“I always let them pick the music so that they’re comfortable,” Sid Foy said. “I gave one to my sister once and she put on, like, a nature documentary. It was weird.”
Foy gives stick-and-poke tattoos. The technique is the same one used to give people prison tats. Most of the time, the tattoos she gives are simple. Charm her enough with liquor or money and she’ll do something more difficult.
“But I won’t tattoo someone I don’t like,” she says.
Her stick-and-pokes are given with one needle, one thread and a lot of sterilization. Foy boils and burns the needle before soaking it in rubbing alcohol.
I encountered her work before I ever met her. I walked into my living room one morning to find my roommate desperately hungover, unable to keep his head up.
“I got a tattoo last night,” he mumbled through his cigarette. Three of the guys had convinced Foy to give them upside-down crosses. One later reworked his at a real tattoo place so that it featured a giant heart and the word “Mom.”
“I can’t see how she can be mad now,” he told me.
Proper care of your new tattoo requires unscented hand-soap and lotion of the same name, but none of the cross-boys bothered with that. Still, only one of them went south, and that’s because buddy let me put a cigarette out on it during a real blackout of a night. It got infected, swelled and scarred. No hard feelings, though.
“Tattoo places are too sterile,” Foy laughs. “Well, of course they’re sterile, they’re supposed to be, but you know what I mean. They’re impersonal. It’s like a doctor’s office.”
Her least favourite question is, “What does it mean?”
“I love the process of stick-and-poke,” she smiles and pauses. “It’s about the memory. It doesn’t have to mean more than that.”
She’s right. The tattoo I got from Foy derives its meaning entirely from the time I got it. Three days of insanity with two phenomenal people, drooling in cafe corners and spitting on the awful maps in Little Italy. I got it the night after a punk show. On that night, I was in my first real mosh-pit and did my first stage-dive all while wearing a suit. I received the tattoo on the floor of a dirty Montreal hotel where we’d spent the afternoon watching the cops question a group of Hasidic Jews about a mystery liquid in a red Solo cup. All of this was to a soundtrack of Of Montreal and Mother Mother.
The next night at a hostel bar, someone asked me what my tattoo meant. Foy and I shared grins, as if we were both in on a really good secret.
