Their stories live close to the surface – chronicles of war tinged with personal trials, indelibly embedded in their skin.
In painful, sometimes hours-long sessions under the tattooist’s needles, soldiers and survivors compose an illustrated history of campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan – a living archive of the most intimate sort.
They’ve inked the names of wives and children; dates of deployments, births and deaths; flags and unit logos; intensely personal symbols and Bible verses. In a stark reminder of the stakes, young soldiers anticipating first combat have requested “meat tags,” information inked on the rib cage to help identify bodies in a worst-case scenario. Between the outlines, in plain sight, lie their unique interpretations of pain and conflict.
“THE BAR CODE TO MY LIFE”
Staff Sgt. Edward Tillman’s arms chronicle the payback for his moral bargain to survive combat.
He went over with the 4th Infantry Division in the spring of 2003, part of the first thrust into Iraq. He returned in 2005 to face an ever-more-lethal insurgency.
Staff Sgt. Edward Tillman, 29, has thick, brown arms covered with ink. Reflections of his deployments mingle with a tapestry of punk-rock logos and assorted personal graphics.
But no meat tag.
“I’m a wuss,” Tillman laughs. “Not on my rib cage.”
He wandered into A-Z Masters Tattooing and Piercing, about a mile down B Street from Fort Carson, shortly after returning from his first Iraq tour in February 2004. He got his name and the proud declaration “Made in USA” inked on his left arm.
It reflected a basic truth – but not the whole truth – about how war had changed him.
“I saw things I never thought I’d see,” Tillman says. “When I came back, I had typical PTSD symptoms. I turned to drinking heavily, smoking, I was sexually active – not your typical moral values.” 
By the time he embarked on his second Iraq tour in December 2005, he’d struck a bargain.
“Like a New Year’s resolution, I made personal bets with myself – that if I come back alive, this is how I’ll live my life,” he says. “That motivated me, gave me more hope.”
One of the Christian soldiers in his unit had tattooed a book, chapter and verse from the Bible on his left upper arm. Tillman, who considers himself more spiritual than religious, asked what it meant.
“If God is for us, who can be against us?”
The words struck him as a direct application to his circumstances – “If I survived a second time,” he figured, “maybe there is a God.”
Three months after his return to Fort Carson last November, he once again visited the tattoo shop. On the inside of his right forearm, he commissioned a sparrow – an old-school tattoo symbol popularized by sailors – beneath a banner reading: HOPE.
The piece, his first in two years, took 3 1/2 hours to tattoo and inspired one overriding thought: This really hurts.
“That was my rite of passage coming back again,” he says. “A lot had to do with the deployment itself. It was harder. The danger was more present. But I always had hope – within myself and with my buddies – to make it out alive, together. It was also hope to overcome my personal obstacles and come back to see our families and live to fight another day.”
He wasn’t finished with the ink.
In early March, he went back and got a second tattoo: the letters SXE, shorthand for the Straight Edge music movement that began in the 1980s and touted a lifestyle featuring abstinence from alcohol, drugs and premarital sex.
It represented a step toward fulfilling his survival promise to himself.
A couple of weeks later, he had the artist ink two small red crosses on his right arm, and between them the citation from his buddy’s Bible verse: Romans 8:31.
He sees his tattoos depicting a saga of personal maturation.
“They’re who I am,” Tillman says. “They’re like the bar code to my life.”
“THEY DO THIS TO FEEL SOMETHING”
Tattooists witness bravado going to war, darkness coming back.
Mike Stone sees them come in – barely adults and giddy with newfound independence – and go crazy with the ink.
About 90 percent of the business at A-Z Masters comes from the soldiers at nearby Fort Carson, and their taste in body art runs the gamut.
Some come in laughing, Stone says, anticipating their first combat deployment and, in a dramatic show of machismo, ask for meat tags.
“They say, ‘It’s so my body can be ID’d,”‘ he explains. “But they really want it put there to show that they’re not afraid, they’re nonchalant about being blown up.
“But let’s face it: Nobody wants to go over there and die.”
At Top Notch Tattoos, a storefront about one click down B Street from the Fort Carson gates, JonBoy Elliott’s business rises and falls with the rhythm of the military deployments.
