Jaclynn Fulkman walked into Righteous Tat2 a couple of months ago hoping to change her life.
“I have kind of a weird request,” Jaclynn told Jody Boring, the brawny owner of the Kenmore shop on Manchester Road.
In late 2003, when she was 43, Jaclynn was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. Following the diagnosis, she had a double mastectomy, six rounds of chemotherapy and reconstructive surgery that included breast implants
More than a dozen years later, Jaclynn was thankful to be cancer free. But she felt stripped of her womanhood.
Jaclynn lifted her shirt to show Jody why.
Surgical incisions left long, thin diagonal scars across each of her breasts. And the faux nipples — tattoos put on by a shop specializing in post-mastectomy work — were uneven: One appeared to point down and the other was larger and pointed off to the side.
Jaclynn said she was so horrified by what she calls her “Franken-boobs” that she avoided looking at herself naked in a mirror every time she got out of the shower.
Jaclynn wanted to hide those scars under a tattoo bra, something lacy and pretty. She had the OK from her cancer doctor for her plan.
Jody was intrigued. He had inked thousands of people, but never heard of anything like this.
In his tattoo parlor, as unknowing drivers whizzed by a few yards away, Jaclynn and Jody became unlikely partners in transformation.
With Jody’s help, Jaclynn was changing her body.
And Jody, who opened his tattoo shop after getting clean and sober about a decade ago, was transforming his soul.
Rough beginnings
A teardrop tattoo under Jody’s left eye is so faded now it almost looks like a mole.
But the ink stain — done by a friend when Jody was in seventh- or eighth-grade — is a permanent reminder of the previous life he’s worked hard to leave behind.
Jody grew up in what Akron city leaders now call Sherbondy Hill, the former Lane-Wooster neighborhood. Jody calls it the “V” and lived on a steep section of Russell Avenue that runs parallel to Interstate 76 surrounded by poverty, violence, misfortune and abuse.
When he was in fourth grade at Margaret Park Elementary School, Jody said he reached out to a teacher for help, confiding for the first time to an outsider that he was being physically abused.
Instead of protecting Jody, the teacher told his abuser, who only beat him more, Jody said.
Angry and hopeless, Jody said he knew then he was on his own. That year, he started huffing gasoline daily until he passed out. He ratcheted up to booze and weed the summer between sixth and seventh grade. And in eighth or ninth grade, he ran away, living in a shanty he built from plywood and pallets under the East Avenue entrance ramp bridge to I-76/77.
All the while, Jody was stealing, brawling and getting picked up by police. For a combination of crimes, he was sentenced to a juvenile life sentence, but incarceration did nothing to reform him.
A few months after turning 18 in 1992, he was facing 25 to 50 years in prison if convicted of his first charges as an adult.
“I was cold,” Jody said recently. “It has never been a case of kids being a bad influence on me. I was the bad influence.”
A fresh start
On a snowy day in February, Jody closed his shop for what would be the first of Jaclynn’s three tattoo sessions.
Jody didn’t want any distractions. Plus, he didn’t want other customers walking in and out to make Jaclynn feel uncomfortable while she was topless getting her tattoo.
When Jaclynn arrived, Jody showed her the tattoo bra he designed. It was like a black, lace bra with two mesh cups covering the bottom part her breasts and two large roses with leaves and tendrils covering the scars on the center and sides. Jody drew a separate curvy, thin tendril that spanned the base of cups, like a fanciful front clasp of a bra.
The tattoo design did not wrap around to the back like a traditional bra. It covered only the scars on her chest. Jody was careful to keep it to scale, so the overall size of the tattoo was small enough that Jaclynn could wear almost any type of shirt or dress without the tattoo peeking out of a neckline or armhole.
“I love it,” Jaclynn told Jody, who was relieved.
Jody told Jaclynn the goal that day was to finish the tattoo outline of the bra. He would ink the roses and fill in the detail on her second visit.
Jaclynn, topless, laid down flat on Jody’s tattooing table as Jody picked up his electric needle like a pencil and began to trace a stencil he had put on her skin.
The needle makes hundreds of tiny holes a second, delivering ink to a layer of skin under the epidermis.
The pressure of Jody’s hands pressing into the scar tissue in her breasts made Jaclynn tear up, but there was no way around it. Jody and Jaclynn quickly learned each other’s signals of stress and pain and found a rhythm of working and pausing that made the pain bearable.
About three hours into the 5½-hour session, they took a break.
Jaclynn stood up and saw herself in a mirror.
“For 12 years, I didn’t feel like a girl,” she told Jody.
Seeing the beginnings of her tattoo bra, she felt an unfamiliar pang of modesty. Her breasts, which had been poked, prodded, removed and replaced by a myriad of doctors, nurses and other medical helpers, suddenly felt like hers again.
Jaclynn was so happy she began to cry.
Jody, realizing Jaclynn’s joy, cried, too.
Getting the message
The future looked bleak for Jody in 1992.
His court-appointed attorney talked to him over the phone as he waited in Summit County Jail for his first court appearance on battery charges.
