Heart on his sleeve
By April Seager Photos by Bill MilliosHonoring A Family With an Armful of Ink
It took two—maybe three—minutes for Alfredo Maggi of Frederick to peel off the long sleeved, preppy-striped dress shirt he had on.
“To be honest, I show this tattoo to almost everyone I meet,” Maggi says, his right arm held out taut.
Dedicated to his parents—both deceased—Maggi’s tattoo stretches from shoulder to wrist. Picture by picture, the portable mural narrates a journey that started in the Caribbean and ended on Market Street, downtown.
“Cuba’s right there,” Maggi says, pointing to a puddle of ink near his elbow.
His father, Alfredo, and mother, Herminia—whose cameo appearance can be found on Maggi’s lower arm—both grew up in Cuba, though the couple actually met in the company of “Lady Liberty” in New York City. Eventually the Maggis migrated to Miami, whose visual shout-out is represented on Maggi’s “sleeve” by a tattooed reference to Miami’s Ocean Drive.
Then there’s the image of Saint Barbara, floating at the crest of Maggi’s arm. Bigger than Cuba and the Statue of Liberty combined, the tattoo inspires reverence and a little bit of terror, he says.
“Sometimes, growing up, I made fun of it,” Maggi adds, referring to the icon whose duplicate once hung in his home, shaping his childhood belief system. “A couple of times I had to pray to it.”
The Saint Barbara image is the needlework of Thomas Kenney of North Market Street’s Classic Electric Tattoo and Piercing, while the stained glass-like cityscapes elsewhere were created by Shane Acuff of Gus’s Tattoo Studio, also on North Market. Other artwork on Maggi’s limb was created by Gordon Staub of Time Bomb Tattoo—yet again of North Market Street.
Maggi says he decided to sit for three different, downtown tattoo artists as a way of spreading around the love he has for downtown Frederick.
“What makes Alfredo’s sleeve different is that it has artwork by so many different types of tattooers,” Kenney says. “There’s a real painterly style that…may not be what’s common in tattoos—[perhaps] a mimic of a portrait—and then there’s a more tattoo [-ish] style, which are the parts I did.”
Gazing through this party of styles are two realistic portraits by Staub. The tattoo artist’s skill became clear when Maggi—a fount of family lore—laid out the source photos Staub worked with. The snapshot of his mother was taken in 1972. She’s posing beside her husband, though Maggi chose to use another, older photo of his father.
“My dad and his brother flew to New York on Eastern Airlines in 1956,” he explains, showing a black-and-white image of two young men in suits holding messy piles of snow. “They’re sitting on top of a roof in Brooklyn. They were from Cuba, so they’d never seen snow.
Memorial tattoos aren’t always this elaborate, nor are the emotions they represent so obvious, Acuff says.
“A lot of times [memorial tattoos will] be someone’s name, maybe a date—something small, like a flower,” Acuff explains. “But there can be no doubt that Alfredo’s is a memorial tattoo.”
Maggi’s sleeve wasn’t his first tattoo project, and, from all indications, it’s unlikely to be his last. Still, it might end up being his boldest.
“People I know were, like, ‘You got a sleeve this time,’” he says proudly. “No [B.S.], I got a sleeve. It took long enough….And the only way I’m going to lose it is if I lose my arm.”
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Photos by Bill Millios
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Samet "Dizzy" Caliskan
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Simply put, I am an idiot.
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