Benjamin Franklin

Growing up in Philadelphia, I always hated Benjamin Franklin. We learned about him in school all the time, every historical plaque had something to do with him... Frequently I remember thinking, "Man, Benjamin Franklin, give someone else a chance to do something for once."

I moved back to Philadelphia during the tricentennary of Benjamin Franklin's birth and suddenly I was working on all of these Franklin exhibits. My brothers mocked me for working on projects about someone I complained about, and I was somewhat irate to be spending so much time adding to Benjamin Franklin's importance.

That's when I realized I didn't hate Benjamin Franklin. I was jealous of Benjamin Franklin. Alll of the projects he worked on were because he was a curious, interested, energetic person with lots of ideas. After that realization I knew that I really just wanted to be Benjamin Franklin.

To show my love for Philly and changing attitudes about a pretty rad dude, I got this tattoo. One of my favorite things about it is when visitors are trying to identify me to other museum staff and they say, "I talked to someone last week, she was small with curly hair, and had a tattoo on her arm of someone, Isaac Newton or maybe Ben Franklin?"

Dana Scholss
OMSI



Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

Mississippi Animals

I love to teach people about nature, especially in our current climate of outdoor educational deficit. Kids and adults don't seen to get outside much anymore, since we're glued to our screens. So I've been doing nature-related classes for years, in the hope that one time, just one kid (or adult) will get inspired enough to be interested in the living world around us. One of the classes I teach is about identifying animal tracks, a class I myself had taken about 12 years ago. I had been wanting another small tattoo, similar to the three tracks I already had under my watchband, but I also realized that the detail was limited because of the size.

This led into looking at making them a little larger, which led to looking for other natural history images--in particular, an owl, which is a symbol on another business I own, Night Bird Design. While searching for clean, clear images of owls, I found an artist on-line at (of all things) a clip art web site, who had drawn not only an owl, but also a bunch of other animals in a style I loved, sort of flowing, but not tribal. I bought all the images he had of Mississippi animals and started trying to put them together in a design pattern that I liked. Some images worked better than others, so eventually I whittled it down to 13 (heron, bear, snake, wildcat, fox, coyote, armadillo, owl, deer, alligator, otter, raccoon, and skunk). Another consideration was the final size of the work, as I'm a fairly small person, and had to rule out any place that would be seen while wearing a bathing suit, as my parents STILL don't know I have tattoos (I'm 48).

Finally, I saved enough money, and it was my birthday, so I went to a tattoo parlor about an hour away. I had been there before to talk to one of the owners, and examine the pictures of their work (and assess the cleanliness and professionalism of the shop), and had been duly impressed.

The tattoo artist's name is Adam at the Classic Tattoo Studio in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He did an excellent job, and I'm so pleased, I MAY even show it to my mom...but not my dad, quite yet.

Robin Person
Branch Director
Historic Jefferson College
www.historicjeffersoncollege.com


Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

Aim To Please

I've worked primarily in museums and libraries for over 17 years. I have a handful of tattoos, none of which were conceived with any reference to museums or library science. However, there's one tattoo that I got the summer I became a museum person, which speaks a lot to why I'm still a museum/library person.

I got my guns from the talented Mike Stobbe at Avalon PB in the summer of 1998. I was home from college for the summer and working as an intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the mornings, while bar tending at my uncle's bar in the afternoons. I was straddling between a La Jolla fine art institution and Mission Beach happy hours; college-life and hometown; living with parents and trying to be an adult. I was trying be a lot of things and thought the "aim to please" was a true sentiment to the in-between sort of place where I could make everything work.

Sixteen years later "aim to please" now reminds me why I enjoy working for museums and libraries. We are a service industry. We connect people to knowledge, to history, and to culture. We tell stories and invite stories, encourage conversation, and promote traditional and visual literacy. It doesn't make sense to me if it isn't benefitting an end user, an audience.

Why guns? Besides the play on words, the western iconography identified me with the rockabilly crowd I was involved with at the time. Also, while I am definitely not a guns rights advocate, I still appreciate a gun as an object of mechanic beauty.

Kara West
Library Arts and Culture Exhibition Manager
San Diego Public Library


Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

Blue Feather

After finding a brilliant blue feather on a hike and reading how the color comes from external light and not from the diet of the bird, I decided that my first tattoo would be a blue feather. On the day I had been in Seattle one year, my daughter and I celebrated the pain and excitement of moving here with the pain, in her words — "of course its going to hurt!"— and excitement of a tattoo. Now the image reminds me of 'lightness', of hiking in the NW and of stepping outside my comfort zone once in awhile.

Kris Morrissey, PhD

Director, Museology Graduate Program

University of Washington

Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

Dippy

Though I was a late-comer to museum visiting, as soon as I was truly exposed to world-class museums in college, namely the Carnegie system in Pittsburgh, my love of them took root inside me and has only grown exponentially since. One may think that working at a museum might change that feeling, but for me, it never did. Almost as soon as I got my first museum job, I wanted a museum tattoo. I waffled on designs, and never really committed until I was completing my graduate degree in museum studies. By this time, museums were such a part of my identity, it felt necessary to wear a symbol of that love on my skin.

