Joolz Denby's Blog

Gold (c) Joolz Denby

The Bride stands at the latticed
window gazing out into the ineffable
dusk of her last maiden day,
the stepping silhouettes of the distant hills
shade on shade of tender dissolving blue,
the smoky rose and violet of sunset ashing
into the coming night.

A thread of incense smoke unwinds
its sweet sandalwood embroidery into the
warm air as she dreams,
her smooth young face hieratic and distant,
her eyes dark as holy pools,
her shining hair a tasselled braid
dropping to her knees uncut,
scented with jasmine and amber.

Tomorrow her almond-pale body
will be burnished, hennaed and
perfumed, then wrapped in her wedding sari,
the archaic weight of fabric more than simple cloth,
being freighted with symbolism
and heavy with women’s magic.
The sari, a serpentine length
of pigeon’s blood scarlet, brocaded, precious,
the core of its incantatory pattern a filament
of pure yellow gold, the metal drawn fine as gossamer,
woven into the very garment she will wear,
her future secured by its unchanging value
and as just as her mother did,
when the fine silk dulls and frays,
she will feed it to the fire which will
consume the silk leaving in the dross
the unchanging and eternal purity
of the sun’s sister, Gold.

There in the hot cinders it will glitter,
the indissoluble reminder of herself,
the knowledge that whatever she appears,
however the World sees her
what she is in essence remains
unchanging, faithful, pure.

This is her talisman,
like the old spiral wedding pendant
even her grandmother has forgotten the age of,
that shows the turning path of her life
trace from birth to death and back again
and will see her daughter’s journey
and will lie on the breast of her grandchild
when this same sun warms
her knotted hands and the veils
between life and death are worn transparent.

Her daughter, yet unborn,
will one day show her her dowry cloths,
just as she showed her own grandmother
the priceless saris, months in the making,
stamped and foiled in the same gold
that winds its threads through her wedding garment,
and watched the old woman sigh
and touch the bright designs gently, gently,
half-immersed in the past,
her heart a storehouse of mystery and wisdom,
understanding that like the fire that
burns the worn and discoloured silk
from the golden core,
pain tempers the spirit, and a woman,
like a spear-head or a good sword,
carries her strength in the beauty of not harming
where she might, in protecting that which needs her
and in turning the fierce edge of pride to creation,
not destruction.

The mother, having given birth,
also tends the dying;
Gold, blessing the Bride,
honours the Dead.

All that seems simple -
a shining yellow metal,
a young woman dreaming at dusk -
is complexity past imagination:
all that seems soft, weak, helpless -
a trembling Bride engulfed in her vestments,
a little ornament catching the light -
is enduring and unbowed beyond Time and Fortune.

Here is Gold. Here is The Bride.

Here is the mystic union.

Here is Gold.

The New Tattoo: A Meditation.
© Joolz Denby

I hate showing non-tattooed people my brand new, just-done-that-day work. They want to see it. Go on, show us, they beg. I refuse but they persist. We want to see, pleeease, they say, breathlessly. I try to explain that it’s not as it will be when it’s healed but they don’t - they can’t - understand that. They can’t really comprehend ‘healed’ because they don’t really understand the process involved. The whole concept of tattooing is so alien to them they imagine I’ll whip off the dressing and a luminously bright, smooth, unscabby, fully finished design will be all present and correct beneath. I imagine they think it might be a bit pink round the edges, but that’s all.

I look at their faces; I resist the desire to explain in long, tedious technical detail the actuality of tattooing, knowing from experience it’s pointless as nothing in their life experience comes close, either physically or psychologically. I cannot - no, I cannot - blame them for that.

So, if I can’t get out of it without looking completely rude and secretive, I resignedly (which is just as bad, to be honest - how grudging, how graceless) re-arrange my clothing, peel back a corner of the cling film wrapping taped to my flesh with stained micropore tape revealing the inky, bloody, Vaselined, serumey, swollen, sore-looking thing beneath. Like the viscous mass of the becoming butterfly roiling liquidised in the carapace of a chrysalis, my new tattoo is in a state of flux, bathed in it’s hot juices, not yet fully formed.

Not unlike a stigmatic revealing her wounds to the world, I try and look patient and calm. Oh, they say, these unmarked people. Sometimes even, urgh, yuk. Occasionally, Jesus. Then they tell me I must be braver than them, or I must be masochistic, or deranged, or a radical feminist man-hater, or have a deep-seated mental problem, or punishingly low self-esteem, or they ask me if I was always a rebel. They trot out what they fondly think are original remarks about self-mutilation or some grossly outrageous exhibitionist they saw displaying themselves on a T.V programme which proves - really - that I too am a screaming attention seeker and possibly, though they don’t say this often, a sexual pervert.

