When writing a book leaves a (literal) mark on its author

It is a truth too seldom acknowledged that books mark their authors for life. Authors, of course, mark the completion of their books: a party, a bauble, for the lucky few, a check. Yet the wages of a book go deeper than royalties or celebration. So it was that on a Saturday morning last year, just shy of my 54th birthday, I found myself at a trendy tattoo parlour on the Lower East Side, waiting for my artist to arrive. The plan: She would ink onto my forearm a detail from a painting by the Boston-born artist John Singleton Copley, whose biography I had recently written. I spent the better part of a decade in the close company of that fascinating, vexing man, dead some 200 years yet far more alive to me than most of my neighbours. Now he and I were both moving on. A remembrance seemed in order. “A life should leave/deep tracks,” as the poet Kay Ryan writes.

My older son, the kind of teenage faculty brat who dreams in rap and ink, had hatched the plan when I submitted the manuscript. “You should totally get a tattoo,” he said, desperate for one himself. Over the years, he had travelled the stations of Copley’s cross with me. He knew the artist’s work well, and his mother better. “I’ll find the artist,” he said. He did: a remarkable talent with nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram. Her work was astonishing, as minutely detailed as any Copley, with a feminine, folkloric twist. But she plied her craft in Turkey. This, I pointed out, was an obstacle. “Nah. She’s coming to New York,” he answered, half dare. “Have you written her yet?” he asked, about as often as I told him to clean his room.

Eventually I wrote, explaining the conceit, a middle-aged folly. Her assistant asked for pictures of the painting, and of the canvas — my aging forearm. Calendars were aligned, a deposit made, instructions sent: Arrive early, no alcohol. Expect to spend three or four hours in the chair.

The artist and her assistant pulled up to the shop in a black Escalade. The place was spotless, all black leather and mirrors, and throbbing with a soundtrack that ranged from Barry White to Migos. The customers came from many nations but only one generation: an inky pan-ethnic youthquake. The only other person within spitting distance of my age was the father of two French-speaking girls — sisters, it seemed — whose design would celebrate their lifelong bond. Under 18, they required his consent. The man at the desk took my ID, too: a universal policy, he said, with a glance at my gray mane.

The artist, a tiny, striking woman of not more than 30, sported a gorgeous head of gray, too, hers artfully dyed, with undertones of lavender, in a manner that Copley would have recognised. When he got to England, in 1774, the most fashionable young women wore their hair powdered gray and piled atop their heads in billowing waves. 

He quickly incorporated the modish look into his best London portraits, ethereal things full of motion and light, an ocean away from the sharply etched lines of his New England work.

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