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At the end of a tree-lined street in New York's East Village, there is a Catholic church on which school children have painted murals of yellow suns and blue birthday cakes. Directly across from the church is Last Rites, the studio of tattoo artist Paul Booth. To enter, guests tread carefully past windows choked with cobwebs and rusty meat hooks, through a heavy iron door, into a dimly lit waiting room filled with incense and the crunchy sounds of thrash metal. A musty hallway lined with dead moss leads to Booth's tattoo chamber. There, a mummified cat, frozen in midstride, rests in a glass case surrounded by medieval torture devices. Customers sit in a gynecologist's chair - a black leather affair with sparkling-silver stirrups. Gifts from devoted subjects line the shelves. Among them are two human skulls from a Swedish gravedigger and a note from a customer written in his own blood. "Thank you," it reads. "My soul is with you."
Booth is fve feet nine, with meaty hands and a well-fed gut. His face is studded with loops of silver. Tattoos blanket his arms, from shoulder to knuckle. He recently added another portrait to the gallery that is his body. "I wanted something to represent the right side of my brain, the creative side," he says. A centipedelike design of tightly coiled swirls now covers the right side of his scalp. "It is like a curling mass from my brain stem." The rest of his pasty-white head is shaved clean, except for a mane of dreadlocks hanging down the back.
Booth, who is thirty-four, is a revered tattoo artist for the hardcore-metal elite, bands such as Slipknot, Mudvayne, Slayer, Pantera, Soulfly and Sepultura. Unlike most tattoo artists, he doesn't first outline the image onto skin. Instead, he goes freestyle right into the flesh with his needle. His black-and-gray tattoos of blasphemous violence echo the same nihilist madness of the metalheads he inks. Booth has decorated arms, heads, backs and legs with weeping demons, decapitated Christ figures, transvestite nuns severing their own genitals, cascading waves of melting skulls, muscled werewolves raping bare-chested women. Corey Taylor of Slipknot has his entire bony chest inked with a skeletal moon face blending into a flaming sun. Phil Anselmo of Pantera has his own face tattooed on his forearm, screaming in rage as an oversize biomechanical tongue explodes from his mouth and through the crotch of a naked, hollow-eyed harlot.
There is a two-year waiting list for Booth's work.
He says his clients come to him because they share his frustration and rage, his feelings of anger and alienation. Booth understands those emotions and brings them to the surface with his needle. His gift lies in transforming the dark side of his clients - their hurt, their torments - into flesh art. A Paul Booth tattoo is not an image. It is an exorcism.
Evan Seinfeld, the bassist for Biohazard, sits in the chair, offers his hand and waits for the bleeding to begin. Four years ago, Booth inked a fanged devil on Seinfeld's hand. The first few mornings after he got the tattoo, Seinfeld would wake up and just stare at it in shock. But the devil face has faded and needs to be re-inked.
Getting a hand tattoo requires mental and physical commitment. It is difficult to hide the image. And unlike the shoulder or thigh, there's no padding on the back of a hand, nothing to cushion against the needle. "The less meat, the more it hurts," Seinfeld says, flexing his fingers in nervous anticipation.
Booth sits and gently takes Seinfeld's hand in his own, studying it like a sculptor inspecting clay. As the guttural sounds of Six Feet Under rattle the studio, Booth slips on white latex gloves and removes a steel needle from a sterilized package. He locks the spike into a tattoo machine and dips the point into a disposable cup of black ink. The instrument whirs to life, humming across Seinfeld's hand, creating a vibrating pool of blood and ink. For more than an hour, Seinfeld grimaces in pain, his shaved head slick with sweat, as the needle drills into his knuckles and the tender webbing between the fingers.
Booth sits silently under a hot white bulb, virtually motionless, catatonic in concentration. His blue eyes stare at the emerging tattoo without blinking. His lower lip droops. He says that he tattoos with such intensity because of the artistic burden he feels. "When someone gets a bad tattoo, it's devastating," he says. He cannot afford to make mistakes or disappoint the client. There can be no errors or lapses in creative judgment. "I wouldn't want to put a permanent mark on somebody's skin and have them regret it," Booth adds.
Clients place limitless faith in Booth's abilities and vision. Ryknow, the bassist for Mudvayne, trusted Booth to decorate his entire torso with no prepared design or discussion. Ryknow took off his shirt and lay down, eyes closed. For more than four hours, Booth and Filip Leu, another acclaimed tattoo artist, peppered the musician's torso with ink, their machines clanking and scrawling across his muscular chest and stomach. They created an abstract, supernatural design, a hurricane of black shadows that drift across Ryknow's body.
