Scott Campbell, a tattoo artist who began inking bikers and moved on to Heath Ledger and Courtney Love, admitted that he now has a publicist. He said his had suggested that when a reporter visited “you do wheelies on your motorcycle, then drink some rosé”; Campbell likes messing around on his Ducati, and he recently co-created a line of wines called Saved. But he rejected the conceit: “I’m, like, ‘Guys, that sounds like a W.W.E. character—the Sophisticated Brute.’ ”
He crouched on a swivel chair in the back of his Williamsburg tattoo parlor, his knees tucked up and his mutt, Texas, sprawled below. A youthful thirty-seven, Campbell wore an “I Hate Doomsdays” T-shirt over a torso coated in tattoos. Tats are now as ubiquitous as bumper stickers, but to him they’re not something slapped on the skin but graven into it, evidence of transformative decisions made at critical moments—decisions good, bad, and drunk.
He often draws “ghost snakes,” unpredictable spirits that he believes inspire his work. Growing up by a bayou outside New Orleans, he was an ophiophile; he’d catch king snakes and sell them to a pet store for twelve dollars. He was looking for trouble wherever he could find it. At sixteen, he got his first real tattoo (after a small starter skull): a huge purple scarab on his left shoulder. His beloved mother had recently died of cancer, and he’d run away from home to Houston, and “the cultural value of anything was how much it irritated my father”—an oil-company executive. “He’d never get a tattoo, so if I got a tattoo it was a promise to myself to never become like him.” Texas yawned at his feet. “Now that I’m about the age he was then—well, if I had to deal with my wife dying, and having two kids to raise, I don’t know if I could do it without crawling into the bottom of a bottle, either.” (Charlie Campbell says that he quit drinking before his wife died.)
The scarab has become a faded time capsule, but, Campbell said, “I don’t regret it, just like I don’t regret this guy”—he showed off a primitive chicken head on his shin. “A buddy and I used safety pins to drunkenly tattoo each other in Edward Albee’s barn in Montauk, and it came out so bad he tattooed ‘Sorry’ underneath. It’s my worst one, but I find myself looking at it a lot, so maybe it’s my best one.”
Of late, Campbell has turned increasingly to fine art, tagging dollar bills in thick black ink that, for instance, turns “ONE” into “GONE.” He said that the advantage (and the disadvantage) of tattooing is that your canvas can talk, can help you figure out what it wants. Noting his visitor’s Wasp upbringing, he suggested, “If you had a big, gnarly scar from open-heart surgery, we could tattoo an ‘It’s fine! Everything is fine!’ around it.” It’s an idea.
As an electric needle began to buzz out front, he went on, “I’m married to someone who comes from that—the sugarcoating culture.” In 2011, he met Lake Bell, the filmmaker and actress, on the set of HBO’s “How to Make It in America,” when he was hired to give her character a tattoo. In the makeup trailer, she noticed his motorcycle helmet and asked if he raced. He mumbled something, and she guessed, “New Jersey Motorsports Park?” He recalled, “It was as if I saw a flower grow out of her head: ‘How do you know those words?’ Her: ‘My dad owns that park!’ Me: ‘What are you doing later?’ ” They’re expecting their first child in the fall, and Campbell can’t wait for the transformation—“I will take dirty diapers over the Boom Boom Room at 3 A.M. any day”—and the tattoo he hopes she’ll want him to give her to mark the occasion.
He grabbed a couple of plastic cups and poured out healthy doses of Saved’s fifteen-dollar rosé from California’s Central Coast. He asked his vintner to make the taste mild—“I like wines you can drink all afternoon”—but his main contribution was the label, which is basically tattooed into the bottle. It’s a diamond shape of fired-on clay that’s stuffed with symbols and incantations—“Mom,” a ghost snake, “Allow yourself greatness”—in the cabalistic manner of a Dr. Bronner’s soap label.
He said that his father, who has become a chiropractor, loves his turn to wine because “it fits into his and my stepmother’s dinner-party life style.” With bashful pride, he added that a few years back his dad asked him for a tattoo: a spiral, from an Argentine cave painting, that both Campbell and his sister wear. “It was such a big gesture—a proud man admitting he was wrong and laying down arms.” He displayed the Argentine spiral on his own inner arm, coiled like a snake, and raised his cup to toast the bottle’s end. ♦