Here’s my throat, a picture of it after a five-hour sitting with tattoo artist William Bracey of Downtown Tattoos in New Orleans LA in my home state… pardon the redness. I wanted to get a military, American traditional art piece on my throat to represent my journey!
I had been working at the oil refinery doing a turnaround in Belle Chase, “aka Hell on earth,” Louisiana and my cousin Chris Vining, a US Army National Guard vet of operation Iraqi Freedom, wanted to go and get tattooed with me so we both went!
My cousin Chris who was wounded in an IED incident in Iraq wanted to do something special with me because we are close family so we decided on this session.
This tattoo represents me and who I am loving a relentless life pushing through anything. At this time in my life, I had been a dark spot so I had to rebuild my whole life after losing everything because of recently losing an opportunity with music.
I had just moved to New Orleans to work in the grueling world of the oil refinery biz. I was building scaffoldings for Safeway and tower jumping, building structural platforms 300 feet in the air some days… so I could save money to go back to Los Angeles and to fund the band I had been developing in the southern rock blues genre.
This tattoo is that whole experience in an art piece the battleship represents strength and pushing through the storms of life, living for what matters family and well being.
My cousin Chris had been going through multiple surgeries to get his life back so it was a beautiful experience to get tattooed with my brother in arms. To me, tattoos are a representation of who I am where I’ve been, the only vessel in which we can understand the pain of the roads traveled are the individuals walking those roads.
Art is my outlet and tattoos to me are a sacred representation of where we have been as well as where we can go if we hold on.
gracirocks.com! 