The Art of Darkness

Sage Reil grows black tomatoes in her home garden alongside corn, Chinese red beans, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, lettuce and rosemary. As a tattoo artist known for covering skin, including her own, with dense expanses of black, this horticultural choice was a natural one for her. Given the tomatoes’ striking appearance and unique flavor, it made perfect sense to me that such a dark delicacy would stand out in a garden lush with colorful summer growth.

I was amused, but even more so, curious about the apparent contradiction. But Sage explained to me that black is often misunderstood, imbued with biases and prejudices that evoke thoughts and images of evil, malice and death. Black, she told me, is often underappreciated, marginalized and feared, exemplified in common parlance by terms like black heart, black sheep, black mark and the black arts. But for this blackwork artist, achromatic tattooing is a medium with tremendous depth and versatility.

I first met Sage when she and her partner, Jade, were walking their (black) dog, Okami, in our Leland neighborhood. I felt pulled to connect with this copiously tattooed, statuesque woman who was dressed completely in black. After a rich, colorful conversation at her home, I met with her at Ghxst Tattoo in Wilmington.

Sage’s first and only tattoo that day — an eight-hour project — was to be a half-sleeve cover-up of what her client described as a now-meaningless jumble of pop-culture images with a complex, video game-based theme centering around a beautiful woman fighting off alien creatures. Sage was going to replace the client’s disjointed chaos with an intricately detailed, futuristic, space-themed image that would reflect her journey to wholeness and meaning. This project resonated with Sage, whose artwork ranges from the photoreal to the abstract, from the recognizable to the fantastical, from the natural to the supernatural, and from the secular to the sacramental and even sacrilegious (to some).

Sage explained to me that there are as many reasons for getting a tattoo as there are people who wear them — to decorate, celebrate, memorialize, romanticize, conceal, reveal, accentuate, affiliate, dissociate, proclaim, protest. And they vary widely and wildly on an endless array of dimensions, including size, location, complexity, shading, color, planning, randomness and meaning. Much like photographers who work in black and white to let the strength of an image take precedence over color, Sage values the depth and complexity that shades of black can bring.

Sage, a native North Carolinian whose early life experiences and challenges would strip the color from anyone, transitioned to predominantly blackwork tattoo artistry in her 20s, through which she could “achieve more depth.” She fastidiously plans and studies all the tattoos she applies before ever lifting needle to skin, whether her own or her client’s. While working on an image, sometimes for eight hours at a time, she must literally pull back from the close-up work in order to see the emerging image in its totality. Similarly, she carefully researches and chooses black inks for their safety, viscosity (for optimal flow through her needles) and longevity, like Panthera, a preservative-free, organic, vegan product.

In contrast to, or perhaps just like, the monochromatic menagerie of tattoos that covers large swaths of her body, Sage’s ever-unfolding life’s journey has been a multihued tapestry of bits and pieces of a complex narrative. First marking her skin at 18 with a spiraled tribal image in hopes that it would demarcate her transition to adulthood, Sage has since permanently etched her living canvas with increasingly “dark-themed” images, from looming Gothic cathedrals to richly symbolic battles between good and evil to demons of varying complexity and allure. For Sage, “the images are not about hellscapes and battles between purity and darkness” as much as “taking jabs at what most others take way too seriously.”

For Sage, death and decay are simply part of the cycle of life. The sprawling, ever-evolving, seemingly onerous achromatic images on most of her body, including a full sleeve and completely blacked-out neck (a floating-head effect), are part of “my larger eradication phase” of now-meaningless earlier-life symbols. It all relates to a journey to cohesion that she hopes will “link what’s on the outside of me with what’s on the inside.” She is a living reminder, to herself and others, that “life is not a calm pond, but a turbulent ocean.”

While the symbolic and achromatic nature of her work might suggest otherwise, Sage’s work is, as she puts it, “life-affirming, transformational and growth-oriented.” She will not ink images of hate and oppression, instead choosing power-, agency-, transition- and survival-laden images and themes. She has covered mastectomy and other surgery-related scars, removed “ugly remnants of people’s painful experiences” and is ever mindful of their health, including the potential physical, tattoo-related complications from diabetes and autoimmune conditions. She thoroughly feels out clients before they begin their shared journey. For her, tattooing is about relationships — a “metaphysically intimate” one.

When not tattooing, Sage games competitively on hyperreal futuristic battle and space platforms like Star Citizen and War Thunder and is a dedicated student of the horticultural arts. Along with the very sweet “black” tomatoes she generously shared with me, Sage enjoys cooking.

In her garden, as with her flowing, organic blackwork artistry, beauty is not about perfectly waxed, multicolored and shiny store-bought fruits and vegetables, but is found in their growth and utility. In seeming stark contrast to the dark-themed images that flow from her pen to skin, Sage is committed to vitality, incomprehensible complexity and beauty, which, as she reminded me, “is in the eye of the beholder.”

Follow Sage on Instagram at @Cursedsagetattoos or find her at ghxsttattoostudio.com