TATTOO OWNER:
COLLEEN AF VENABLE
New York artist Colleen is a designer for First Second Books, a firm that publishes graphic novels. She’s also the founder of spoof art celebration Lumberjack Day, which encourages Brooklynites to don false wood-choppers’ beards and carry faux-axes every 26 September.

Howdy Bizarre readers,
I’ve got lots of tiny freckles and birthmarks, and I’ve always joked about joining them up with tattooed lines to make constellation-like patterns. When I finally did get a ‘dot-to-dot’ tattoo though, I chose to make it into the shape of a giraffe – and there’s a hilariously obscure story to explain why!

I majored in art at college and, although I’m passionate about painting, my course was intense. By the time I graduated I was so sick of acrylics and oils that I swore off creative stuff altogether. After the overdose effect had worn off, I resolved to get back into art, but I didn’t know what to paint.

Eventually, I decided that a stuffed giraffe toy that I’d had as a kid would make the perfect subject: it was as ugly as hell, with half its stuffing missing so that its head lolled to one side. After several searches of my parents’ house though, I just couldn’t find it. Instead, I began looking for other stuffed giraffes at shops, theme parks and jumble sales, and taking mock-serious photos of me posing with them.

Before I knew it, I had 1,712 photographs of me with the toy giraffes, and what had begun as a joke had spontaneously developed into an art project, spanning four years and involving people from all over the world via the internet, who became official ‘Giraffe Hunters’. I began to see giraffe shapes wherever I went: they lurked in floor tiles, milkshake froth, and discarded chewing gum.
 
Then one day I got an email saying that the original toy from my childhood had been found in England! It was being used in a church, as one half of a bedraggled giraffe couple aboard a second-hand Noah’s Ark. A while later, I was in a restaurant and the waiter brought over an old-fashioned silver platter with a domed lid. “I believe you ordered this?” he asked, before removing the cover to reveal my giraffe! My friend had arranged to have it sent over from the UK.
 
To signify the end of my unexpectedly long-winded, long-necked art project, I froze the giraffe in a big block of ice and smashed it into tiny, furry pieces. I wanted a more permanent way to commemorate the project too, though – and that’s how the tatt came about.
 
I was turned away by several artists who thought the idea was dumb, or tried to charge me an extortionate amount because I wanted them to draw something original and ‘tricky’, but then a pal who got her arm inked with an amazing full sleeve of fighting robots directed me to Dave C Wallin from Brooklyn’s 8 Of Swords studio.

I chose to place the dot-to-dot on my leg, next to a stone that was embedded in my knee after an accident I had while playing in the garden when I was six; it seemed appropriate that the image of my childhood toy, depicted in a format reminiscent of childhood games, would be close to a childhood scar.

It’s strange though – I never cared for that giraffe much as a kid, yet now it’s become pivotal within my life.

HUNTING THE SIGIL? CLICK HERE!