By Crow Jonah Norlander
I made it into my thirties with too few rash decisions and regrets. I was tired of being measured and playing it safe. I wanted a tattoo. I’d had permission from my mom since age 14 so long as I wanted the same thing for a full year beforehand, and even when I had an idea that stuck, I balked. That, and I’m a fainter.
Then came endless vaccinations and suddenly needles weren’t so scary. I still felt intimidated by the macho shops, so my friend Mary Alice had a tip. Go stick and poke. Sit in someone’s homey living room, admire their fiddleleaf fig, listen to records. She said Frances is the best: clean, profesh, friendly. A few IG DMs and a short sitting later, I had my first tattoo: a tiny molcajete on my forearm. Frances’ easy presence and calm conversation kept me conscious, and I was hooked.
For my ~seventh, Frances spent half a day poking my hero Mark Baumer peeking out from a flowering bush semi-permanently by hand and needle onto my shoulder, and what follows is a condensation of our conversation as we were each half-distracted by intense task focus and moderate physical discomfort.
Were you ever in a bike gang?
I grew up on Vinalhaven up in Midcoast, and me and my summer friends would totally ride around on our bikes. First thing in the morning, you wake up, you have breakfast and then you ride all around the island and look for where the pile of bikes is, because there was no cell phone connection out there until two years ago. I also didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was maybe 12.
Was it just not presented to you as an opportunity to learn?
I have a weird phobia of things with wheels. I don’t trust them. I don’t have a driver’s license, I had a really hard time with bikes, I have a really hard time with skateboards, I don’t know. I don’t trust them. They don’t stay still. They roll everywhere.
So you lived on the island?
Yeah, yeah, so I went to kindergarten, first, second grade in Los Angeles, and then moved from there to Vinalhaven for third, fourth, and fifth grade. It’s an hour and a half ferry ride from the mainland, so not living on the island and going to school there is pretty impossible. I was out there for three years. Probably left the island like three times in that whole stretch.
How big was your class?
Nine people.
Are any of them doing anything interesting now?
It’s a mixed bag. Most of them are still on the island. I think one of them went away to college. One of them is starting some kind of cool homestead situation, where she’s rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals, so she has three raccoons just in her house. But yeah, they all graduated. I think for the most part they’re fishin’ and working at the school or the post office or whatever. There’s very much a culture of like, if you leave, you’ve sort of given up on the island, or you aren’t in the inner circle anymore. It’s not malicious, it’s not people being mean. When you grow up somewhere, it’s good for a lot of people to stay.
Did you finish college?
I did not. I went one year, and then COVID happened. I’m twenty-one, so I would be in my senior year right now. I finished my first year, and that summer, I started tattooing and was like, “hey, this is the best.” If I decide I want to do something else, I’ll go back to school, but for now I’m pretty happy. So I did not finish school. Thank you for coming in a little bit later than we said, by the way.
Absolutely, no problem.
We have lots of bats living in our attic.
Bats?
Yeah. (laughter) Some dudes had to come and check out the attic and the door is right there, so I was like alright, we need to delay a little bit, unless you wanted people climbing over you to get to the attic.
What were they trying to do? Get them out, or just assess the situation?
Maine’s laws on bat infestations in houses are really strict because it’s a protected species, which, awesome, I’m all for that, so basically when you have a bat problem, what you do is seal all of the little microholes that bats could be coming through, and then the population slowly leaves or dies. It’s been three years of them checking up on the attic. But it’s worked, we’ve only had two bats in our apartment this summer, which is awesome. Last summer it was one or more per night.
Wow. You hear them flapping and bouncing around?
No, they get in the house. Flying through the house and everything. Sometimes they get into our downstairs neighbors’, and they have lots of pets so it’s a scary rabies risk for them. When it was just me and my dad living in this building, we didn’t really care. We didn’t really do anything about it. We were like, yeah, we don’t mind having some roommates.
So you’re really moving to California in a couple of weeks?
Allegedly. We don’t have our housing situation figured out at all, so it still feels super abstract, but that is the plan. I’ll probably have to get a real-person job.
Really?
Honestly, spending a little time back in the workforce might be good for me.
What kind of normal job are you going to get?
I don’t know. Anything that pays the bills. I really want to do landscaping, but I don’t drive. You usually need a car for those jobs.
Do you feel like you’ve made a deliberate decision to not drive?
No, I really want to, but I find it difficult to motivate myself to learn. Back to the bike conversation, it’s very similar. There are a lot of things about driving that I do want, like being able to get to nature, get out of the city, just bop around and do my own thing. But those wheels, man, I just don’t trust ’em.
Do you think your nervousness about wheels is your own ability to control them, or other people?
