The Swedish Chef, The Cookie Monster, and Other Tattoos I’ll Never See Again
/Emma Rose Ryan
First thing’s first, I’m going to need you to pull up google images and type “Swedish Chef Tattoo.” Before you pull the trigger on that search, picture in your mind what you’re about to see...once you are satisfactorily disturbed, hit enter. After the pictures load, you’ll be assailed by dozens of absolutely unconscionable pieces of body art. Ones that will smash your already low expectations.
Even among Muppets, the Swedish chef is the worst possible tattoo choice. He’s an eyeless puppet with human hands and a pervy mustache in real life, and in tattoo form, he’s exponentially more wrong-looking. He also sadistically wields knives and other kitchen equipment, and many of his tattoo iterations depict him murdering other beloved muppets in cold blood. Or, even worse, he’s accompanied by a speech bubble saying “bork, bork, bork.” All in all, the results of this search provide concrete proof that humans cannot be trusted to act in their own best interest.
However, there is one exception.
While most of its counterparts skew to extremes of hyper-realism and cartoonishness—à la the Muppet babies—this rendering straddles the issue altogether. It’s an impressionistic interpretation, a sketched outline contrasted by lush colors and gentle shading. The chef is in profile, holding a massive cleaver over a cornucopia of gorgeous-looking vegetables. Rather than lean into the dadaist absurdity of the subject matter, this tattoo takes itself seriously. It’s almost like the artist was tasked with creating the Swedish chef’s royal portrait and transposing it onto a person’s leg. For me, this image is the second google result for “Swedish Chef Tattoo.” I’ve seen this inexplicable, beautiful tattoo in the flesh, and you never will.
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Uncle Mike hated needles. This is a nuisance in the best of circumstances, but it is a very,
very bad thing if you’re a cancer patient receiving intravenous chemotherapy. My mother used to try and preempt the nurses, giving them a fair warning that he was a difficult patient when it came to IVs. Yet, each time they rolled back his sleeve, they’d laugh and make the obvious joke, “How can someone with all these tattoos possibly hate needles?”
They would then fail repeatedly to find a vein because the ink that covered him from wrist to shoulder made it nearly impossible to find a vein. At Mike’s request, Adoh¹ started asking the “good” nurses when they would be scheduled the next week, so that he could avoid the question and maybe, just maybe, get stuck on the first try. But, after cussing out a phlebotomist during her seventh failed attempt to start a drip, Mom and Adoh pulled rank and made him get a port², even though it would mess up the look of his WWI fighter plane tattoo. Once, when Mike slipped into a coma, a nurse called my grandfather because the location of his port was not listed on his chart. “I told them, it’s right under the left wig! Lucky thing that I could give them such specific directions.”
I remember asking Uncle Mike when I was seven or eight what it felt like to get a tattoo. My mom had told me they used a needle gun to do it, and because ‘needle’ and ‘gun’ were two of my least favorite words, I was curious how someone could endure such a tool on a regular basis. Mike assured me it wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought it would be.
“The needle in the gun is teeny-tiny, and when it pokes you it feels like this. Give me your arm.”
He took my little hand in his and poked my wrist rapidly with his index finger, scraping my skin with his nail gently each time. His fingers weren’t swollen from steroids then. “Never get anything tattooed on your hands or feet,” he warned me, “Anything that goes directly on bone hurts a lot.”
When he told me this, he didn’t yet have the image of a skull—brain pink and exposed—beside a grey cancer ribbon stretching from the wrist to the knuckle of his right hand.
That tattoo was his most painful and last completed.
When I got my first tattoo³ I followed his advice. I had them place it on the fatty part of my side, just below my armpit and above my ribs. When the inking began, I realized that he was right. It feels like someone is scraping you with a mechanical pencil—hard enough to raise a welt, not quite enough to draw blood. I winced, but only slightly. If you were to rank this feeling on the same pain scale as, say, a brain tumor migraine or the losing a loved one, it would be nothing. Nothing at all.
