Thomas Crone
Tattooist Jamie Toon of Cheap Trx, foreground, creates permanent art on customer Mike Frisella's arm.
Last Friday afternoon, Jamie Toon was having one of those days. At work since 11 a.m., the genial tattoo artist at South Grand’s Cheap Trx had one appointment reschedule and another one not show. With temperatures hovering in the high teens and snow and ice still on the ground, no walk-ins found their way into his chair, either. “I really haven’t done much,” Toon cracked just prior to 5 p.m. “Except for playing some Facebook games and checking in on my farm.”
But everything changed when Mike Frisella walked through the door. The young musician was there for a large, wrap-around piece for his upper right arm, one that Toon was eyeballing before Frisella’s arrival. The two had exchanged ideas for the job for roughly three weeks, “mostly through Facebook,” Toon said. Now, finally, the moment of truth had arrived.
From the time Frisella arrived until the time the needle and ink met his skin, Toon ran through all the elements of his trade that get glossed over on the tattoo-based cable reality shows. He continued shaping and sizing the artwork on various printers and light-tables, trimming the sheets and taping them together into a template. He readied his station with a razor, soap, and paper towels. And he readied his customer, applying the outline to his arm and, finally, adding some missing lines.
Frisella was patient. “I’m a tiny bit nervous,” he said. “But I’m pretty relaxed about it all.”
Just as he was about to begin the inking, Toon changed the music in the room, moving from what felt like an obligatory soundtrack of Guns N’ Roses (at the time, playing on both floors of Cheap Trx) to an iPod mix of Frank Black, the Rolling Stones, and Tori Amos. Though he occasionally checked in with Frisella, Toon mostly bantered with the artist and client in the adjoining studio space, where conversation veered around a variety of off-color topics. Throughout it all, the needles hummed.
As Toon continued to trace his patterns, bringing four horsemen and their steeds to permanence on Frisella’s muscular arm, Frisella fiddled with his iPhone, checking email even as his arm twitched slightly with each application of ink. An hour into the job, with Toon and Frisella chatting about their bands, the outlines of four men riding the outlines of four horses were appearing on a corner of Frisella’s body.
