ANY MAN WHO'S EVER BEEN IN the restroom of an Atlanta restaurant or gay bar and stolen a brief, innocent glance at the penis of Ed “Johnson,” was probably caught in the act.
“You can always tell who’s peeking,” says Johnson, who asked that his real last name not be used because he is not out to family members. “It’s fun, if they do get a peek, to watch their reaction.”
Johnson, 53, used to have insecurities about people seeing his penis, and during the years that he dated women, “a lot of girls wouldn’t touch it.” Throughout childhood Johnson wondered why his penis was heavily scarred, and he learned during a 1983 visit to a urologist that it was caused by his circumcision at birth.
Years later, Johnson looked into getting laser treatment to remove the scars, but skin experts recommended he research cosmetic tattooing.
Last October, after one tattoo artist had already refused to work on his penis, Johnson was walking through East Point and passed Southside Tattoo.
“I figured, I’m just going to get up the nerve and ask,” he recalls. Three tattoo artists turned Johnson down before one agreed to draw a red, orange and yellow flame on the top side of his penis shaft.
“He said it was going to hurt like hell, and it did,” says Johnson, who adds that the artist put up a screen for privacy.
“Everybody out there was listening for me to come across the top of that screen,” Johnson says.
The 45-minute procedure helped erase a lifetime of aesthetic discomfort for Johnson, and has even made urinating entertaining.
“It’s certainly a bit more amusing to look at,” Johnson says. “And in a clothing-optional environment, it certainly gets a lot of attention.”
JOHNSON ISN’T THE ONLY GAY metro Atlantan who has who has permanently inked a private area of his body. For artistic rather than medical purposes, Denise Moss traveled to Canada earlier this year to get a tattoo on an area she describes as her “left ovary.”
Moss and her partner of 20 years were married in Vancouver in July 2007, and the couple returned to Canada in April for Moss to get tattooed by Justina Kervel, a famed tattoo artist who appeared on Season 3 of “The ‘L’ Word” giving Shane and Carmen matching tattoos.
Moss was prepared for the tattoo to be painful, but she says Kervel’s hands were like silk as she inked a smoky image of the Vancouver beach monument where Moss and her partner were married.
“I almost fell asleep,” Moss says of Kervel’s delicate touch. Moss already had a previous tattoo, but she says, “This one means a whole lot more to me.
“It’s more like a tribute for my partner,” she says.
Tattoos are a popular way to pay homage to loved ones. Jerone King didn’t really consider himself to be the tattoo type of guy, until he lost his brother and best friend to AIDS and decided to memorialize them by getting the red AIDS ribbon on both of his calves.
“I knew eventually someone would ask me about it, and it would remind me of them,” says King, 40. “The owner did it for free because he said it was the first time anybody had done one of those.”
“I thought that was going to be it, but it started getting addicting.”
King next got the Human Rights Campaign’s equality logo tattooed on his right chest, then embarked on a much larger art piece honoring his family. The tattoo covers both sides of King’s torso and incorporates a tribute to his grandparents’ Cherokee heritage, the crucifix from his mother’s grave, and the words “mother, love, hurts” written in Korean.
Jerone King (Photo by Bo Shell)
The piece took about five years to complete, but King doesn’t get to show it off as much as he used to. King also got a tattoo of a tiger across his abdomen, which is the reason he usually keeps his shirt on.
“When I moved here, I was walking through Piedmont Park, and someone complimented me on my tattoo, and he said, ‘I’ve seen that before,’” King recalls.
It turns out a gay porn star has an identical tiger, and after a few more instances of mistaken identity, King says, “I’ve been kind of keeping my shirt on ever since.”
Dindi Doward’s fascination with tattoos began when she would color all over her Barbie dolls. As an adult, Doward combined her love of ink and beautiful ladies by getting three tattoos of women, including a large pin-up doll on her shoulder.
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