Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Tattooed Poets Project: Stephen Roger Powers


Today's tattooed poet is Stephen Roger Powers  , who is sharing this tattoo of an iconic figure from the music industry:

Photo by James Morton

Stephen explains:

I've been a Dolly Parton   fan since my family took a road trip to Tennessee in 1987.  We stopped at Dollywood  , and I fell in love.  When I was in college I wanted a Dolly tattoo, but I never went through with getting one.  I kept the thought of it in the back of my mind for years, and when I started writing poems about Dolly and my frequent trips to Dollywood to see her perform benefit concerts for the Dollywood Foundation  , the idea slowly crept forward again.  Then my book of Dolly poems came out in 2009, and I knew it would soon be time.  One day last year my friend Liz, who has 14 tattoos herself, told me to stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, and just do it.  Sounded reasonable to me.  So Liz drove me to Liberty Tattoo   in Atlanta and introduced me to Michael "Shack" Shackelford  , the artist who'd done most of hers.  Shack drew up a stylized, cartoonized version of Dolly from the cover of her 1977 album Here You Come Again, taking some creative license by adding pokey nipples, which was fine with me.

Liz kept saying she wasn't going to let me back out of it now that she'd driven me there and gotten pulled over for an illegal u-turn on the way, so Shack sat me down, we got started, and today I have Dolly Parton inked on my forearm.  While the tattoo is based on a full body shot of Dolly and it runs down my entire right forearm from elbow to wrist, the photo here is a close-up of just her face and torso, which I think makes Shack's details easier to see.
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