I refrain from remarking it was them who wanted to see the work in this state in the first place. Usually, I don’t say anything at all but let them run on while I cover up, annoyed at the way micropore never wants to stick again after you’ve unpeeled it. Annoyed at myself for giving in and thus subjecting myself to unkind or ignorant remarks. Annoyed at being annoyed. I surreptitiously do some yoga breathing to relax my clenched heart and pull my sleeve down or unroll my trouser leg. I smile, rather tightly, not showing my teeth.

In my youth I reacted more aggressively. I felt the need to justify myself, to cast my desire to be tattooed in terms which would be accepted, if not understood, by the untattooed. I cited ancient cultures, artistic temperament, a love of decoration and jewellery, even spirituality. Wildly I cast about for big reasons, vast excuses, undeniable arguments. I felt the need to crusade, to be the Jeanne D’Arc of tattoo, willing to be burnt at the stake of ignorance rather than give an inch. I berated my adversaries, I harangued them, I was bold, defiant, self-righteous and undoubtedly tiring company.

In those far off days, of course, a tattooed woman was something of a rarity, but I did have the enjoyably baroque excesses of Punk, and then Goth, on my side. I was part of a Youth Movement which to many, excuses a lot in young people. They thought I would grow out of it - the curious outfits, the bizarre hair, the exaggerated make-up. The uncompromising attitude. Somehow, in the broad sweep of their assumptions, was the feeling I’d grow out of my tattoos, too, and in the glowing maturity of my late twenties, with marriage, motherhood and comfortable respectability under my belt, some Greater Power would quietly reward my submission to the norm with a fresh new skin.

Oddly enough, none of those things happened.

Certainly I stopped dying my hair in lurid colours, or backcombing it amid a brain-damaging fog of hair spray to dizzy heights. The outfits were hung at the back of the closet (but not the jewellery) and anything black and stretchy became the ideal. The high-heeled pointy boots were replaced by trainers. The make-up subsided to a lick and a promise. But well, the tattoos stayed. Increased. Multiplied, even. They coiled, crept, enveloped, blossomed, inhabited more and more of my decidedly generous physique and I could no longer claim the dubious protection of a youth cult.

It became painfully obvious to my more conventional acquaintances and co-workers, as the years passed and I entered middle age, that I got tattooed because I wanted to. Worse, I wasn’t going to stop. And even worse still, I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed. I even go to the swimming pool regularly, in my utilitarian black Speedo, showing acres of skin, as if I was normal. Oh dear.

But none of this is to say I’m not aware of the consequences of what I’ve done to my body; or that I don’t have regrets. In my youth, I would never have admitted to regrets, that would have seemed like a surrender. But with age comes a certain inevitable elasticity of mind, and with longevity, experience. I have, as a little child I know told me, ‘seen stuff’. I have a different understanding of society than I did at twenty, or thirty, or even forty. I have the thoughts I have now, at this time; they sparkle, some sharply, some faintly, in my mind, like an infinity star field. Some of them are beautiful, all of them are points of fire. They are much more outrageous, and dangerous, than my frocks ever were.

So regret, the most touchy subject in tattoo world. It’s what taxi drivers always say to you:

‘Doncha regret ‘em, then, the tatts? Eh? A nice-lookin’ gell like you?’

We always, us tattooed people, say no, we don’t. I’d say it too, and often do. But it’s not true, for me. Or rather, to be more accurate, I regret society’s attitudes towards me, as a tattooee. I regret the damage my body art choices have done to my career, for example, and I regret the way some people react to me. But you can’t say that to a taxi driver, or a nurse, or a policeman, or a doctor, or a prospective employer, or a potential lover, all of whom repeat that phrase in terms appropriate to their culture and class. You can’t explain, at length, about prejudice because people never consider themselves prejudiced. They consider themselves right. So it’s easier to say no, no regrets. And really, what’s done is done, isn’t it? I certainly wouldn’t remove my tattoos, because I like them, they satisfy something in me, they are me, so that leaves only one option. Deal with them, and the reactions they bring. Take responsibility for my skin.

