by George Roberts
We at the magazine expect all of our contributors, when they get an assignment, to devote themselves to the project. When I assigned Mark White the task of writing a feature article on gyotaku artist Dwight Hwang (Issue #41), I knew he’d devote himself to it. I’d known Mark for a couple of years before I was involved with the magazine, so I knew he was enamored with all things Japanese. Mark had trained in the martial art of aikido for the better part of 30 years and spent several years running his own dojo (which is how we met). He had done sumi-e painting as well as nature printing, and he liked to drink expensive sake—so I knew this assignment would be right up his alley. And I knew Mark was itching to publish a feature article in a national magazine. In all, I felt pretty confident about giving him the project.
Frankly, I wasn’t really surprised when Mark turned in an excellent feature. I wasn’t even that surprised when Dwight Hwang produced our most striking cover to date (black and white—who knew?).
But what happened next, I never saw coming.
I was at home one weekend afternoon in August when I got a text from Mark. It was a photo of a man’s bare back with a tattoo of a Dwight Hwang print on one side: The Boil, a tuna chasing a flying fish out of the water. It was one of the prints we had used to illustrate the feature. The tattoo was beautifully rendered, but it was fresh; it had that raw, painful look.
“Holy crap!” I texted back. “Who is that?” It still hadn’t dawned on me. In that moment I was thinking that maybe Dwight had shared the photo with Mark, that one of Dwight’s fans had paid him the ultimate compliment.
“It’s me,” Mark wrote.
“Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
I called him.
“What on Earth possessed you to do this?” I refrained from adding, At your age. After all, there can’t be many people who decide, at age 62, to get their first tattoo—especially if they work in healthcare, as Mark does.
Mark explained that he and his son, Nate, had been planning to get a tattoo together for a while, but he wasn’t sure what he should get. Then the article came out. That cinched it. One Saturday morning found them at Ruby Red Ink in Achushnet, Massachusetts. Nate got a tattoo of a hibiscus in memory of Mark’s deceased mother, who had loved the flower. Mark was in the chair a bit longer—over three-and-a-half hours.
“Can’t imagine what that must’ve cost,” I said.
“Put it this way,” Mark replied. “For what I paid for this tattoo, I probably could have bought the original print.”
Although there’ll never be any question that Mark will devote himself to his work, I’m going to have to be careful about what projects I assign him in the future.
Tattoo: The Boil, rendered by Jared Ponte of Ruby Red Ink in Acushnet, Massachusetts, from an original gyotaku print by Dwight Hwang.
