AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I know my Wattpad friends have waited patiently, and I'm happy to announce (at last) the official beginning of LOU'S TATTOOS on Wattpad.  Because it has been many months since the Sneak Peek was posted, we'll begin today at the beginning.  Happy reading.

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(Our story is about a Miami tattoo artist in 1995. In case you don't remember 1995, this brief intro will bring you up to speed. If you remember 1995 well, or if you just hate reading introductions, feel free to skip right on over to Chapter 1. Happy reading.)

In 1995 photographs were made with film, phones were connected via landlines mostly, and tattoos were worn by a small percentage of the population, who comprised their own subculture of Americana.

Photographs

In 1995, photographs were developed and printed by the local drugstore or camera shop, and it took several days between dropping your exposed film canister at the shop and picking up your printed four- by six-inch pictures. If you planned to share your pictures, you ordered double prints, and you kept one set while mailing the other set to Aunt Agatha for the family scrapbook. The cost for having someone develop and print your pictures was substantial. If you took ten rolls of pictures (figuring from 12 to 36 shots per roll), you would spend well over a hundred dollars to see them.

Professionals and accomplished amateur photographers would set up their own "dark rooms" with basins of chemicals, enlarging/printing machines, and a clothesline for hanging wet prints to dry. This didn't save any money, since the chemicals and equipment were expensive, not to mention the special photographic paper, trimmers, and lighting required to establish such a personal photo lab. Having your own dark room, however, meant you had the ability to finesse your developing and printing in your own individual style, thus creating a unique work of art out of every photo negative.

Photographic magazines such as National Geographic would typically send photographers into the field with ice chests full of film. For a single article containing six or so finished pictures, a photographer would often take hundreds of shots and return to the magazine with a cooler full of exposed film rolls ready for developing. The hundreds of negatives would be developed into hundreds of color slides (they would not be printed on paper). The magazine editors would line up the slides on flat glass "light boxes" and study the pictures under a magnifying lens. A half dozen slides would be chosen for printing in the magazine and the rest either archived or discarded.

How much faster and easier it is in 2017 to snap digital photos with a phone, a tablet, or even (gasp!) a camera. We see the finished picture immediately. We share it electronically with anyone, anywhere in a few seconds. We pay nobody in order to see and keep and share our photos. Camera shops are almost nonexistent (although many drug stores still have photo departments), and most of us have never even seen a dark room, much less constructed or used one.

Wireless Telephones

Telephones in 1995 were connected by wires, except for the basic, not-smart cellular phones with one-inch-square, black-and-white screens. The menus were rudimentary and usually limited to contact list, call history, and speed-dialing codes one through ten. With rare exceptions, there were no keyboards on these wireless phones; to type a message you tapped the alpha-numeric keypad. For example, if the number 2 on the keypad was also labeled ABC, you would tap number 2 once for A, twice for B, and thrice for C. If the number 5 corresponded to JKL, you would tap number 5 once for J, twice for K, and thrice for L. As you can imagine, typing out an entire sentence in this manner took time, patience, and determination. Abbreviations proliferated very quickly. You could tap four times to write the word "to," or you could just substitute the one-tap "2." To write "you" took eight taps, or you could substitute "U," which took only two taps. School teachers would later blame text messaging for the loss of spelling and grammar skills in children and teens.

For international calling or calling to and from remote areas, a few people used the more expensive satellite phone, which was about the size and shape of a brick. While the basic cellphone could fit in your pocket, the satellite phone would rip your pants off if you tried to cram it into your khakis. These brick-phones were heavy, expensive, and ugly, but in their day they were state-of-the-art for communicating without wires in remote locations.

All of this changed in 2007, when Apple introduced the first iPhone. In 1995, however, the iPhone wasn't even a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye, probably. However, that might not be true, given the visionary nature of his extraordinary mind. Perhaps, with his innate genius, he had conceived of the iPhone while playing with his Playskool portable radio at age three.

Tattoos

Tattoos have a much more prominent and accepted place in 2017 society than they had in the late 1990s. According to one Huffington Post article, tattoos, at the time our story is set, were common only "...on sailors, prison inmates, and members of tough motorcycle gangs. If you looked at accountants, pro ping-pong players, or shoe salesmen though, it would have been pretty rare to find some ink." According to the same article, even ten years after the time of Lou's Tattoos, society remained prejudiced against tattoos, "... and, while some people were getting them on their own, no one would say tattoos were a part of pop culture." (, co-authored by Victor Chateaubriand, accessed 9/28/16)

The AARP polled members over age 65 in 2016 and deduced that just five per cent of those senior adults had tattoos, which they would have gotten in the late 1990s. Estimates from various sources place the percentage of today's 18- to 25-year-olds having tattoos at anywhere from thirty to thirty-eight per cent, or roughly one-third of young adults. (AARP Magazine, June-July 2016, accessed 8/10/17.)

The Huffington Post, in its article quoted above, deduced that in today's world, "Having a tattoo can be an expression of who you are. Or what you believe in. Or something you cherish. Or just something you thought was fun. The prejudice, not having disappeared completely, is certainly greatly diminished."

You'll find more on the history and cultural aspects of tattoos, when Appendix 2, "Tattoo Trivia," is posted at the end of this book.

You'll find more on American pop culture in 1995, when Appendix3, "Pop Culture '95," is posted at the end of this book.  

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