“I’ve been noticing some military guys getting portraits of their kids,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of yellow ribbons with American flags in them, some memorial tattoos, a lot of Bible verses, before they go over – or if they’ve gone and come back.”
But those who come back often request something darker than the designs inked before their deployment. Elliott has done a grim reaper toting an M-16. One soldier requested a tattoo with a skull to represent the soul of each enemy soldier he’d killed.
Lee Barfield, the owner-artist of Affordable Tattoos and Piercing in Colorado Springs, has done memorial pieces, designs with names and dates and dog tags hanging from combat boots or praying hands, flags coupled with phrases like “Freedom Isn’t Free.”
She sees the needles as therapy for soldiers in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“They realize they’re a little wounded, but not dead,” she says. “They’re feeling numbness, and they do this to feel something. It’s a healing thing.”
But she has also seen the damage.
A young man recently returned from Iraq sat in Barfield’s chair while she applied a memorial tattoo.
She’d seen him in her shop before, just a regular kid. But now he told her a disturbing story about a lull between firefights. With no enemy in sight, the soldiers turned their weapons on a dog.
They fired a few rounds, but the dog didn’t die. So they fired a few more. Then they ran over it with their armored vehicle, just to hear the bones crunch.
“They had programmed themselves to be hard,” Barfield recalls. “The whole thing was about not losing the programming. But he was laughing when he told the story, and it kind of scared us.
“And I realized that some will come home mean.”
“HE MADE ME WHO I AM”
He took a bullet and a bomb for his country. Surely she could brave a needle to memorialize him.
Driving home after a stirring ceremony mixed with staggering emptiness, two young widows figured: Why not?
Crystin Bradfield and her friend had just watched their husbands’ unit – the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment – march into the gymnasium at Fort Carson to recordings of patriotic music. Joyous reunions had erupted all around them.
Some soldiers talked about heading for a tattoo parlor to memorialize lost comrades.
Hoby Bradfield had died seven months earlier in Tall Afar, Iraq, after a sniper’s bullet wounded him in the neck. He might have survived. But as he was driven to a medical helicopter, the Humvee that carried him struck an improvised bomb. 
The driver died instantly. Hoby died a little while later.
As the two women drove away from the welcome-home ceremony, the initially laughable notion of getting themselves tattooed slowly gained traction. They headed to a shop where Crystin’s brother had been inked.
At the tattoo parlor, Crystin warmed to the idea before her aversion to needles gave way to second thoughts. Her friend, the Humvee driver’s widow, gently chided her: Hoby had taken a bullet.
Couldn’t she endure a tattoo?
“Small and simple,” Crystin told the artist.
The women settled on identical designs.
The artist went to work on the right side of Crystin’s lower back. It took only six minutes, with none of the excruciating pain she expected. He outlined a small star and filled it with gold ink – a widely recognized symbol of a soldier who has died in the line of duty.
Beneath the star the artist etched the date of Hoby’s death: 7.9.05.
It had been a whirlwind romance. They married five weeks and six days after they met, as Crystin struggled through classes to become a dental assistant and considered quitting. Hoby pushed her to stick it out, made her believe in herself. 
She was seven months pregnant when her husband died.
“He was such an important part of my life – he made me who I am,” Crystin says. “There’ll never be a day in my life that I won’t have a picture of him in my house or talk about him with somebody.”
One willing listener: Kloe Adele Bradfield, born less than two months after her father’s death.
Crystin met most of Hoby’s family for the first time when she traveled east to bury her husband in Arlington National Cemetery, near his Virginia home. Now, at 22, she has begun taking classes toward a degree in elementary special education, ventured into another relationship and put her house near Divide up for sale.
She’s moving to Virginia – in part to rear Kloe near Hoby’s family.
And she’s not quite through with the needles.
Sometime soon, she says, she’ll have a second piece done opposite Hoby’s gold star. It will be a small depiction of the sun, underscored by another date: 9.3.05.
Kloe’s birthday.
Between the sun and the star, she’ll have the Earth inked into her skin and connected to the other elements with some sort of winding design.
“Because at one point in time,” she says, “him and her were my entire world.”
“I REMEMBERED WHO I DID IT FOR”
Four hours under the needles pays tribute to a fallen squad leader.
The needles push yellow ink into the skin just below Farley Fergerson’s left shoulder, but beads of red rise to the surface and mingle with the pigment.
