In her own words....

This symbol is on my left ankle. I got it in 1997 when I was living in Florida, at a small, inconsequential "touristy" tattoo shop. By the time I got it, I already had two tattoos and had a few more in my mind. I had been thinking about a Duran Duran tattoo since 1995 or so, after a record signing for Thank You that I didn't get into (Sam Goody in NYC will never, ever be the same...). In 1996 I created an animated GIF of the Seven and the Ragged Tiger logo that I used on a website, where the "7" symbol in the center rotated in a 3D fashion. I realized at the time that this symbol meant a lot more to me than just the band Duran Duran. The tattoo morphed into a much greater piece - it is part of a multi-tattoo ankle piece that contains symbols of my youth, and represents a certain fantasy/escapism that I experienced during a rather harsh period in my life.

I decided to strip away most of the logo and just use the inner symbol. I also rotated it so that the middle line was vertical. I wanted to make it look like a tribal piece, and I intended for all my ankle tattoos to have the same style.

A lot of people ask me what this tattoo is, since it is obviously a symbol yet nothing particularly well-known! My answers differ when faced with this question; always the truth, yet never all of it: "It's a symbol of something...but it's rather personal" or "It's from a band" or "It's meaningful, but only to me." Sometimes it just takes too much effort to explain....

FYI I finally made a band signing in 2000 during the Pop Trash tour. It took 17 years, but I prevailed!

Also in her own words....

I had no intention of getting another Duran Duran related tattoo. None whatsoever. I swear up and down that I never, ever thought I would get anything other than the simple "7" symbol described above.

But...well...stuff happens.

Right after I got a sailor-style mermaid pinup tattoo on the side of my right leg, I declared to a friend, "Gee, I have this big blank spot now just begging to be filled..." I decided I wanted a modern-style pin-up to provide contrast to the old-style mermaid. I surfed online and looked through some books and I didn't find anything I liked; then one day it occurred to me that the video for "The Chauffeur" has many images of women in various states of undress that I particularly enjoy. It took only two weeks from the original conception of the idea to receiving the actual tattoo; I found an artist on the web who had a great portfolio (Teejay from White Tiger Tattoo) and I sent her pictures and descriptions via e-mail. I met up with her at a tattoo convention in Washington, D.C. in August, 2002 and we set to work on the first day of the convention; four hours later, the process was complete.

The video for "The Chauffeur" has always been my favorite Duran Duran clip. This may strike some people as strange, since the band never appears in the video. At this point I could write a lot of paragraphs about when I first saw the video, what it meant to me on first viewing, what it means to me now, and some flowery explanations and complicated analyses about the portrayal of women and lesbian imagery in 80s video culture.

But I'll spare you all that.

Suffice it to say, the clip is a favorite, and therefore I didn't hesitate in using one of the three women who appear in the video as a modern-style pin-up on my leg. This is the woman who dances topless at the end; she comes out of the car wearing a chauffeur's outfit and strips off her jacket and hat to perform her dance. I asked Teejay to increase her breast size; this is supposed to be a pin-up, after all, and she had to be a little more bodacious than the original image. She added a few more curves and I asked her to include the hat, but other than that the pose is a direct screenshot from the video. Teejay worked in part of the car for some context, and a nice little detail: there's an image of two women in an embrace reflected in the rearview mirror.