Rylan John Cavell is Utterly Bewildered

     Memories are funny things. They can be vivid and bright and sharp, or they can be diffuse and nebulous. Some that are intangible and fleeting like feelings and sensations will linger, while faces and voices become undefined, eroded by the distance of time, then brought back into sharp relief, briefly, by a photograph. Memories are fickle things.      This is what I've been pondering in the last few days, as my sister has been digging into the archives to piece together our family tree.       My parents have been excavating layered old albums full of faded and yellow, and grey and grainy photographs. Each one they unearth brings back a surge of nostalgia and comfort; The same happy contentment I felt as a child when around the people in those pictures. Those people whose faces, now much altered by age, or long gone, swam in the air above me as I played with toys, or prodded at frogs in the pond, or imagined what the snails were thinking about; Having conversations that didn'

     We all hope to leave our mark on the world.     With the written word, I hope I leave a small mark on people's imaginations, and a fabulous, glittering, colourful smear across their inner world. It is a way of leaving a legacy. A way of having a life longer and more complex than simply a number of years. We all crave it in some way. Many do this by having children. I do this by way of words and art.     Aside from an author, I am a tattoo artist. The tattoo also creates a permanent change to a person, though much more tangible than some minute internal alteration. A vivid, striking, bold alteration to someone's physical presence. As a tattoo artist I help to show on the outside of a person, a little of what's on the inside; That ineffable and inexplicable surge of chemicals and firing neutrons we call thought and feeling.     I leave my mark on the world between the pages of paperbacks, and on the open book that is the human body. Both can be read, but in remarkably di