Inking without a plan gives Booth freedom to explore the desires of those seated in his chair, he says, to feed off their energy, allowing his clients' demons to help guide the needle.
"We're all trying to release our negative energy, our frustration with the world," Seinfeld says. "Through our art and our music, we're getting it all out."
Booth was born and raised in suburban Boonton, New Jersey. His mother, Paula Ellis, remembers her son as a loner who preferred pencils and sketchbooks to people. Paul was thirteen when his father moved out. He entered high school sick with feelings of rejection and bitterness, unable to connect with students or teachers. He was the arty outcast with the mohawk.
His only solace came from drawing, returning home from school and filling hundreds of notebooks. Before long, childish doodles of cartoons and superheroes became sinister images of fire-breathing monsters, sword-wielding skeletons, bloody scenes of destruction.
After graduating from high school in 1985, Booth worked odd jobs, as a graphics designer and a repo man. He felt empty and bored; the future seemed bleak. Then, fourteen years ago, Tabitha arrived. Booth celebrated the birth of his daughter with his first tattoo: He had her name etched onto his shoulder, encircled by a delicate red rose. As the needle ate through his skin, the violent beauty of the art form mesmerized him.
For the next three years, Booth worked as an apprentice in a New Jersey tattoo studio. It was a simple shop where customers requested generic images - lots of cartoon characters, maybe the odd burning skull. Booth learned his craft but felt stifled as an artist.
Around the fall of 1991, he heard of a tattoo convention taking place in Pittsburgh. Artists from around the country would attend, along with photographers and magazine editors. Booth wanted to be there. He had drawn a few demon heads that his girlfriend at the time (and mother of his child), a brunet beauty named Barbara Valverde, had always admired. Using them, Booth mapped out an elaborate, daring tattoo, a spooky black-and-gray design of three demons that blanketed Valverde's entire back and curved down her thigh. Booth finished inking the image on the day of the convention. He hopped in the car with Valverde, her skin still raw from twenty-two hours of needle time, and raced to Pittsburgh. Some of the most skilled tattooists in the nation were there, and Booth was just another aspiring practitioner from New Jersey. He was hoping to impress somebody. Money was tight; he needed the work.
But when Valverde disrobed and displayed the tattoo, the fanged, skinless demons on her back galvanized the audience. Within hours, the convention was buzzing with talk about Booth. Fellow artists, curious about the technique, came to check out his style; customers hoped for appointments. Booth earned Best Tattoo and Best Up-and-Coming Artist. Tattoo Revue devoted its November 26th, 1991, cover to the Valverde work of art. Soon, Booth was the star at conventions around the world, from Germany to Brazil. A fan from Israel inked the image of Booth's face on his shoulder. A young admirer from Colombia tattooed the name of Booth's studio, Last Rites, on his forearm.
Squirming in the chair, his body curled tight from suffering, Seinfeld sits through the last minutes of the tattoo. His hand has turned into fleshy hamburger, a swollen, meaty wound.
Scheduling appointments with Booth is now difficult, given his fame and newfound responsibilities. He was artistic director for the first-ever Tattoo the Earth, a pioneering tour that blended art and music. Tattoo artists and thrash metalheads wandered the countryside for a month-long carnival of music and body art. Fans listened to Slayer, Sepultura and Slipknot while getting inked by internationally celebrated artists such as Filip Leu, Sean Vasquez and Bernie Luther.
Booth feels that the project served an important purpose: Tattoo artists and metalheads should unite and work together, he says, because the two tribes of social misfits share a common outlook. Shawn Crahan, a.k.a. Clown of Slipknot, agrees. Booth and Crahan are great admirers of each other's work. "I have a lot of dark ideas in my head," Crahan says. "Paul develops those same emotions in very powerful pieces."
That kind of approval threatens the very negativity that first drove Booth to seek distinction as an artist. "If I woke up one day and became happy, I probably wouldn't tattoo anymore, because I wouldn't see a need to do it," he says. "I would lose my art if I became happy."
Booth dabs at Seinfeld's hand with sterilized gauze. The walls of the studio vibrate with hardcore metal. Seinfeld nods to the rhythm, trying to lose himself in the music. The more he grits his teeth in pain, the more Booth smiles. "I'm such a sadist," he whispers with a grin.
JOSHUA LIPTON
(RS 892 - Mar. 28, 2002)