Musician Monday: Camille Harp's Bird Flies Free

It has been a while since we celebrated "Musician Monday," but the early onset of spring has brought out the tattoos and last week in Penn station, I met Camille, who shared this part of her left sleeve:

We focused on this segment in particular:

Camille told me she went to her artist, Fernando Casillas, at Think Ink Tattoo in Norman, Oklahoma, and just told him she wanted a bird flying out of a cage. "I just like the idea of setting yourself free," she explained. Work from Think Ink has appeared on Tattoosday previously, here.

It wasn't until the following day, when I noticed that Camille had followed us on Twitter, that I realized that she was a musician. I had caught her while she was heading back to Oklahoma, and was nervous about catching the right train and making her flight in time.

Camille, as it turns out, is Camille Harp, a singer-songwriter from a musical family, who has an album forthcoming called "Little Bit of Light". If you go to CamilleHarp.com, you can download her song "One by One". It's a lovely song that only makes me wish I could hear her in concert. She has a wonderful voice and soulful tone.

You can also grab her record "Like the Rain" here.

Thanks to Camille for sharing her tattoo with us here on Tattoosday! Please check out her website and/or her fan page on Facebook and support this wonderful artist!

We'll leave you with a performance from 2010, in which Camille sings with her mother in Oklahoma City:

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The Tattooed Poets Project: Jeff Simpson

Today's tattooed poet found us by way of Adam Deutsch. Jeff Simpson offers up this cool arm tattoo:


Jeff, a tattooed poet from Oklahoma tells us:

I started reading Horace in grad school and soon grew to be a fan of the odes. The quote, pulvis et umbra sumus—taken from the ode to Torquatus—is commonly translated as, “We are dust and shadows,” but I prefer David Ferry’s version: “we’re nothing but dust, we’re nothing but shadows.” The line offers such a blunt beauty to our mortality, I thought it would serve as a good defense against procrastination, etc. The tattoo was done by David Bruehl at Think Ink Tattoos in Norman, OK. David is an incredible artist. I basically gave him the quote, said I dig skulls, and he nailed the design on the first sketch. This was my first tattoo (I was a late bloomer), and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. I’ve already booked another session to start working on a sleeve.

Head over to BillyBlog and read one of Jeff's poems here.

Born and raised in southwest Oklahoma, Jeff Simpson received his MFA from Oklahoma State University in 2009. He is the founder and managing editor of The Fiddleback, an online arts & literature journal that will launch its first issue later this year. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, and H_NGM_N. His first full-length collection, Vertical Hold, will be published by Steel Toe Books in 2011.