Inked

Cade Vanderkamp
english 1001-110
october 16, 2007

Christine Ericson or “Trinity,” as most people know her is a young tattoo artist in Larose, Louisiana. When most people hear about Trinity’s work, they picture a big, tall man with tattooed sleeves going down his arms and sitting on top of a Harley. A lot of people also think that being a tattoo artist is an easy job and that the women cannot hang with the men.
All these ideas will soon change.
When I was on my way to meet Trinity, I assumed like most I was going to be talking to a big guy with lots of tattoos and a Harley, considering I heard Trinity road Harleys. I pulled up to the shop pulled the keys off my bike and walked in. When I walked in I noticed that the only person in the shop was a young girl, only nineteen or twenty, sitting behind the counter. I walked over asking her if this is the shop that Trinity worked at. She looked at me with a smile, “sure is what can I do for you.” Then it hit me, like a ton of bricks, she is Trinity. Wow, I thought I was coming here to interview a guy and here I am and he is a beautiful girl. As I stood there for a moment in shock, she got up and walked out from behind the counter, it was then I saw just how beautiful she was standing 5’7” with long brown hair. “So let me guess,” she said sarcastically, “you thought I was a guy with lots of tattoos and a Harley.” “I get that a lot,” she said with a smile. She was comfortable dressed in a black tank top and a blue jean skirt with a single Harley-Davidson tribal tattoo on her lower back. She was very sweet and very outgoing. When I asked her about interviewing her for a report she said, “of course you can, I’d love to help.”
Trinity was born and raised in Larose, Louisiana. From a young age she loved to watch her father, David, tattoo his clients. She often longed to learn the art, but her father always said it wasn’t a place for a girl. He tried for years to get her older brother Zack to pick up the needle, but he always refused to saying, “it’s not for me dad it never will be.” When Trinity was twelve her father realized that Zack was not going to ever become an artist, and he started to teach Trinity. After years of hard work studying her father’s movements with the gun and needle, she started to develop her own unique style. Once she developed this style she started to really get into tattooing people. She started out slow working on small tribal bands and doing touch up work, but it wasn’t before long that she was tattooing portraits and her own custom designed tribal art work. By age seventeen she had just finished high school at Central Lafourche High School, and was at the top of her game. Her fast track however was about to hit a road block.
Shortly after her graduation her father was involved in a car accident and died. Trinity was devastated and couldn’t even look at the shop or a tattoo. Zack told Trinity she could have the shop, the house, and their dads Harley-Davidson, after telling her this he loaded up his truck and took off to Florida. This did not help Trinity at all. It took two months for her just to walk back into the shop. Once she was able to handle the pain of her father’s death she started tattooing again.
Business was slow and getting even slower with the addition of another shop opening up while she was grieving. The other shop had pulled a lot of her father’s customers away from her, and others thought that a girl could not compete with a man when it came to tattooing. For months she barely scraped by and often thought of selling the shop but she could not sell it. The shop was her father’s dream and part of that dream was to pass it on to her, so no matter how hard things were she could not bring herself to sell the shop.
One afternoon she was just about to close up shop when one of her father’s old friends showed up. He looked at her and saw that she was devastated that the shop was failing. He told her she could turn it around. She looked at him and asked how because she had no customers and in the tattoo business customers are your advertisement agency as well as your income. He looked around the shop for a minute and saw a drawing, “what is this,” he asked. She looked over at him, “that it’s just a drawing I was working on.” With a smile he said, “so stick it,” and took off his shirt and laid across the table. She looked at him confused for a minute, then said, “Ok,” and got everything she was going to need. She carefully set everything she would need in place and prepared to tattoo her creation onto his back. This was going to be difficult though because a tattoo this intricate and this big would have to be done freehanded. She worked for five hours that night and finished all of the outlining. Two week passed and the old man came in again and asked if she was ready to finish. After four and a half hours of work her master piece was done. He stood up and looked into the mirror at his back and saw a perfect tattoo of an eagle soaring over a siloughette of a Harley with an American flag waving behind it. After he left that night and for weeks to come he showed everyone he knew his new tattoo and who the artist was.
The business started coming back slowly a few here a few there, but it was still hard to keep up with the other shops. A few months after the old man left the shop; a few bikers came into the shop and asked her if she was the girl who does the custom tattoo art. Before they left she had three appointments for custom tattoos with the promise of more to come. A few weeks later the bikers tattoo were complete and suddenly business started booming, turns out that those bikers where member of the Red Nights and Iron Worriors, two large motorcycle clubs. They showed their clubs their new tattoos and told them who the artist was and embers of their clubs started to go to Trinity for their tattoos. Since then she has had a thriving and competitive tattoo shop.
Not only is Trinity’s job trying at times, but also nerve racking. She is an artist who only has one shot at every masterpiece; there is no erasing, no back space button, and no undoing anything in ink. She is a woman running at the top of her game in an occupation dominated by men, and yet she preservers and raises above all the competition. Trinity is one tattoo artist who has changed my mind about the field she is in.