“Isn’t it neat,” deadpans A-Z Masters artist Mike Stone, “how it turns orange with the blood?”
Fergerson, 24 and recently returned from Iraq, hasn’t sat for a tattoo for nearly a year and a half. But now it’s all coming back to him – the sensation of someone repeatedly slapping a raw sunburn.
“It feels just like I remember it,” says Fergerson, who joined the Army right out of high school in the southern Colorado town of Rye.
In the summer of 2003, Fergerson first walked into a tattoo shop near Fort Bragg, N.C., after eight months in Afghanistan with the Army’s 82nd Airborne.
He perused the array of stock designs and decided to ink a “tribal band” on the upper portion of his left arm, a circle of thorny spikes that seemed at once gung- ho and reflective. In the wavy design, he saw the ups and downs of his tour.
Two hours under the needles felt like a rite of initiation but left him with a sense that the worst was over.
Except that it wasn’t.
His unit returned without casualties from a 2004 deployment to Iraq, and Fergerson left the 82nd and returned to Colorado, where he pulled duty one weekend a month with the National Guard.
But then came tragic news: His former squad leader, a sergeant named Travis Nixon, had been killed by enemy fire during his second stint in Afghanistan.
Fergerson felt moved to memorialize his friend. Below his right shoulder, an American flag has been inked into his skin just as it appears on the sleeve of his uniform, with Nixon’s full name and dates of birth and death. It’s surrounded by arching script: “All Gave Some, Some Gave All.”
Fergerson spent four hours in the chair with a sense of mission that transformed the pain into something good. 
“Where his name starts and ends, that was really painful,” he recalls, tracing the flesh with his finger. “But I took it a lot easier because I remembered who I did it for.”
Later, when he learned that the Colorado Army National Guard’s 169th Fires Brigade out of Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora would be deploying to Iraq, Fergerson signed on for his third overseas combat tour.
The 169th headed to Iraq in July 2006 and came home a year later without suffering a single casualty.
Recently, he sketched out a tattoo to capture the essence of his three deployments and e-mailed it to Stone at A-Z Masters.
For $160, Stone spends 2 1/2 hours hunched over Fergerson’s arm, bringing the concept to life.
Fergerson composed his design based on a logo from the fantasy video game “Zelda” – a large triangle divided into three upright and one upside-down triangles. Outside the edges of the larger triangle, he wrote the dates and locations of his three tours.
The three corner triangles he shaded yellow, mimicking the video game logo.
In the upside-down center triangle, Fergerson reproduced Arabic characters that some locals in Mosul wrote for him on a 3-by-5 card – a word that captured the sum of his war experience.
“Chaos.”
A history of tattoos among military personnel
The tradition of military tattoos has never been stronger and remains rooted not only in design, but process.
“Part of what goes on with military tattoos is transformation — there’s pain, anxiety, and you get through it,” says Terisa Green, a California-based expert on the popular form of body art. “And with memorial tattoos, there’s a right of passage that’s going on.”
Green, who has a doctorate in anthropology and two books on tattoos to her credit, notes that the military’s history of tattoos can be traced to Julius Caesar’s invasion of Great Britain in 55 B.C.
In an article for “American Legion Magazine,” she noted that Caesar found the Britons’ tendency to paint themselves a bluish-green — a practice later determined to be tattooing — gave them a “horrific” and intimidating appearance on the battlefield.
The American Civil War marked a major surge in the popularity of military tattoos linked to specific events. The naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack spawned tattoos celebrating victory — on both sides of the indecisive clash.
The tattoo tradition has continued with each generation, as soldiers have used them to signify membership in a military unit or memorialize lost comrades.
The art itself has evolved, from the often cartoonish, standardized body art of World War II to elaborate original designs of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
As tattoos have gained popularity — some surveys show as much as a third of adults under age 30 have gotten “inked” — the U.S. military has eased some restrictions on tattoos.
“What the military has done is acknowledge the reality of the situation,” says Green. “All major branches revised their rules to acknowledge the fact that the people coming in are more heavily tattooed than in the past. Still, they try to place requirements. The number one thing they don’t want to see is something that’s anti-social that ruins cohesion for the group.”
By Kevin Simpson
