Ink Stains from Katrina – Chapter 5 – Erin
Erin and hurricane tattoo
Erin Eastern
Green Market Manager
Erin hails from a demographic group she believes was hit the hardest by Katrina – young, no longer dependent on parents albeit living month-to-month, with no insurance, and no savings. She and her roommate began an evacuation journey that started with following his family to Covington and then heading to Florida to her grandparents, where they sought shelter for the duration of the evacuation. “We had no money to buy clothes and had two pairs of underwear with us. So we needed someone who could take care of us,” she said.
When it was okay to return to New Orleans, Erin’s roommate opted to stay in Florida and she came back alone. “It was a ridiculous time. My friend, Rachel, moved into the apartment with me and even wore my roommates clothes,” she said.
This was not Erin’s first tattoo. “I had marked important moments in my life with a tattoo. When I turned 18, I got my first one – a lizard – it means nothing. I had a pair of boxer shorts with lizards on them. For me it’s not so much about the design. I don’t care if I don’t like it in 30 years. It’s a permanent marker of what I did like at the time.”
The next one was during her college sophomore year, when she thought she would never come back to New Orleans. “I was living in Berkeley and had a masked man tattooed over my heart to symbolize my love for the city. But then I realized that I wanted to make my life in New Orleans, and I had a feeling this was 100% home because I loved the place,” she said.
For Erin, the tattoos are part of accepting things never turn out the way you want, but they turn out okay in the end. Her Katrina tattoo is what has become for many here the iconic hurricane swirl. “My best friend would never get a tattoo. ‘How can you put that on your body?’ she’d ask me. But we were driving around the city after the storm and she said she wanted to get a tattoo with a hurricane symbol. She asked me if I would get one with her and could I say no? No. So we got the same tattoo. This symbol wouldn’t have been something I chose.”
“My best friend ended up moving away from New Orleans a few months later. Everyone thought she was so lucky because she had kept her job through the storm, but she wound up moving to New York.”