I Got a Mystery Tattoo From Scott Campbell

This past Saturday morning, I got a tattoo from the artist Scott Campbell of Saved Tattoo. Thirty-six hours later, on Sunday night, we met face-to-face for the first time.

We were at a dinner to celebrate the conclusion of his four-day marathon tattooing project, “Whole Glory,” and we were halfway through an interview about the project before he realized I was one of its participants. “Oh, my god! You got — I didn’t even clock that!,” he exclaimed. “Can I see it? Do you like it?” Very much, I assured him. “I’m so glad. I’m so glad!” he said.

I was glad, too — and more than a little relieved. For the project, Campbell erected a white picket fence adorned with tattoo graffiti in the lobby gallery at Milk Studios, with an arm-size hole in the middle. (Hence the name.) He sat on one side, with all his equipment; participants in the project sat on the other. No words, notes or information were exchanged. Campbell inked 23 tattoos on people who didn’t see them until they were finished — and completely irreversible. I ended up with a sort of triangular thunderbird, with a tiny, lopsided heart next to it: my favorite part.

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My tattoo fits for me, for a whole host of reasons Campbell didn’t and still doesn’t know about. Which is, maybe, sort of the point. Campbell himself can’t totally explain it: “Not to take away from my being a psychic genius, but I think it has a similar flavor to when you read a horoscope and it’s spot on,” he said. “O.K., so did that horoscope just prophesize how your day unfolds, or was it sitting there waiting for you to read it?”

Which doesn’t mean the tattoos were undertaken randomly. “What was surprising is how much communication there actually is,” Campbell said. He had, he explained, planned a design for each of the tattoos he did — and ended up drawing something completely different for each one of us. “I’d sit there and I’d shave the arm, and I’d clean it off, and I’d be like, ‘It’s not right.’ Yours included,” he said. “Every single one, I changed my mind last minute. Who knows, maybe Malcolm Gladwell would say there are subtle, imperceptible clues I caught.”

Whatever vibes or juju passed silently through the hole in the wall, they worked. Campbell invited all the participants to the celebratory dinner at the end of the run, and it seemed to me that everyone entered the Smile convinced they’d lucked out. “Twenty people that I spoke to tonight, everyone thought that they got the perfect one,” said Eric Lagerberg, an architect who got a skull with a rose clenched in its teeth. (It’s perfect for him, but would have been a total mismatch for me.)

“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life,” saidNate Schlie, an intern at Lands’ End, who got the last tattoo of the project; Campbell finished it up just a few hours before dinner started, and it was still bandaged up when he met the rest of us. “I’m from Ohio. This is so new to me.”

“We’re bonded for life,” chimed in Steve Ali, a Columbia student who got a giant rose. Talk turned to what we’d been most scared we’d end up with. Someone mentioned the fornicating cartoon mice depicted on the picket fence. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be boobs,” Schlie said matter-of-factly.

Given the audience of curious passers-by and body-art hopefuls that filled Milk Studios all weekend, the pressure to offer a sufficiently excited reaction weighed on us, too. “One of the most stressful things is the, ‘I like the Christmas gift,’ when I don’t, look,” Lagerberg said. Thankfully, he didn’t have to employ it. Dinner was served, and wine flowed: rosé and a California red blend from Campbell’s own label, also called Saved. “I need to let you know that I totally feel the gravity of what you guys offered me,” he told the table. “I really, really appreciate it.”

Several people wanted to know: Is there any chance of our little club growing bigger? “I’ll do it again, for sure,” Campbell said. “I’m opening a studio in L.A. in the springtime, so maybe that will be the kickoff. Who knows, maybe it’ll just be a hole! Maybe my studio will just be a hole.”