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My Adoh, the keeper of family records and the maker of many crafts, spent a lot of time at Hobby Lobby after Mike died. She bought dozens of posters and reams of colored paper, brought it to my mother’s kitchen table, and enlisted the help of my sister and me to create photo boards to decorate the memorial service. I was asked to pull up google pictures of things Mike used to like, transpose them onto a document, and use my dad’s fancy new LaserJet to print them out for super-gluing.
As I was doing this, my mom was sifting through family photos saved to the old desktop in our home office. Every so often, I’d look up from image searches of Dunkin Doughnuts and MeatLoaf album covers and watch my mom at work. It was clear that she was looking for photos of Mike’s tattoos, and, as I watched her click through them, it dawned on me that they were all gone. Mike had been cremated weeks ago. These pictures were all we had—not just of him—but of all the characters and images he took with him.
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Apparently, women are fairly-underrepresented in the field of body-art, and Mike’s claim to fame among the tattoo community was that he was only worked on by female artists. I don’t know if he did this in order to be a feminist ally or because he wanted to hook up with tattoo-artists, but it certainly makes his pin-up girl sleeve less icky in retrospect.
The art on his pinup arm was about as tasteful as work in the genre can possibly get. They were beautifully done—as all of his art was—and there are only a couple topless ladies on the very highest part of his shoulder. I’ve only ever seen them in photographs because they were easily hidden easily by t-shirt sleeves. After my sister was born, my mom insisted that Mike make the rest of his “lady arm” PG-rated, as he would soon be a role model for two adoring nieces. He and his artists followed these instructions, finding creative workarounds for the rest of his planned designs. His sailor lady wore a white sailor-girl crop top, and his red-haired mermaid held a tiny mer-baby in a bubble against her chest. I loved Mike’s lady arm, and to this day I cannot pinpoint why. Maybe it was an extension of my love for Disney princesses. Unclear. All I know is that I was hit with a pang of sadness when I realized all his loyal ladies went down with his ship.
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After getting diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma, Mike’s tattoos got more serious. Work from this period included an hourglass full of gumballs, meant to symbolize the way he wanted to enjoy the time in life he had left. There was also the skull tattoo, which was done to match a painting he had purchased of a skull surrounded by tendrils of smoke. He commissioned a recreation of the Norman Rockwell piece Old Sailor and a clutch of gorgeous roses for his chest to honor his late grandfather and grandmother respectively.
I remember one day while we were out and about, I was holding Uncle Mike’s hand, leading him through a parking lot.⁴ I liked to keep him talking while we were moving around, so he wouldn’t have time to stew about the fact that he couldn’t walk by himself. So I asked him what kind of tattoo he thought I should get. He was quiet for a second, and he answered, “You should get anything you want. Don’t let anyone else choose it for you, but it should be something important to you.”
I’m surprised that he didn’t tell me to get something that reminded me of him. I found out after he died that he was terrified that Kailey, Jack and I would forget about him someday. In a way, I guess he did tell me to get something that reminded me of him. He never knew how important he was.⁵
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My Nana hates tattoos and facial hair. Every time one of her three sons grew beards, she would offer them fifty-dollar bills to shave them off. Her tattoo animosity was even stronger. She never said exactly what she would do if any of her children got one, and all but one of them were too scared to find out.
Mike’s first tattoo was a dragon. He asked his tattoo artist to make bright-red birthmark between his shoulder blades into the dragon’s eye. My mother told me that it won some sort of tattoo-convention award for “ingenius integration of existing body marks”. I’ve done some pretty extensive Googling, though, and it doesn’t come up anywhere. The dragon was eventually incorporated into a dungeon scene with knights and various other medieval regalia, but we don’t have any pictures of it because it was being kept a secret from my Nana. Mike would steal individual family members during gatherings and show him the progress of his body art in the security of his old bedroom at my grandparent’s house. The room he had moved back into, for a time, after his divorce. As his tattoo collection expanded, it became harder and less convenient to hide.
Once she finally found out, she was annoyed but resigned to the decision her son was making. A decision, I’m sure, she assumed he’d live to regret.
