By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: Jan. 28, 2012
The tattoo on Jack Cutler’s right arm pricks him everytime he looks at it. A faded red rose and just below it a name that once put roses in his cheeks.
Rosealyn.
Now, it’s a thorn in his heart that makes him grit his teeth every time he sees it.
She is long gone from his heart, but stays etched, seemingly forever, on his right arm.
“I’m aware of it every day. It’s one thing I don’t like to think about,” Cutler says.
“I just want it to go away.”
When he got the tattoo in 1999, he had no idea the rose on his arm would become a thorn in his heart.
He was in high spirits and drunk on love when he walked into a tattoo artist’s shop in Vancouver.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, shaking his head at the memory.
Even though he has it tattooed for the past 13 years, the rose has stung more in the past one year.
Cutler married last year, and although his wife is ‘cool’ with the tattoo, it’s taken a while for her to get there.
“I remember looking at it and saying, whaattt?” Marilyn said, her face a picture of horror, as she recalled that moment.
Seeing that first impression reappear, Cutler quickly interceded.
“Well, she knew I regretted it,” he says, smiling.
Now, both plan to get new tattoos, although Cutler would first try to get the rose repainted blue.
He hopes the artist can extend the stem over her name, burying Rosealyn under a canopy of leaves.
It will be painful to remove it, Cutler says, but the pain would be far less than the agony of seeing her name every morning.
Many Cutlers walk every year into Phil Boyd’s Twilight Tatto Shop on Second Ave. with one request.
They want to bury the past engraved on their body.
Covering a tattoo that has light colours is fairly easy, but if it’s too dark, he suggests they undergo removal by laser, a costly and a painful operation, Boyd says.
When people walk in asking to get someone’s name on their body, Boyd gives them a gentle warning.
“I tell them, get your mom’s name. You will never regret it,” he said, laughing.
Boyd has names of both his father and mother tattooed on his legs, two Japanese characters that say, “I miss you, dad and mom.”
Experience tells him people who want to tattoo the name of their boyfriend or girlfriend often have problems in their relationship.
“It’s like they are saying, ‘see how much I love you, now don’t leave me’,” he says.
Boyd has been running the downtown tattoo shop for over 14 years now, and business has remained steady over these years.
Tattoos, once the preserve of growling gangsters, have crossed over to mainstream culture.
Celebrities such as Angelina Jolie have only help burnished their charm. That butterfly effect has fluttered around Twilight Tattoo also.
“All kinds of people come in. I got ladies from the bank, the lawyer’s wife and the people from the church,” Boyd says.
He might see another visitor soon, a man with a rose on his right arm.
