GODSTUFF

NIU KILLER’S TATTOOS NOT JUST SKIN DEEP

When I walked in to the Chicago Tattoo Factory in Uptown on my birthday last fall, it was not on a whim. I’d been contemplating getting a tattoo for about 20 years.

Still, I told no one I was going — not my husband, not my best friends. My first and only trip to the tattoo parlor was a solo journey, one steeped with personal meaning and spiritual import.

A round Celtic knot about two inches in diameter now adorns the back of my neck in sepia-colored ink. To me, it symbolizes many things. A relationship with God. A connection to my beloved. A journey of faith and grace.

I know many people with tattoos, and to a person they acquired their body art after some contemplation.

In the days following the shootings at Northern Illinois University, as a profile of the killer, Steven Kazmierczak, began to emerge, one detail of his otherwise-unremarkable life caught my attention: his tattoos. Over the five or six months leading up to his rampage at NIU, the 27-year-old graduate student acquired three elaborate tattoos of violent, bloody images on his arms.

On his left forearm: a multicolored tattoo of a sword or dagger impaling a skull.

On his left arm, below the shoulder: a large, red pentagram with two points facing up (a symbol commonly used to indicate Satan or Satanism.)

And on his right forearm, a detailed depiction of Billy, the macabre puppet from the “Saw” horror films, riding a tricycle against a background of bleeding knife wounds that ran the width of his arm.

What, if anything, might Kazmierczak’s tattoos have indicated about his state of mind, if not his soul?

In the “Saw” films, the puppet Billy delivers messages from the psycho protagonist known as the Jigsaw Killer, who doesn’t actually kill his victims. Instead, Jigsaw puts them in sadistic traps where they have to choose between, for instance, maiming themselves horrifically or killing another person in order to survive.

Creepy.

Tattoos have been around since at least the Neolithic era, some 10,000 years ago. And the reasons people get the tattoos they do are myriad.

“The people I interviewed said, in their view, the images on their bodies were expressions of their spirituality,” said Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University who studied people in central New York who had Native American images tattooed on their bodies. “Some people said it was their soul becoming externalized.”

I spoke to Jason Dunavan, the Champaign tattoo artist who created Kazmierczak’s three new tattoos, a process that took 15 hours over three visits. Dunavan has worked in tattoo parlors for a dozen years and said he doesn’t ask people why they’re getting inked or what the images they choose mean to them. The only tattoo requests he turns down are for gang signs.

“This past Saturday, I did a half-sleeve of the Virgin Mary,” Dunavan said. “I have no idea why that guy got it.”

Kazmierczak wanted the Billy tattoo because he liked horror films, Dunavan recalled. It was meant to be the beginning of a series of horror-film-themed body art the NIU shooter planned to acquire. “He wanted Freddy Krueger and a couple of other characters, too,” Dunavan said.

He remembers Kazmierczak as “a really, really laid-back, timid guy.” In the 15 hours they spent together, nothing Kazmierczak said or did gave Dunavan any indication of the darkness that apparently lurked beneath his demure demeanor.

On Monday, Dunavan was giving away free tattoos — of red and black ribbons — in exchange for donations he intends to give to the NIU victims fund.

Christina Frederick-Recascino, vice president for research at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, conducted a psychological study of adults age 18 to 30 who had been tattooed. While she found no connection between tattoos and psychopathology, body art does say something about the person who bears it.

“The reason they got the tattoo and chose the actual art that they got represented something about their identity and how they viewed themselves,” she said.

Kazmierczak’s tattoos could have been a red flag. “It could certainly reflect a pathological identity coming out,” she said. “If, all of a sudden, I saw someone who didn’t do this before, whose identity was something that I found to be positive, and all of a sudden they’re getting violent imagery tattooed on their body, I would probably wonder what’s going on . . . and just start asking some questions.”

Tragically, there’s only one question any of us now can ask:

Why?