No Idols Tattoo

It is never too late to wake up and change your mind about who you are, or even who you can be.

Jon Mesa is the case and point example of this.

Photo by Hailey Cognetti

I saw him before I met him, passing by the shop on Orchard Street to Cafe Katja (one of my favorite restaurants in New York because it feels like home).

One night I’d see him crafting a considerable piece on someone’s back, a week or so later I’d see him and a couple of the other artists seated in the brightly lit studio speaking into microphones.

I sat at the Katja bar sipping a Beeks Knees one night and asked Ming (filmmaker, bartender, friend) “Do they do a podcast over there?”

”Yes,” he confirmed. He also told me that they came over after the podcast.

I got to know No Idols before I got to know John. Sort of grew up in the place, popping in to get a heart tattoo on my left hand (I did the right one first, thinking I wanted the left one clear for when I got a ring on it).

I got my first heart tattoo out of a flash book in SoHo. My ex and I had talked about it in Copenhagen a day or two after we decided we should probably break up. He was going to get leg tattoos and I was going to get one on my middle finger. I have eight of them now.

Jon and I fell into a conversation on the sidewalk in a way Jane Jacobs would be proud of–bopping from AI to art to the neighborhood as he inched away from his shop, closing up for the night.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

The answer was upstate and that surprised me. As a young person in New York, I was still functioning under the assumption that cool people in New York all live in New York.

“I have a house up there,” he said, “and space.”

We really hit it off about tech and AI. How companies are investing in the hardware as we get to weirder and more abstract places.

“I’m gonna write about you,” I told him. That’s how I decide who to profile. I meet an interesting person or place and it just sort of has to feel right and I blurt it out. There’s no corporate strategy. Just walking around and hanging out.

Jon and I tried to coordinate times for me to swing by the shop, once with my little notebook thinking I’d spend the whole day there, later a giant book on Internet Art. Even though I’d been in the shop myself three times by then to get tattooed, I didn’t really meet No Idols until I met the artists in No Idols.

I had a brief chat with Jon my first time in the place after deciding to write about it. He told me that he’d done one lip tattoo before, and that mine hadn’t been done the right way if it was already peeling. That you had to go deep enough for it to feel like the needle was going to go through.This makes me shiver.

That’s how I feel about profiles, I think. You have to take the time. To really immerse yourself in a place, until everyone in there is thinking what is she doing here, and then oh it’s her, she’s here, and then you become (almost) one of them, until they let you in, if you’re lucky.

Ermis

Ermis is from Greece and I have Greek Oregano to prove it. I left the bag above my furnace the first day, on accident, and the whole apartment smelled heavenly. I felt pride in this oregano as my Grandmother declared that the type she buys in Kansas isn’t “her oregano anymore.”

Ermis is a visual artist doing everything from drawing and painting to, of course, tattoos. We connect over some of our favorite painters, and as I sat there, chatting with him, looking at pictures of his beagle, and showing him exhibits of Internet art in my library book, it suddenly hit me that I couldn’t really know No Idols in the way I needed to until their hands were on the tattoo gun and the needle was in my skin.

“Will you give me a heart?” I asked Ermis. He said yes. I can’t remember if I did it that time or came back later, but before I knew it he had the iPad out and was sketching hearts that looked like my others.

When I got the first one at 22, I’d asked the artist how small he could make it. I still felt like I was marring myself with something, even if the mar meant love.

“I want you to draw it how you would do it,” I told Ermis. By this time, I’d gotten much warmer to tattoos and had also cultivated a reverence for artists who were still alive. Realized I didn’t need a tragic story and time for someone’s work to age to find it beautiful.

He took a few more moments with the iPad.

“I would do it like this.” He handed it back to me with these crosshatched hearts. One horizontal, one vertical. It was dainty, but cute. I recognized the style from the sticker he gave me the first time I met him (so maybe he tattooed me the second).

And then I sat on his station (where another artist had once given me a hip tattoo) after contemplating just pulling down my tights upstairs and finally running downstairs to the leopard and red and black bathroom. I’ve never been shy with my body. Ballet conditioned me to change in front of everyone, like each outfit was a costume and we were all just preparing for the next scene.

He started on one heart. Then moved onto the next.

“What do you wish people knew when they came in to get tattooed?” I asked him.

He explained that people find him intimidating, but he’s really just focused whenever he’s tattooing. That if he’s quiet, they should not take it personally.

I used to get nervous in chairs when I modeled as a kid (18 is still childhood). I’d sit in hair and makeup thinking that each person in the process was someone I’d need to win over.

“I have something to tell you, but I’m going to wait until I’m done,” Ermis said.

“Now I’m nervous,” I said, giggling. Anticipatory phrasing like this puts me in a weird spot. Like a kid who has cut a square out of her mother’s special golden tablecloth in the kitchen drawer that was once used in a ballet to portray a picnic in heaven and knows the hole will be found out, not now, but soon.

Ermis finished the tattoos. I sat looking at the new hearts on my own thighs.

“What if we get tattoos tonight, Hailo?” my ex had said in Copenhagen.

“We could,” I think I said. It was raining. The bars were open and none of them had a cover. I was wearing a cheap slip I sometimes slept in and a Miu Miu overcoat that was too light and didn’t fit. At least not well.

We both backed out. We were young and afraid.

“Hearts are the hardest because they are symmetrical," Ermis said.

And I looked down at the tattoos on my thighs.

“Thank you,” I said, “I love it.”

Kerri

There’s a memory device for remembering people’s names. If you take a moment to connect them to someone else–a character, a moment, a friend– with the same name, then you will remember their name forever. And Kerri, to me was like Stephen King and Courtney Love’s Carrie, because she has these gorgeous 90s eyebrows and perfect lips that you’d expect in a Y2k makeup tutorial.

