Second Chances

In a sun-kissed, laid-back residential street in Nonthaburi, a forty-minute drive away from Bangkok, you’ll find a tattoo studio that looks nothing like a workplace and entirely like a home. It’s a compact one-story house with a flat roof and a walled-off veranda that is something between a garden and an outdoor museum, the floor crammed with flowerpots and bonsai trees, shelves near the wall laden with paintings and wooden sculptures. Anyone coming in for a tattoo is warmly greeted by a man with gray plowing through his bound hair and solemn crowfeet nipping at his eyes. His face is not one made for smiling but he does it anyway, widely, enthusiastically like the act in itself pleases him immensely. He introduces himself as Fah and that, too, seems to please him. The clients already know that Fah only tattoos original designs but some are surprised nonetheless when the first hour of the appointment is spent lounging on the veranda, talking and drinking tea until Fah announces after sufficient conversation that he has just the right idea for their tattoo. In the part of his house he transformed into a tattoo studio, he draws the design and perfects it with the client’s input, making sure they’re fully satisfied with it before reaching for the ink.

If someone had asked Fah forty years ago how he imagined his future, this would be the last thing on his list. Even a decade ago, the idea would’ve been unfathomable, for who would give up the life of a diplomat for a home tattoo studio in Nonthaburi? Some people, surely, but not Ambassador Sivakorn Hiranyakrit – until Fah realized in his midlife crisis that he’d rather be some people than himself. Changing careers in his late forties wasn’t easy, but Fah had the special drive of someone who felt they’d wasted half their time on this earth and rather wouldn’t waste the second half as well.

Nowadays, Fah is pushing sixty but he has never felt younger. This implausible new happiness is barely a decade old and some days he still feels inebriated with it. His life isn’t glamorous but it’s rich in mundane miracles: the unbridled joy he gains from going by his nickname instead of his stifled civil name, the childlike delight of painting his veranda walls by hand, the beauty of a client’s tired but amazed laugh. And then there is Nok with the mirthful eyes and the laughter lines around his mouth, Nok whose name means bird where Fah’s means sky, who first came to Nonthaburi for a tattoo five years ago and kept turning up at Fah’s doorstep in the years after, at first with appointments, then without them, and eventually just stayed. He made the wooden sculptures on the veranda, as well as the wooden chairs and most of the furniture. Sometimes, he brings a passion project from the workshop and asks Fah to paint it, and it’s both I love you and I trust you and more. This evening, Nok is visiting his nieces in Bangkok and Fah is content to spend the twilight hours with a client who made a last-minute appointment, ears filled with the meditative hum of the tattoo gun. Afterward, he tends to one of Nok’s sculptures until deep in the night and goes to bed exhausted. It’s a good kind of exhaustion, one that comes from a day of fulfilled passions, a day spent living and breathing art instead of dreaming of it.