It’s a mixture of everything. Definitely the speed and everything. I dissociate a lot. People say, “I zoned out and I’d gone 40 miles.” I could see that freaking me out a lot. Finding it hard to stay present all the time. It’s a lot of responsibility. You’re responsible for yourself and whoever’s in your car, but also whoever’s around you in their cars. The amount of trust you have to place in other people. I’m a nervous passenger as well. Just something about going real fast is not my normal state.
How do you think about getting to be old?
There’s nothing I’m more excited for in life than being a tattooed grandma. I’m very very excited to be an elderly person. My idea of everything in between is very abstract. How do you say what happens in between being young and being old old? There’s varying degrees to small old to medium old to slightly older old to most old. I don’t know. I guess all that time just fills itself up. I think if there’s one thing in life I’m looking forward to most it’s being really old and hopefully still being able to do tattoos.
What about it appeals to you?
I feel like being young is so unstable, you’re just trying to figure everything out. I guess there is an idea of having things more figured out when you’re older. That’s definitely a nice idea. I don’t know how realistic it is. I have a feeling most people don’t have everything figured out. Just a certain peace with self that is harder to get to when you’re a young person. Less expectation. Less eyes on you.
What’s it like being in your 20s?
Everyone hypes up being in your 20s as the most fun ever. The reasons they give are not reasons that appeal to me or seem like good things to me necessarily. The freedom is definitely real. I feel that, and I value that, but it’s just that they value youth a lot. That is like, an ideal, and I think that that is silly. It just sets everyone up for long-term maybe not being super satisfied. I’m supposed to do all the fun things in my life in these ten years. I’ve been really inspired by my parents. My mom was on one career path her whole life, and then four years ago, decided to go back to school for nursing. My dad is taking a class in film production right now. So just the fact that they were like, okay, we’re not restricted to doing this thing that we said we were going to do, we can always try things out and change, that was really inspiring.
There are always opportunities to explore and try new things, and there is no fixed window for when you can and can’t do certain things.
I think that has to do with responsibility. You’re still quite low on responsibilities when you’re younger, even if you’re working and supporting yourself before you’re responsible for supporting others. There’s definitely a bit of a window for very certain things.
What kinds of things do you feel are projected onto you as far as what you should want to do right now?
I don’t know, partying, being super social, going out on the town. I really like making dinner at home and hanging out quietly. The one exception would be going to see music. I love going to see music, but I don’t know. I don’t really like drinking. I’m not a super social person. I have a hard time with more than, like, four people. And then I think as a tattooer, people have this perception of you as being super cool and there’s a certain amount of social currency that comes with it. I definitely noticed a change in how people treated me when I started tattooing versus before, but I don’t know. I don’t identify as being cool. I think I’m lucky in that it’s pretty normal for people not to be doing a full, complete four years at college these days. I think I would have a lot more complicated feelings about not going back to school if that was different.
When the bats would fly through your house did you ever have to catch them, or chauffer them outside?
Yeah, you get really good at it when you do it every single night. They’re essentially blind, but they echolocate. So all you need to do is have a really big piece of paper on hand, or cardboard or whatever. Doesn’t matter if it’s thin, it just has to be big. You start at the wall and herd it out because it’ll think that the big piece of paper is a wall that it can’t fly into. So you corral it out the door. Or if you don’t feel like dealing with it, you just get it into a room and open all the windows in there. I would put on my full snowsuit so that I wouldn’t have to worry about walking around with the bat flying around. People have really different reactions when I tell them about the bats. Some people are like, “Whoa, cool.” Some people are like, “Disgusting.” Some people are like, “Why don’t you just kill them?” Which we wouldn’t do even if there were no laws restricting it.
What’s the first thing you wanted to be?
Either a geologist or a hypnotist. There was a long list that I wanted to be all at the same time. I wanted to be a professional archer. I wanted to be a survival instructor. I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist. I wanted to do autopsies and shit. A lot of natural sciences. I wanted to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I was like, these are all careers that complement each other, yeah? Why are you going to limit yourself to wanting to be one thing?
Did the geologist thing come from just, like, smashing rocks?
Yeah. Bringing the hammer and the bucket to the beach. For some reason, rocks were always a big thing. Whenever my dad would go somewhere new for work, he would bring a rock back for me. I was a very downward-focused kid. I was always looking at the ground, on the ground, eating stuff off the ground, rolling on the ground. Very much just chilling with the bugs and the grass. And that led to finding a lot of cool rocks and being interested in finding rocks and knowing where they came from and how they got there and what they were made out of. I was a big collector as a kid. I always had a collection of natural artifacts, like bones and shells and rocks and preserved plants and bits of snakeskin and whatever else. And when I would have people over as a kid, the first thing I would do is I had to show them my entire collection, and I had to explain in detail exactly what everything was and where it came from and what it does.
Did you ever give things from your collection away as gifts?