And she most importantly, is kind. Speaks with a smile, welcoming people into the shop with warmth and joy to be there. She runs around the block grabbing food and coffees and lights up when she talks about her boyfriend.

I ask if there’s a playlist on. Kerri explains that it’s a radio station, which feels perfect for this place. Eclectic, yet cool. Very different characters in the same set, composing a perfect balance between cool and warm–the type of shop where you know you’re in good hands, but you’re not intimidated by the place.

(Kerri’s family is going to Puerto Rico soon. If you have recs, please comment them)

Coco and Pumpkin

The heart tattoo I got during a reading, by Coco

Coco is slower to warm up in a way I both respect and am envious of. She knows she doesn’t need to win anyone over. I ask where she’s from. The answer is Poland. She was going back for the holidays and contemplating what to get her family for Christmas. And soon enough, we’re discussing Pumpkin, her small long-haired Chihuahuah.

“My life changed when I got her,” says Coco. She also shows me a picture of a fat pug from home and I’m not sure if home is New York or Poland, but I’m doubling over with laughter and watching Pumpkin run around and bark at bigger dogs and I am grateful that Coco is talking to me because she has the sort of demeanor I almost wish I could study and take on.

One day I ask to see her work. It’s cute, in the purest sense of the word. Incredibly detailed and realistic and interpretive. It’s whimsical yet still grounded. I want her to tattoo me in 2025. Partially because I should save up the money instead of acting on impulse. Partially because I want to finish this profile and make it interactive.

But most viscerally, Coco has left me with the strong desire to adopt a small dog. She explains that her life changed, that it’s beautiful to come home and have a little creature who is excited to greet you and see you and have you there. That she brings her around with her and Kerri confirms that people approach them all with such excitement.

My publicist, Sean Forde, and I briefly discussed adopting a joint Chihuahua. My roommate will not buy in (yet).

Jon Mesa

photos by Hailey Cognetti

Jon reminds me of my brother immediately. Even when I just noticed him afar, and I’m not entirely sure why. I watch him from afar at the shop, as he works on a large piece on someone’s back. Eventually, I sit across from him, like the chair is a table and we are conducting a very important meeting. He opens up bit by bit. Born in the DR. He’s moved around a bit.

“You’ll never guess what I was doing before I was doing this,” he says.

And I try to guess. Barista, Actor Finance.

And the answer is fitness. He worked in a gym, and one day he took an interest in tattooing and learned technique and fell in love with tattoo-y tattoos.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

He laughs good naturedly–he has a great laugh– “They’re just like classic tattoos, like koi fish…tattoos that look like tattoos…”

He shows me photos of his work and the stuff is brilliant. So surreal I feel like I’m looking at a Rembrandt.

We briefly discuss his experience influencing. How it was fun, but not entirely fulfilling. His time in a private studio off Bowery. His favorite places and designers, like The Flower Shop and Ralph Lauren, and his belief that you should dress well.

A few weeks later, at Fossetta, we sit across from one another over a spritz and a glass of wine. I’m not giving him the energy I want to, but I don’t want to tell him that it’s because I’m mourning, and he tells me that he doesn’t open up a whole lot, especially about pain–that it’s a habit he gets from his mother, and I think me, as well, even though I do not say it.

We talk about his time on Reality TV. He was/is an Ink Master Star, which Hailey Cognetti and I gush over after she takes his photo around the shop.

“You just gotta be yourself,” Jon says, about reality TV “You have to not care. They’re going to edit you how they edit you.”

And it’s now that I realize why he reminds me of my brother. My brother was always a controversial figure in our suburban Kansas town. He was always exactly who he wanted to be. He explored his identity in a way people didn’t understand, giving me permission to do so as well. And he loved the people close to him fiercely.

“What’s next for you?” I asked Jon.

And Jon said the most beautiful thing. As someone who, on all accounts is extremely successful in his field. He explained that he didn’t know if he wanted to have a shop forever, to be tied to a physical space, because he has an eight year old son, and family in DR, and a partner who he ran into so many times that it had to be fate and they did Omakase for their first date and he gave her a ride to work and parted in an act of true romance, and that he realized, is realizing, as he gets older and more and more successful, that he really just wants to slow down and spend time with the people that he loves.

And I’m sitting across from him with a glass of red wine, thinking about how this is the great human truth and he has articulated it so well, so beautifully with gusto and verve and absolutely no hesitation or shame.

So much of my life own has been spent trying to shirk a shame I never really understood. A shame I could never pinpoint, since I was taught to not be shy with my body, but I guess to never mar it.

And Jon is light and joyful and seems to be carefree, for the brief time I’ve been lucky to know him.

On a different day, I’m sitting in the shop in the evening. He prepares his station and I pull down my lip, and I’m remembering what he said about going so deep that it feels like the needle is going to go through, and the different iterations of a life Jon has seen, and how life just happens, and suddenly you have property and a child and a digital footprint and you can look back and think this is my life and look forward and think and this is what it could be next.

I ask Jon to put on his meta glasses as he tattoos my lip. Because I was afraid. But then, it didn’t hurt and I realized we could have fun with it. That’s life. Anticipation of the pain. The pain of changing your life. Of creating one. Or deciding on something new. But you feel it and it becomes a part of you, and you move onto something new, with the impact and memories of the past.

I’m going to get another heart at No Idols. Not out of heartbreak, like I always have in the past. But out of hope for the future. Vote to decide where. And go see Jon. Tell him where you want to go with your life, and if you’re honored with the company of his bright optimism, then perhaps you too will realize that you can start over at any given moment. Decide on a new dream. And pursue it, (tattoo) guns ablazing.

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