I still didn’t have my design though, and it began to feel important that the tattoo to represent not just museums generally, but the Pittsburgh museums of which I am so fond. I considered a number of different ideas (a Warhol-ian shoe, for instance), but nothing felt perfect---until I thought about Diplodocus carnegii!  Dippy was the first dinosaur in Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is named for Andrew Carnegie, and casts of the Pittsburgh Dippy now sit in 10 locations throughout the world. Diplodocus has come to be an important icon at the museum, but also for Pittsburgh itself. It was decided.

On February 1, I went to Unique Ink in Greensburg, PA, with Dippy design in hand and my mom in tow (she also got a tattoo at the same time to make it more special. My Dippy is not scientifically accurate (which I know because museum work gives me easy access to world-renown paleontologists, a daily privilege I don’t take lightly), but its mine. And now I wear my heart on my sleeve….er, Diplodocus on my wrist….and proudly show the world that I’m a museum person through and through.

I should also note that my first tattoo, a butterfly on my hip which was acquired weeks after my 18^th birthday in an act of teenage rebellion, years later would also come to have deeper museum meaning. For my Master’s thesis project, I observed visitors and recorded their conversations at a display of 30 drawers pulled from the butterfly collection. Now, I can’t see my butterfly tattoo without thinking fondly of that project or of my own museum experiences that I hold so dear.

Leigh M. Kish
Interim Director of Marketing
Carnegie Museum of Natural History



Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

Old Fashioned Microphone

There’s a sort of mental snapshot from a time in my life that I remember so fondly I often think of it in my most difficult moments. It's of an abused and familiar  microphone with a dirty yellow windscreen, on an unremarkable stand, at the front of a stage, at night, under blinding lights, outside, in front of a crowd of 700 people whose faces I can’t quite see out in the darkness.

A microphone waiting for someone to speak into it is pure potential. And the fact that is often tied to the presence of a microphone, that people would give you their complete attention, is something too valuable to describe.

I’ve been in a few bad bands (always as a singer because I've been too lazy to commit to any instrument yet) and absolutely love making an idiot of myself singing karaoke ("Total Eclipse of the Heart" is my go-to opener). I’m addicted to being in front of people. All the singing is all well and good, but what I care about even more is communicating, I’m obsessed with it. I love to listen to the way masters of the art take nebulous, complex ideas and gracefully capture them with words. A true genius can present ideas so perfectly that you’ll think you knew them all along but just hadn’t defined them yet.  I want (but don’t really expect) to be that genius. I could listen to my favorite speakers do their thing for hours on end.

Wanting to communicate as badly as I do, I often speak about what I care about most: my faith, the Gospel of Christ. It is the thing that I filter every little bit of my life through and I’m totally crazy about studying scripture carefully and sharing the things that excite me about it with others. I worked for three years as a teaching pastor in New Mexico and I often preach at my current church. I relish every opportunity.

My tattoo is of an old fashioned microphone, specifically a Shure 55SH, a model that's been in production for more than 70 years. I chose this specific microphone for two reasons. First, because it’s built as a vocal mic, and has a reputation for capturing voices uniquely well (I’ve had a few professional singers see my tattoo and tell me how much they love this particular model). Second, much more superficially, I think it looks cool. It’s just a big block of steel, the actual mic is really stout and heavy. I have it on my left forearm because the left side of the body is traditionally the creative side. Also, when I do speak with a handheld mic I almost always hold it in my left hand to leave my right free to gesture crazily and fumble at the water bottle.  

The microphone isn’t  my first tattoo, but it is my first plainly visible one. People ask me about it all the time, and I love that. It gives me a chance to talk about my faith and my life. I’ve got good friends today who I met because they asked me about my tattoo.

I have a personal rule that I have to have a single tattoo idea, unchanged,  for two years before I’m allowed to get it. I’ve been holding on to a way to fill my right forearm for about two-and-a-half. With any luck I’ll post again soon.

Brandon Hutchinson
Traveling Exhibitions Manager
San Diego Natural History Museum



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Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

My favorite book growing up was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. What story possesses more intrigue, more suspense, more mystery, or more magic than the coming-of-age tale of Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, siblings who escape the doldrums of their suburban childhood to live within the walls of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art? They forage for coins from the fountain so they can eat meals at a neighboring automat; they sleep in the antique beds of French royalty; they uncover the truth about an original Michelangelo statue. Most of all, they learn deep truths about themselves.

Twenty-odd years later I rediscovered my love for this book. I found it on a bookshelf in my childhood home in 2007, just after taking a job at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I read it and re-read it (and re-read it again).

I fell deeply in love with my museum work and knew I wanted to have a From the Mixed-Up Files tattoo. I sketched it out and had it done at Th-Ink Tank Tattoo in Denver. The final version on my skin is very close to the sketch I drew, though done by a master's hand. The intricacy and precision of the lines absolutely astounds me.

I love the story of my tattoo and the story of Claudia and Jamie. Thanks for the opportunity to share it with my museum friends and colleagues here.

Kate Tinworth
www.exposeyourmuseum.com




Want to share your own story and tattoo?
Email Beth: beth (at) redmond-jones (dot) com or Paul: info (at) orselli (dot) net.