Only for the most special occasions. It was really a big deal if I gave anything away. I was a bit of a hoarder, but not in volume. My dad had a talk with me the other day because I had this box of seal bones that were putrefying on top of the fridge for a while, and he was like, “Yeah, dude, you got to move these. I know they’re doing their thing, and it’s going to take a while, but I can’t have rotting bones on top of the fridge. Sorry.” I was like, you know what? That’s fair. So I just put them outside.
Can they still do their thing out there?
Yep. So basically when you putrefy bones, you’re soaking them to remove any soft tissue because the soft tissue will rot off in the water or get to a point where you can scrub it off really easily. Then the next phase is degreasing, which is you soak it for another week or two in just a water dish soap solution, and that removes all the grease and stinkiness and dark discoloration stuff. And then the third step is a soak in industrial-grade peroxide, which is hard to find. You can also use hair dye remover.
What are you going to do with them after all that?
I was going to give a few, because they’re really beautiful bones, I was going to give some to some of my tattooer friends here when I leave. Just like, “Bye, here’s some bones,” because they’re all weird like me, and they like bones.
Where did you find them?
On the beach. There was a dead seal that washed up and I grabbed some stuff. It was horrifying, disgusting, turning into liquid. It was awful. Something had carried its skull off, which I was really sad about. But I got almost a full set of ribs and a few interesting vertebrae. A part of a pelvis.
How’s the jewelry making going?
Oh, it’s great. I’m really loving making chain mail. It’s a really good outlet. It’s just super repetitive and meticulous and you don’t have to think too hard. It’s been good. I still haven’t decided if I want to actually do anything with my jewelry. It doesn’t necessarily feel right to be selling it because it’s more of an exercise than anything else. I’ve not had as much time as I’d like to work on certain projects, but it sneaks in where it wants to. Something that I’ve learned is because the materials are expensive, you have to make sort of a troubleshooting version, like a prototype out of a cheap metal, and then make the real thing out of the real metal that you’re using. And that is hard for me because I don’t really plan. I just sort of wing it with a lot of my pieces. And when I do plan, I have a hard time keeping track of what I’ve done and remembering how I pulled something off. So if I make a prototype, I have a hard time replicating it. Unless it’s super simple.
Seems like it would be hard to retrace your steps.
Yeah, you can sort of look at your piece and figure it out. But a lot of people are very good about writing down all the stuff, keeping track of everything, writing down a recipe. Recipes are not really my thing.
What’s on your Vinalhaven tour?
Well, there’s really not much. Main Street is a single block of stores, and then it goes into the woods and it doesn’t come out until it loops all the way back around to Main Street again after circling the island. But as far as nature spots, I’ve got a couple of little secret beach spots. Vinalhaven has these great defunct granite quarries that are all filled with water, so they’re great for swimming. They’re really clean and awesome. There is, like, one place to eat on the island. There’s a few, but there’s one that’s worth it. It’s a little food truck that has really good crab rolls and burgers and simple stuff. But yeah, I mean, mostly it’s nature spots out there. I spend my days bopping between my aunt’s place, which is sort of like a second home, and my place. Having people over.
Do you know how to juggle?
No, I am not a very coordinated person. Like, fine motor skills are strong, but larger scale coordination is not strong. A horrible dancer. Could never figure out juggling. Not even, like, jump roping or hula hooping. Last picked in gym class kind of person. I came in last in a hundred-person cross country race in middle school once. It was horrible. It was mortifying.
Do you like paddling?
I do like paddling a lot. anything in the water is cool for me. I love kayaking, canoeing, paddleboarding, what have you. Sailing, swimming. The land is too unforgiving, though. Too solid. I’m going to have you sit up so I can get a proper look at this guy.
I remember how to sit.
How do we be a person again?
Always forgetting.
I remember every morning.
It’s fun to get excited about tattoos that fewer people will see.
I would never wear tank tops before I got my arm tattoos. And now I’m like, hell yeah. Flirty and grandpa all the way. Tattooed grandma, here I come. Cool. Yeah. Take a look at that. Let me know what you see as far as inconsistencies go. I can do anything.
It’s great. I love it. I don’t see anything in need of anything.
Awesome. Cool. Great. So how have you been liking that Saniderm stuff?
Good. Great.
Cool. Some people have a bit of a reaction to it. I just went camping with my dad up in Baxter and had just done this tattoo on my leg two days before and I was like, shit. Living in the woods. Super dirty. The Saniderm kind of saved my butt.
Yeah, I bet.
All right, awesome. So yeah, you know the drill. We’ll take photos and it’ll be good.
Crow Jonah Norlander lives in Maine with his family of humans and hounds.
Frances Eder is an artist specializing in handpoke tattoos and handmade jewelry, and can be found on Instagram @megafauna.tat2.