Does that sound a little ‘love me, love my tattoos’? Yes, I suppose so, and many people do, I’m pleased to note. There are always people out there just waiting to surprise you: the elderly lady at the pool who tells you how she’d love to have a rose on her hip, if - annoyingly - she wasn’t due for a hip replacement operation. The man who finds great pleasure in gently, with permission, tracing your art with his fingertip. The masseuse who tells you how much more pleasant it is to massage your illustrated skin, than plain old boring skins; nothing there to look at while you work. The sporty aerobicised gym girl who asks for your artist’s address so she can have a Pegasus on her back; winged, like her flying feet.

Fascinated people, wistful people, envious people, attracted people, people summoning up the courage to change. People who want to memorialise personal events on their skin, subsume memories into their living body, who want to honour love. Men who want their child’s name etched on their back; my daughter, my son, I’m so proud. Women who want to say they understand freedom at last; it’s in the mind, they know that now and they want to modify themselves without regard to the opinions of a damnable society whose criteria are solely in the marketplace. Because they’re worth it.

Sentimental people, fierce people, kind people, spiritual people, melancholics and artists, comics and high wire walkers. We go under the needles because we know that we’ll die one day; we know that we can live with what we do because we won’t live forever and beauty - well, it’s definitely skin deep.

But doesn’t it hurt? I get asked that at least once a week. And it does hurt; variably, but it hurts. We’re so scared of pain in the West, aren’t we? I am; the first twinge of a headache and I’m heading for the ibuprofen. But tattoo-pain is different; I choose, I submit, I tame my discomfort, I endure. For some, the pain is an offering, a transition, a metamorphosis from one part of life to another. For others, it’s an inconvenience to be borne, for some the bearing of such pain in public is a re-affirmation of pride and strength. Skinny little women bear it better quite often than musclemen. Some boys faint when they feel the actuality of what they screwed up all their hormone-whipped courage for; some girls remark it’s no worse than a Brazilian wax. Some talk all through the needle’s bite, the swabbing and the blood; some, silent, fix their eyes on distant horizons; some pray in their heads and remember as the name they can never forget blossoms from the mess. We are all blessed. We are a kind of family: An illustrated family.

So the new tattoo - it scabs, it itches abominably, it peels, it becomes splendid and it is no-one’s business but my own. Look, I’m not asking much - aside from world domination, calorie free Haagen Datz and eternal youth - but I’m asking you, yes, you reading this, if you’re not tattooed and you see a tattooed person, and that old urge comes over you to make a remark or ask a question; stop. Think about what you’re going to say and wonder - how do I look to them? Is my remark/question/observation useful and not offensive? Would I like it if they said it to me? And - gulp - have they heard the same thing a trillion times before? Think of it as an exercise for your mind; think of it as mind-expanding. Expand your mind to accept what’s different to you and remember, you’re incredibly different to some folk’s eyes.

There’s an old saying in the tattoo world: Tattooed People Don’t Care If You Don’t Have A Tattoo. There are variations, but that’s the gist of it. We don’t care if you haven’t got a tattoo - because, why would we?

So come on, celebrate with us; join in the human carnival, the fireworks, the candy-floss, the bright, whirling, brilliance of it.

You’re welcome.

Joolz Denby - A Critical Perspective.

Joolz Denby’s poem ‘Bradford’, from her latest collection Pray for Us Sinners (2005), celebrates her adopted northern city ‘lying crouched in its deep-sided valley’. Walking its multiracial and multicultural streets she finds ‘All the world is here, laid out in patchworks / of drenched and brilliant colour’, in the fruit and vegetables stalls, and fabric shops like ‘some dead caliph’s treasure’. At the heart of the city centre’s regeneration is Wool Exchange, where there are painted wooden archangels to be seen, and even the deserted mills are ‘telling their silent stories of what has been and what will be; / the deaths, the births, the fighting and the love, / all the humanity of it’. This seems to encapsulate much of her essential subject matter – even though, elsewhere in her poems, stories and novels, she summons up the dangerous darkness of its mean streets. The poem concludes with a significant last word: ‘in this northern city, under the terrible stars … we belong’. It is significant because her work actually teems with characters who feel themselves to be socially excluded, whether because of their class, racial identity, sexuality – and usually a mixture of all these things.



Known during her punk era simply as ‘Joolz’, Denby has become a multi-faceted writer and experienced performer, adept at presenting herself and engaging with audiences at venues such as pubs, clubs and festivals. She has appeared several times at Glastonbury, accompanied by jazz or rock musicians. Her poems and stories tend to be dramatic monologues, and can be bloodthirsty tales of love and death; brutally contemporary but equally as often told through figures taken from Beowulf or mythological sources. Her personal interests in tattooing (‘we can say with the bright mythology of our skins / I am myself’, she states in ‘Fortune favours the tattooed heart’) and body piercing are fully reflected in her works. She writes about non-conformists, from rock musicians to stand-up comics, and shows both knowledge of and sympathy for abused women, victims of drugs, drink and domestic violence. Extreme physical and mental suffering takes place in her work; violent men and female victims are commonplace. She really puts her characters (and by extension readers) through a psychological wringer.