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Shortly after Mike’s first surgery, my fourth-grade teacher told the class that getting tattoos was an affront to God.
“And I’m not just talking about one or two little things,” she insisted, “as long as they’re tasteful, meaningful. But there are some people you see out there and they have tattoos all over,” she ran her wrinkly hands down her arms, making a disgusted face, “It’s thuggish and so disrespectful to the temple God gave them.”
My hand immediately shot into the air in protest, but when my teacher called on me to speak I choked on my tongue. How could I explain Uncle Mike and his arms to someone who would never see them?
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Think about tattooing someone’s name on your body.
Think about the amount of love it would take to motivate you to do that...while sober I mean. There’s probably only one person who I would do that for, and it’s only because he did it for me.
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Uncle Mike really liked Chips Ahoy cookies. His co-worker Jenny6 told us at his memorial service—as we all munched on the cookies at the refreshment table—that he used to come into work with a half-eaten box of them in the morning and finish them by noon. I remember hearing about this habit when I was twelve and becoming extremely excited for adulthood and the cookie-eating freedoms it would provide.
He brought them to family parties, and once my sister and I made the connection between him and a certain blue muppet from Sesame Street, he became our own personal cookie monster. He used to do the voice, pretending to offer us cookies only to snatch them back form us and devour them with a dramatic “Nom! Nom! Nom! Cooooookieeees.”
When I first saw the Cookie Monster tattoo, I didn’t appreciate the gravity of it. Uncle Mike put weird things on his body all the time7, so the thought that he would get a cartoon image of cookie monster holding three cookies, each one emblazoned with my siblings and my names...it seemed only natural. But in retrospect, it was a gesture of incomprehensible love. Mike never got to be a father, or even really a husband. I realize now that he cared more about my happiness and the happiness of my siblings than about anything else in the world. He got a puppet tattooed on his leg just to make us laugh. He wanted to show the whole world how much making us happy meant to him.8
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When Michael O’Connor died in a coma on December 10th, 2011, he had dozens of tattoos. He covered his body with everything from roses to a ring of kangaroos around his right ankle. Many had become warped and misshapen as his body bloated from steroid medication. Some, like the recreation of Old Sailor, was left uncolored and half-finished. When he took his last breath, the image was just a black sketch covering his massive stomach.
Mike never lived to regret a single one of them. I wonder sometimes what they would have looked like as he grew old and wrinkled like his father before him. I wonder how much more of his body he would have covered with color and humor and light if the universe had just left him alone.
1 Pronounced AH-doh. I’ve called my mother’s sister this since I was a baby, and because I am the oldest niece the name stuck. Even her own parents call her that now. Adoh chose the spelling for the name, and Apparently, it’s an acronym which stands for Aunt Devoted Of Heart. She wants it on her tombstone.
2 A chemotherapy port, sometimes referred to as a mediport, cancer port, or portacath, is a vascular access device that is implanted under the skin so that people with cancer can be given chemotherapy.
3 It is the number thirteen, copied from the 13th page number of my favorite book.
4 Mike’s first tumor was attached to his occipital lobe and removing it cause him to lose some vision and coordination. He often bumped into things and fell, but my sister and I were the only people he would allow to hold his hand.
5 I am making plans to get my second tattoo --a rose designed by my sister-- on my left arm. I’m just waiting until I can track down an artist that worked on Mike to do it.
6 I remember hearing about this habit when I was twelve and becoming extremely excited for adulthood and the cookie-eating freedoms it would provide.
7 Not long before this, he had come to a birthday party with a freaking gorgeous, lightsaber-wielding Master Yoda tattoo.
8 There is a great family photograph of my toddler-aged brother seeing the tattoo for the first time. My sister Kailey made a full-sized oil painting based on the image. This essay that you’ve read? This is my oil painting.
Emma Rose Ryan is an undergraduate studying Creative Writing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She’s a member of the Chapter One Young Writers Conference. When she’s not writing, Emma can be found reciting Shakespeare, watching The West Wing, or petting someone else’s cat.
Read an interview with Emma Rose Ryan here.
