Marginal Cost

Artwork is on display on human canvas at music festival

0 Comments | Roanoke Times & World News, Jul 25, 2010 | by Neil Harvey

About 14,000 people are expected to pass through FloydFest 9 this weekend, a figure that gives the event a population roughly the size of Radford.

Scores will be entertained by acts such as Old Crow Medicine Show, Levon Helm and Grace Potter, but an avid observer could probably spend all four days of the music-and-arts festival sitting back and watching the crowd.

Part Woodstock, part flea market, part day in the park, the festival presents a vast flurry of shorts, shades, sneakers, sundresses and sandals, along with a whirl of ball caps, straw hats, hairstyles, T-shirts, tie-dies and tattoos.

Saturday, as temperatures climbed north of 90 and the fields were baked by the late-July sun, shirts were in far shorter supply than skin art.

Here, then, the product of people-watching, are four short stories of four FloydFest fans and their tattoos:

You could see Alex Broughton’s face even when his back was turned.

The 44-year-old maintenance technician from Roanoke has a demonic likeness of himself inked into the flesh behind his left shoulder. His wild-eyed doppleganger appears to be clawing and gnawing its way from the inside out.

The tattoo, Broughton said, covers a previous image, a wizard, etched on a fateful night in 1994. Hours later, he was in a car accident, and though he said he wasn’t seriously injured, Cynthia, his wife of 22 years, did not fare as well.

“She was hurt,” he said. “And that’s the real demon. I needed to cover it up.” In 2008, he finally did, blocking the wizard tattoo with a depiction of his own frustration. “Everybody has their inner demon, and I’ve carried mine. I’ve finally let go.”

A less permanent and lighter-hearted kind of tattoo was being drawn Saturday by Jim McGuire, an artist and photographer from Charlotte, N.C.

Clad in a leather kilt and a horn-shaped straw hat from Senegal, he wore across his chest a belt that carried dozens of colored markers, which he used to draw what he called “Sharpie tats” on the arms and faces of those willing to become a canvas. It’s a hobby the father of two said seems to build its own momentum, especially when children are around.

“It’s kind of a sort of a ‘let the magic happen’ thing,” McGuire said. “Usually if I start doing one person, they start coming up to me really fast.”

For Matt Maze, the artworks on his skin are reminders.

Standing shirtless near the main stage in rainbow-lensed sunglasses, Maze wore a Dr. Seuss-style stovepipe hat that made his better-than-6-foot frame even taller.

The 26-year-old chef from Winchester, Tenn., has 17 tattoos in all, including a skull in a jester’s cap etched on his back.

“My best friend drew it for me before he died,” Maze explained. He said his friend Zack was killed by a drunken driver just seven months ago.

He wears other totems, too — a heart with his little sister’s name in it; dragons; samurai swords; and, below the back of his neck, a plaintive cross.

“My mom told me, ‘I hate tattoos, but if you’re going to tattoo yourself up, get a cross.’ So I did,” he said.

Tara Rudolph, 37, a dental hygienist from Orange, sported an eye- poppingly detailed American beauty rose emblazoned across her right shoulder, half a foot long. She said it took six hours to render the flower and stem
tattoo supply