Blair Cohn is a busy boy, constantly on the go with phone calls, texts, e-mails, meetings, planning, and doing whatever else he can come up with to make Bixby Knolls’s place on the cultural map ever bigger.
But when he’s on the tattoo table, all of that is left behind.
{loadposition latestlife}”This is all about the experience,” he said recently, wincing a bit as Kari Barba shaded part of the inside of Cohn’s left thigh, “and nothing else.”
We’re at Outer Limits Tattoo & Piercing, and Cohn is having Barba finish a tattoo she’s been working on for nearly a year: Eddie as featured on the cover of Iron Maiden’s The Trooper. Even though incomplete, it’s impressive work—Barba is renowned as a serious tattoo talent—but it’s obviously painful. Which leaves an always-to-be-tattoo-free fellow like myself to wonder: Why?
Cohn was once in my shoes—and not that long ago. He made it to the ripe old age of 38 without so much as considering permanently marking his fair skin. But suddenly—at least in terms of his conscious thought—everything changed.
“One day I was driving home, and the light just went on,” he recalls. “[…] ‘I’d like to get a tattoo of my two favorite things, which I will never regret. […] I was scared, of course. ‘Should I hide it?’—the stigma of it, [being] a white-collar guy—’What are my parents going to think?’ So that’s why I went under the boxer line, so no one could see it but me. But I’d know it’s there.”
Those first two—an image related to U2’s War album and USC football helmet (Cohn’s alma mater)—were small and hidden, but they made a big impression on the future executive director of the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association.
“After the first one, I just stared at it and said, ‘What a trip. You can have writing on your skin, and it will stay there,'” Cohn relates. “It was hard for me to comprehend that it was real. I walked in [a] blank canvas, and then there was this permanent thing. […] After those first two, I said, ‘Um, I can sneak on another one.’ And then: ‘I can do another one, on the other hip.’ And then I was like, ‘Wow, how fun is this, to have your favorite things on you?'”
More ink followed, flowing to parts of his body that weren’t as consistently hidden from the world. Somewhere in there Cohn realized that part of the appeal stemmed—like so much of that which makes up the adult—from childhood experience.
“Part of this is [that] this was the first time ever when someone said, ‘Wow, you have such great skin!'” he says. “When I was 10 or 11 going to the beach, it was, ‘Oh, you’re so white, you’re going to burn.’ Back in the day I really wanted to pursue surfing, but I didn’t have the skin for it, and I was very self-conscious about that. But now, it’s like: ‘I have a great canvas. Look what I can do with it.’ It takes away that self-consciousness. Because I remember being about 12 years old and everyone was going to beach, and I [would think], ‘I don’t want to go in shorts.’ I’d be the only guy in summer still walking around in Levi’s. […] I loved skateboarding, but I would pull my socks up to my knees to hide my skin. So all this now is kind of a celebration of [the white skin]. And I can color it. I’ll walk around in shorts and barefoot and not think about [the whiteness] anymore.”
Part of the appeal for Cohn is the chance to push aside his rather frenetic life for an hour or two and let the process—including the pain—focus him on the present moment.
“It’s distracting enough that, just like when I step into the boxing ring, I’m concentrating so much on a singular thing that that’s all there is,” he says. “I don’t want to be distracted with phone calls, e-mails, projects, whatever. You can’t, because this is right there. […] I [liken] it to boxing, where you spend that time in the ring getting punched. There’s nothing more visceral than breathing hard, trying to move around, trying to throw a punch and not get hit but getting hit and enjoying it, the whole experience…I don’t know. Your senses are heightened to the fullest. There’s no ignoring this.”
Cohn has a pretty mainstream day job to sport so many tattoos. But he says that even though there is still some stigma, over the last decade or two American culture has become more accepting of body art. Still, that didn’t prevent him from having some concerns over how his ink would be received by Long Beach once he became part of the establishment.
Barba at work on what she says is a great canvas.
“It probably wasn’t until the first car show in July [2008] that I was directly involved with on the job that I wore shorts,” he says. “At that point, six or seven months into the job, it was like, ‘Man, I didn’t know you had tattoos.’ But any kind of weird stigma was out the window, because they knew who I was. They kind of laughed and tripped on it. […] It’s different anywhere else. I was walking in Chicago, and I watched people: all their eyes went straight down to the legs. But they don’t know who this guy is. But I laugh, because they don’t know that I’m a community guy, that my parents are still together. I’m more middle-of-the-road than they think. That’s kind of always been the dichotomy in my personality: that I kind of enjoy listening to Tool as much as I enjoy listening to the silliest pop songs—because you don’t have to be one thing or the other.”
Cohn heard about Barba and Outer Limits early in his days as a tattooee (let’s pretend that’s a word), but it wasn’t until he invited the Outer Limits crew up to Bixby to come show their work at a fledgling little endeavor called First Fridays that he met her.
“I told her we needed to get together to get some ink done,” he says. “I’m a history buff, so it’s really, really cool feeling the ghosts of old Long Beach while on the table getting work done in that historic space. [Plus,] Kari makes you feel at home in her studio. […] The best experience of being a client of Kari’s is that we’ve had hours and hours of great conversations about life, people, philosophies, hobbies, etc. It passes the time, but it also makes for a more intense and bonding experience with the person putting needles in your skin.”
Fresh off the table, the completed tattoo.
***
A couple of weeks later, Cohn was back at Outer Limits for another tattoo session. But this time it was his mother, Lois, on the table, celebrating her 80th birthday by getting her first tattoo ever (an ice-cream cone—her personal logo during her career as a teacher so that her kids knew how to pronounce her surname). More proof that the Cohns don’t have to be only one thing or the other, and that tattoos aren’t just for bikers anymore.
Outer Limits Tattoo & Piercing is turning 30 years old, and they’re celebrating this weekend. The party starts 6PM Saturday, April 6, at Outer Limits (22 Chestnut Pl., LB 90802), and at 8PM moves across Ocean Blvd. to Rock Bottom Brewery (1 Pine Ave., LB 90802). Art auction, live entertainment, a raffle (with proceeds going to Memorial Medical Center Foundation), giveaways…and yes, Blair Cohn.