The lawyer told Jody he had no experience with similar felony cases, but he believed he was assigned to the case to deliver a message: God wanted Jody to know he was looking for him.
The message was not well-received. Jody wanted a legal warrior, not a God crusader. He fired the attorney, but the messages about God kept coming that day.
Back in the maximum security unit at the jail, two inmates told him God was looking for him. No surprise, Jody remembered thinking, since the two ran a Bible study.
Then a third inmate who was clearly mentally ill, who barked and shouted only gibberish, approached.
“He said, ‘I feel that God wants me to tell you he’s searching for you,’ ” Jody said.
More messages followed, seven in total.
Jody went to a jail Bible study that night.
There, he collapsed and sobbed.
Until that moment, he said he never felt sympathy or pain for anyone else. He said he accepted Christ as his savior that night.
If convicted, Jody could have spent the next 50 years in prison. He instead cut a plea deal and was sentenced to 18 months, time he said he used to study Bible scripture.
When he was released, Jody said his faith remained strong, but not as strong as the temptation of the streets.
Tattoo stories
On Feb. 25, hours before her second tattoo appointment to fill in the outline of the bra, Jaclynn wrote an email to the Akron Beacon Journal about how Jody and the tattoo bra had changed her life. “I went instantly from hating the way I looked to flashing all of my female friends!” she wrote.
“I realize not every post-mastetctomy woman feels the way I did, but I’d like to share the story,” she said. “If it will help one other woman find a way to feel better about herself, it will be worth the space in the newspaper.”
When Jaclynn arrived for her tattoo session, she told Jody she caught her husband, Steve, sneaking peeks at her breasts since Jody tattooed the bar outline.
Steve isn’t a tattoo fan, she said, but he supported Jaclynn’s pursuit of the bra hoping it made her happy.
She sensed now that Steve thought it was sexy. Jaclynn did, too. But even if her husband didn’t like the finished tattoo, it would have been OK.
Jaclynn told Jody, “I’m doing this for me.”
Jody, meanwhile, felt inspired.
Almost every tattoo has a story attached, he said. Someone wanted the same skull tattoo as their late father or the name of their child emblazoned across their heart. But those stories ran together over the years. With Jaclynn’s tattoo, Jody knew he was changing a life.
A natural fit
When Jody was 30, he found himself at a particularly dangerous crossroads. He was parked on the street outside the home of an escort, the mother of one of his children. He said he was furious the woman let men into her home and near their child.
Jody, who had been dealing and using meth, said he went there that night intending to kill the men inside the woman’s home.
But before he could act, Jody said he passed out. When he woke up, he remembers seeing sunshine pouring through his car windows and a gun on the seat next to him.
Jody, now clear-headed, said he began to reconsider his plan: If he killed the men in the woman’s home, he’d have to kill the woman, too, because she was a witness.
“And what would I do then, tuck the baby under my arm and run it down the street like a football?” Jody remembered thinking. “Who would take care of the child if the woman was dead and I was in prison?”
The child had no future unless he made a radical change.
In 2006, Jody sobered up, attended South Street Ministries and looked for a legal way to earn a living.
Tattooing seemed a natural fit. Jody had been tattooing since he was 13, starting with ink and a needle and thread.
The mother of a woman he had been dating believed in him and gave him a gift — access to her credit cards so he could buy what he needed to set up a tattoo shop.
Changing lives
Jaclynn, who lives in Portage Lakes, pulled into Jody’s tattoo shop for the third time April 3. She was only there for a touch-up, to fix any spots missed during 11 hours of tattooing.
Jaclynn — who jets across the country every week teaching medical professionals how to do laser eye surgery — and Jody come from different worlds, but they became so close, they no longer always need words to communicate.
She looked at him, shrugged and made a motion like she was going to take her shirt off.
“No, just flash me,” Jody said.
Jaclynn laughed and lifted her t-shirt. They both admired Jody’s work and Jaclynn pointed out a tiny area on the tattoo bra that may need more shading.
The tattoo bra, nearly finished, camouflaged the incisions that pull in lines across her breast like a cat’s eyes.
When the hum of Jody’s needle started up again, Jaclynn got back onto the table.
A reporter who was there for the final session began asking Jody questions about his past as he finished Jaclynn’s tattoo.
Jaclynn, listening, was surprised. She once joked that Jody looked like a guy who might have a criminal past, but she never believed he did.
Jody is usually comfortable with his story, particularly when talking about his faith.
He’s told it many times before, hoping to help others learn from his mistakes. He’s also taken on tattoo apprentices who are getting out of prison and trying to turn around their own lives.
Yet at this moment he hesitated.
Many, like Jaclynn, only know Jody as the guy who now runs Righteous Tat2.
In the end, he shared his story of redemption, saying that tattoos helped him change his life.
Jaclynn, her tattoo bra now finished, said Jody’s tattoos have changed her life, too.
After she dressed, Jaclynn wrapped her arms around Jody and gave him a tight squeeze.
“To me,” Jaclynn whispered into Jody’s ear, “you have always been a great guy.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.