One is a 27-year-old bride. Another’s a data analyst. Then, there’s the 78-year-old retired librarian. And the White Sox pitcher. And the Chicago jazz musician. What they have in common: All have tattoos.
Over the past year, the stories of Chicagoans and their tattoos have been appearing as part of a Chicago Sun-Times series called Inking Well.
Here are a couple of the favorite tattoo tales that reporters Mary Norkol, writing about Elisa Espinosa, and Katie Anthony, telling the story of Bradley Parker-Sparrow, have turned up.
Elisa Espinosa needed something for her wedding: a statement tattoo
I’m on the cusp of the millennial and Gen Z generations, so you won’t be surprised that I love tattoos, and growing up, I obsessively watched TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress.”
When I stumbled across tattoo artist Synde Barard’s custom piece to complement Elisa Espinosa’s wedding dress on Instagram (did I mention I’m a Zillennial?), I practically salivated at the thought of interviewing them.
It turned out to be a story of love, art, making a statement and breaking tradition.
Sitting in Barard’s Humboldt Park tattoo studio, I felt like I was laughing with a few of my girlfriends and rehashing a blast of a wedding instead of simply doing my job. As much as I want my stories to make the readers feel something, the best ones make me feel something, too.
Barard’s eyes lit up as she talked about her passion for art and her leap of faith to start tattooing as a self-taught artist, without the usual apprenticeship.
Espinosa — a student activities coordinator at Midwestern University — and her husband Zach Gronewold made eye contact as they spoke of their first dance, the details of their wedding, the proposal and the early days of their romance at Valparaiso University.
I’m a breaking news and general assignment reporter. That means I often write about violence, political events and day-to-day doom and gloom.
As important as all of that is, it was nice to have the opportunity to report on art, love and a beautiful wedding. Because that’s important, too.
Jazz musician got album titles inked starting at 25, still has them at 69
Many of the people we’ve interviewed for these stories used tattoos as a sort of scrapbook to memorialize moments.
But what’s it like to look back, decades later, on the art you decided to have permanently inked on your skin?
Bradley Parker-Sparrow, 69, a Chicago jazz musician, let us know about his body art with an email to our tattoos tip line.
Four decades ago, he got tattoos to memorialize his first four jazz albums.
Tattoos weren’t such a big part of pop culture in 1979, when Parker tattooed the title of his first album, “Latin Black,” onto an arm. It was a way of trying to stand out in a musical genre many at the time considered passé, he said.
Among other attention that got him, the Sun-Times took note in an article in 1980.
“I had the tattoo done because a sense of theater has to be added to my jazz,” Parker said back then. “Jazz has gotten too intellectual. This is to dust the new-wavers who are always doing something to themselves. I’m told it will start to fade in 10 years.”
He was 25 then. The tattoo is still there — a bit worn but not faded.
Parker got three more of his albums tattooed on his arms after “Latin Black.” But continuing to put out albums over the decades, he decided to stop with four tattoos.
He got them for the attention. Today, he says, “They remind me, now that I’m older, it’s like all the sudden you’re an adult. It reminds me of the time that surrounded the tattoo — with my wife, my friends, my bandmates at the time.”
