CULTURE DRIVE Barbering and Tattoo feature
CULTURE DRIVE
Barbering and Tattoo feature
Body
OF WORK THE ART OF TATTOO Zack Kassian is talking about his body. “Your elbow hurts a lot,” laments the Edmonton Oilers grinder and Essex County native. “Your wrists. The ribs suck. When you’re younger, you try to tough it out, but the pain aspect, it’s not fun.” Listed at 6’3” and 209 pounds, the 27-year-old-winger is nobody’s vision of a shrinking violet on the ice. But he’s not talking about hockey today. “Anyone who says getting a tattoo feels good is lying to you,” stresses the well-inked NHLer. “The back, particularly along the spine, or when your bicep meets the inside of your arm—they call it ‘the ditch’—none of it really feels good while the inking is happening, to be honest. But when it’s over, it’s that feeling: ‘It looks good; what can I get next?’” Kassian’s refreshingly machismo-free outlook speaks to a salient truth about the place of tattooing in contemporary masculinity: increasingly, opting to subject yourself to a tattoo gun says very little about you, at all. Even committing to a full sleeve no longer connotes toughness, mystery or some sort of inarticulable otherness. These days, it’s just the art that matters. A former Spitfire and Canadian youth international, Kassian belongs 48
By Jesse Ziter | Photography: Syx Langemann
