WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IF I SAID I WANT TO BE A TATTOO ARTIST?

Let me tell you a story.

 I’ve been broke lately, and its funny how when you’re broke is when suddenly, all these things to do come up. All of a sudden it’s pizza week or black Friday or one of your favourite artists has come to Kenya.

All of a sudden that girl you’ve been trying to convince has said yes to a date. And she says she’s only free that week.

So as luck would have it, a chance came up to see one of my all time favourite people in writing. You know those people you’ve always wanted to meet, the kind that you see and your brain turns to mush and you try to contain your inner fan-girl(boy)? Yeah those ones. And I’m a practical girl. And I know there’s not going to be another chance to just go and meet your hero for 100bob. This is the stuff of dreams. So I take my last 100 and drag myself to the hotel he was doing the session in.

I wait excitedly (in the much longer line than I thought) my turn comes and pay the fee. I get in and long story short, I stood at the back of a conference room on the second floor of a hotel, wondering what I did to deserve this. In front of me was him, talking about how he came to be where he was. And for the life of me, I could not pay attention to a single word he was saying. I was dying of heat and stuffiness. The room had not a window in sight and was filled with about a hundred people.

 The anticipation and excitement in the air only seemed to reduce my capacity to breathe, and eventually I had to leave to save my life. After like 10 minutes. It was like getting home and finding out your least favourite relative is staying for a few days.

So my friend and I (did I mention I brought a friend with me?) went to go get her nose pierced. If you can’t meet Jackson Biko you might as well get a nose piercing. Makes perfect sense, right? I ask about a million questions to the guy who owns the tattoo and piercings shop. Did he always go like “I want to be a tattoo artist” when the rest of us said we wanted to be doctors and engineers when we grew up?

He tells me his story, encourages me to be a tattoo artist myself after seeing my drawings, and tells me I could go train under him if I wanted. He  gives me a ton of life advice then asks us to pray with him because he’s closing shop for the day. I suppose its something he always does. And my brain is in shock because who’d have thought I’d be holding hands with a tattoo artist and his wife praying right after leaving a stuffy room filled with writing enthusiasts like myself.

We went for ice-cream after, for me to dull the pain of not getting to hear Biko’s stories in person and for my friend to dull the pain of her piercing.

Now, I’ve been collecting stories while I was away, thank you guys for the emails and texts you’ve been sending. I am alive and well, I can’t wait to share those stories with you guys... See you Wednesday, yeah? 

Photo and Art by Phil Kere