Marianela Ramos Capelo pulls up the leg of her jeans to show her right ankle. “Excuse my hairy leg,” she cautions, as she reveals a 3-inch tattoo: one continuous line that forms the outline of a dog pulled length-wise. “It’s a line drawing of a weiner dog. It’s based on a Picasso drawing,” she explains. Picasso’s simple sketch was a love letter to a Daschund named Lump; Capelo’s rendition is a tribute to her childhood pet: “He was my best buddy growing up. The best memories that I have with my family are with that dog there. He was amazing. That was the first one.”
Capelo has three tattoos: she has another on her left wrist, and a third on her left bicep. She tells me the story behind each one, and then reveals that a year ago, she had no tattoos. It’s possible, then, that the year-long art project she just completed might have swayed her to get a little ink.
Nearly everyday since September 2010, Capelo, a 22-year-old communication arts student, has been asking strangers about their tattoos. In the hopes of overcoming and understanding her shyness, she challenged herself to talk to 365 strangers. Capelo approached people in cafés, on campus and on Commercial Drive, where she lives, asking them to show her a tattoo and tell her the story behind it. With an iPhone and a smile, she found 420 people who let her take a photo of their body art and share the genesis story on her blog, A Stranger A Day (astrangeraday.tumblr.com).
In July, she captured a vividly coloured portrait of Karma that stretched from a man’s armpit to his hip (he got it just for art’s sake). Last October, she photographed a dot of ink below a woman’s eye (the stranger wanted to remember the tears she had shared with her husband). The tattoos vary, but Capelo discovered “something really beautiful” in the relationship all the strangers had with the art on their skin. “It’s hard to get someone to say something positive about their bodies,” she says. Not very many people say, ‘Oh look at my nose! Look at my fingers!’ But with tattoos, it’s very easy.”
On October 24, she posted her final photo, and cried. “I was done! I was just really happy. But that was about 30 seconds and then it was onto the show.” Less than two weeks later, she and three friends drew about 200 Vancouverites to a tiny, narrow art gallery on East Georgia Street to show the complete work. It was almost impossible to walk through the room and take in the images and stories; the gallery was packed with bodies. Attendees were waiting outside before the show even started at 7 p.m., many of whom were the inked strangers from her website. They’d heard about the one-night exhibit on CBC Radio or read about it on the blog Vancouver is Awesome and came to see their picture on the walls. “It was really cool,” the artist says. “One of my main goals of the show was to reach out to the strangers, and for them to see what they were a part of, because it was all about them.”
Each stranger’s tattoo gave Capelo a document of a meaningful encounter. “A few strangers came by and I couldn’t remember their faces. But they would show me their tattoo and I would say, ‘I remember everything about you now!’ And I would. I would remember where they were and who they were with.” As Capelo has learned, tattoos—or even pictures of them—make indelible memories and memories indelible. When a person gets a tattoo, she says, they’re choosing to put a story or image on them for the rest of their lives. No matter the circumstances of getting the tattoo, good or bad, “It’s a memory they don’t regret.”