Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova are founders of the Detroit Tattoo Project, which will slice a new poem into 250 words of phrases that will become individual tattoos – and a collective show of love for the city. Here, the two professors, who started a similar project in Lexington, Kentucky and Boulder, Colo., write about the origins of the project and share the newly commissioned poem.

We first traveled to Detroit in April 2014, following an invitation by a Detroit native who had recently left Boulder for a move back home. Inspired both by the energy of the Boulder Tattoo Project and by the amazing community she found in Detroit, she wrote to us, asking us to consider creating another city-based tattoo project in her hometown. After spending three days photographing street art, talking with people and getting to know Detroit, we felt as fiercely committed to the city as many of the citizens with whom we spoke. So we asked friends for suggestions of a poet who would write the poem at the center of the artwork we found.  We commissioned Detroit native Jamaal May to write a poem as a love letter to the city and the Detroit Tattoo Project was unofficially born.

On our next trip to Detroit, we met with Ash Nowak, another Detroit native, co-founder and artistic director of Haute to Death. Ash agreed to be the project manager and community liaison for the Detroit Tattoo Project. Our team was complete. In October, 2014, the Detroit Tattoo Project received a Knight Arts Challenge Detroit grant for its goal to create a visible statement of Detroiters’ commitment to their city and build a network of people supporting each other. We were thrilled.

Three trips and a year after our first visit to Detroit, we returned for the official launching of the Detroit Tattoo Project. On the first day of spring 2015, May read “To Detroiters I Too May Have Called by the Wrong Name” in front of a small crowd. The electricity in the air was palpable. It had nothing to do with spring storms.

Although the Detroit Tattoo Project is still in its fundraising stage, we have started to consider different ways to divide May’s poem into 250 single words and phrases. We will design each of them as a unique tattoo, so that each project participant will forever own a piece of this artwork on their body.

Read May’s poem below. Poet Jamaal May. Photo courtesy jamaalmay.com. 

TO DETROITERS I TOO MAY HAVE CALLED BY THE WRONG NAMES

Jamaal May

Sorry. When I called you a graveyard, I meant your round, stone teeth always make me laugh. When I said you couldn’t touch me I meant, tag you’re it. Follow me! Follow me! I called you a tangle of vines because you didn’t let me fall out of love with your hair. When I called you a land of too much sleep, I meant keep dreaming me up and I’ll keep dreaming of you. And since I can’t be anything but a mirror facing another mirror when I walk past a building, I have to stare into us rudely. You’re nosey like me, and curious like me, so you know I have to wander some and wonder more which holes need to be patched and which are here to offer another view. I never meant to curse you with my dead, but since they’ll come for you anyway, family, may every ghost find you ready to wrestle them into canvas or wood. May every haunting be a symphony of wind through every hollow and every tree, and every corner of every structure be a violin’s bridge you cross or burn, breathing like a vibrated note. Sisters and brothers of the vibrato, of the backyard smoke, of the Nain Rouge, I know your kind of red, roja, how it blends impossibly with blue, how it smears the bruise of you to color an evening into the next sunrise purple. Mirror, last night you slept and I became a camera in front of your film. Then a finger stepped on a guitar string and an endless workday fell away just like that. A paintbrush spoke plainly to a hand. A mural crept up a wall without waking anyone, and a microphone trapped the sound of a siren on a bedroom mixtape forever. Detroit, when I said you’re dreaming, I meant, you are dreaming. Keep making me up. When I said your pet phoenix was a bad omen, I should’ve said, I read way too many comic books and I just wish it could breathe fire. I told you my back itches where the wings used to be, but I meant, will anyone still believe me when I whisper my song about flight? What I meant by, let the trappers come, was when they do, let them bring their most gilded cages that they might know there are birds yes, but also, here there be dragons—mad dragons, son. May your forked tongues always be surrounded by fire. Your wings a deafening applause. I’ve written your feathers across me, and now I marvel at your scales. May I always be infinitesimal and infinite in your belly. Swallow my whole heart whole. And when they come to defang you, Beast, Brother, Love, Sister, Art, City, may they find the streets jagged with the previous conquerors’ teeth.