a r t e m i s

After Minnesota, I didn't want to try another tattooed pig. It might sound naive, but a lot of the motivation behind my decision to tattoo a pig was to annoint him with a mark that would render him impervious to the fate of all pigs. I was hoping Minnesota's tattoos would make him like Achilles dipped in the river Styx by his mother...invulnerable.

In 1984 I got a call from my friend and former professor, Bob Wade, who was living in Santa Fe at the time. Bob had been talking to a man about the Minnesota project, and the guy was apparently completely taken with the idea. His name was Ralph. Ralph telephoned me soon after talking to Bob, and he asked me to tattoo another pig. I didn't really want to do it at first. I had already done it once, and that was enough, I thought. But then, as Ralph kept talking, I saw another opportunity...perhaps to try to immortalize another pig, and perhaps to really do a pig project without the constraints that I had encountered in graduate school, not the least of which was a low budget. Ralph offered me a reasonable fee to do the project, which this time cost one hundred dollars an hour for the tattooist and another pretty sizeable amount for the operating theater. Randy Adams was not available for this session, but I had met a very capable tattooist in Houston in the mean time named John Stuckey, so I booked him and his assistant. I made arrangements with Hot Dog and Featus' regular vet, Dr. Richard Fussell, to oversee the clinical aspects of the work, and I found a beautiful young Chester White pig in Bryan, Texas. I named her Artemis, after the archaic statues of Artemis found at Ephesis, with the multiplicities of breasts. Artemis was a young sow, and I was really impressed with the number of nipples she had. It looked like she could nurse a small crowd of piglets when she grew up.