All these features are apparent in the poems and stories in The Pride of Lions (1994), which is haunted by self-destruction, emotional desolation, and trapped lives. Women are the focus of these stories, whether washing a dead baby in hospital (‘No Memorial’), or waiting for a violent partner to get out of jail (‘Minuet’). In ‘Black Dog’, a suicidal woman imagines Death as ‘bold and savage but a gentleman, / perhaps the ideal lover … / it will be me he prizes’. The heavy irony of ‘The Perfect Couple’ is that they’re continually wrangling at each other over their failures in life: ‘love isn’t pity, but often, for the likes of her, it’s very close to it’. ‘Fuel to the flame’ is the monologue of a woman who is filled up with anger, ‘like a balloon full of fire’. In a strikingly prescient phrase, she wonders how often ‘the child’s belief howls in the heart of victims when the predator looms over them’.



Predators, their victims - and the ghosts emerging out of disturbed childhoods - indeed loom menacingly over her novels. This is particularly true of her first, Stone Baby (2000), a crime novel with Bradford as its backdrop to its story of serial killings and abusive relationships. Opening with statuesque stand-up comic Jamie Gee doing a gig to a hostile audience, the action then flashbacks to her involvement with her boyfriend (‘a poor man’s Brad Pitt’), whose actions become increasingly suspicious. Narrator Lily and Jamie’s circle of friends include an Asian drag queen, a tattooed musician who becomes a kind of guardian angel figure; all their lives are traumatized as the murders keep on happening, and the tense action concludes with shattering revelations and an armed siege. Corazon (2001) is a neatly choreographed gothic tale that similarly lurks darkly in the mind, in which sado-masochism, multi-racial friendships and gory deaths are prominent. Its main protagonist is Alma, adorned with tattoos and piercings, who escapes from her unhappy marriage in Bradford only to become entangled with a cult community while visiting her parents in Spain. The novel has a clever mythological framework as it leads the reader inexorably on to a terrifying conclusion. Denby does show an almost Edgar Allan Poe-like ability to imagine nightmare situations. Alma eventually finds herself trapped in a cave in darkness; her desperate efforts to find her way out of ‘the intestines of the earth’ are rendered genuinely scary.



Billie Morgan (2004), was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and has been aptly described as ‘a great page-turner about secrets and lies, revenge and eventual redemption’. Her most recent novel Borrowed Light (2006) features a familiar mix of female friends and dangerous men, this time transposed from Bradford to a surfing village in Cornwall. The arrival of the beautiful and flirtatious Angel (‘Fata Morgana breathing fire’) sparks off sexual rivalry among the men, with eventually murderous consequences. The importance of female friendship and mutual support is again well observed, especially between Astra and café-owner Con, amid the mounting threat of violence from a man who stalks Angel. The story culminates in revelations and a horrific discovery. Yet it contrives to end on a note of hope, as Astra, previously saddened by ‘the black, ragged stitch of victimhood through my life’, returns to Bradford, happily pregnant with her ‘secret’ child.



The poems and stories in Pray for Us Sinners (2005) have familiar subjects but much greater assurance in their storytelling, whether the setting is Bradford or re-imagined from Beowulf. Denby’s fascination with religious iconography takes various forms. Most captivating is the confession of the Madonna about the true father of her child (‘Love’). She also writes feelingly about love for the archangel Gabriel (‘the Goddess’ warrior prince’) and a woman’s religious visions in ‘The Prophet of Calgary’. The stand-out piece is also the longest: a monologue by ‘Hrothgar’s Queen’, telling the story of her rise to sexual and political power. Married to the king at 15, she vows ‘I would never again be helpless or under anyone’s dominion’. It is the monstrous Grendel (‘the greatest murderer / the world has ever known’) who becomes her own object of desire: ‘I wanted him; he was my equal, he was as full of power, / as full of rage as I was’. Grendel is therefore – yet another fascinatingly dangerous character. And the Queen is herself another of the female survivors who populate Denby’s stories. Bloodthirsty they may be, but they are often ingeniously done, and full of compassion.


Dr Jules Smith, 2008