Tattoo Momma : You’ll Never Be PTA President in This Town Again

“I hardly feel a thing,” my 65-year-old mom assures me over the incessant buzz of the drill. She’s lying prone on an examination table with her pumps dangling off one end. Just above her turned-out inside left ankle, tattoo artist Jill Jordan fills in the dark swirls of the 1940s-style coiffure of a wriggling, half-naked hula girl.

Jordan completes the picture like a child coloring a book, dabbing her homemade needles into tiny paper cups filled with paints. “You can put on another tape,” she says to me, nodding toward the stereo. For atmosphere, she has selected traditional Hawaiian chants; she’s even baked us a loaf of banana nut bread that I nibble at as I watch her emblazon the bright-green grass bands cinching the hula girl’s exuberant wrists. Jordan, dressed in black go-go pants, wears a vintage olive sweater, rolled up to reveal a forearm of tattooed fruits and vegetables. She and my mom, in her purple muumuu, could be sewing quilt squares together.

I imagine that most daughters, when approached by their Social Security-collecting mother with the plea “Find me a tattoo artist,” might think it strange. But I wasn’t shocked. Sure, my mom had been PTA president and chocolate-chip cookie queen, but she also wandered into the thick of Griffith Park love-ins to buy beads off hippies. She never belittled a new crystal remedy until she tried it, she triple-pierced her ears long before any of my friends did and she always wore on every finger a gargantuan silver Indian ring with a long story behind it. At 55, she reclaimed her family name and re-christened herself “Powell-Melton.”

So when this mother of four, grandmother to five, and adoptive parent to hundreds of my dad’s wayward drama students confessed a lifelong desire for a tattoo, I asked not “Why?” but “What do you want?”

“I want something different,” she replied. “I’d like to look at my ankle and see something of beauty as I grow older. At the age of 65, you want to do some daring things that aren’t hurting anyone else.”

My family--long resigned to mom’s eccentricities--all piped in with their two-cents’ worth. Despite being married in the presence of an Elvis impersonator, brother Steve thought the whole thing a turnoff. My sister Katie, herself a mom, expressed alarm: “I’m going to have a tattooed mother?” Oldest brother Greg, always the production designer, offered advice: “If she gets a plumeria or hibiscus, it shouldn’t be so small that it looks like a bruise.”

Dad seemed indifferent. He might be more happy about it, my mom and I agreed, if the tattoo read “Dad.” But mom had her own ideas. Since she was born and raised in Hollywood, she considered the image of a palm tree, and a shamrock in honor of some Irish in her family line.

The list of possibilities, though, always reverted back to Hawaii, the place in the world my parents love most. Their next trip will be visit No. 25. Oil renderings of Diamond Head blanket their walls; an entire room is devoted to books on the islands, and their china cabinets are overflowing with more than 200 hula girls. Hawaii, we decided, would be her theme.

So that’s how we found ourselves, on the recommendation of several tattooed and pierced friends, at Jordan’s West Hollywood studio. (Do you think I’d take my own mom to some shady emporium on the Sunset Strip?) We chose a hula girl based on a design of “Sailor Jerry,” the proprietor of a legendary postwar parlor in Honolulu. It wasn’t until a week later, when Jordan was bent over my mom’s ankle, that I realized how much the hula girl resembled early modeling photos of my mother.

Mom has named the tattoo “Little Sister,” and it’s healing nicely, thank you. In fact, it has started something of a family revolution. Dad is mulling over a Diamond Head on his biceps, and my 5-year-old nephew has taken to drawing the names of preschool sweethearts on his leg with Crayola markers. My mom likes to sit on the living room’s rattan couch and wave her left calf in circles. She and her hula girl are now as exotic as anything else in the island landscape created in this Valley suburb. They’re both at home.