin