Several years ago now, Peter Allan was in the lineup at Thrifty Foods when he saw a person with a tattooed outline of Salt Spring Island on their neck.
“As I was standing there at the Thrifty’s I was thinking, ‘You know, I love Salt Spring. It’s been my home for 30 years. But what’s that about?’” he recalled in outlining the rationale for his first Ink+Skin+The Rock – Portraits of Salt Spring Island tattooed on the body photography exhibit held at Salt Spring Gallery in 2018.
Encountering that individual merged with an abiding fascination with tattoos to spark the idea for taking photographs of people with island-centric tattoos and having them provide statements about what the tattoos mean to them. Allan has now remounted and expanded on the 2018 show — called Ink+Skin+The Rock=Revisited — in the Salt Spring Public Library’s program room for the month of July, and is still very much interested in exploring why people choose the tattoo medium to immortalize their connections to the island.
As he wrote for the original Ink+Skin+The Rock show:
“I wanted to know more about their stories. I wanted to photograph them. Photography was a pursuit that I learned at my father’s knee. As a child, he and I would take photographs together and then develop and print them in our darkroom next to the furnace in our home. I returned to photography when our sons were born.”
Eighteen portraits are hanging in the library exhibit, which Allan said received great feedback at the July 4 opening event.
Some stories behind the photographs relate to loss, not surprisingly. Liane Fidler has a Salt Spring outline on her calf, said Allan, and had tattoo artist Noah Mott add a swirl pointing at Mount Maxwell because that is where her brother John fell and died in 1988 at the age of 21.
Abbie Sherwood’s photo was in the original exhibit and a new one is also included this time. Her 2018 statement opened with: “It wasn’t my choice to move to Salt Spring. But things happen for a reason. For a long time, I didn’t know what that reason was. For a long time, I didn’t let Salt Spring show me what the reason was. My home is here, my rock is here, my family is here. That is the reason.”
In participating in the 2025 remount, “She wants to sum up what’s happened in the seven years and what the tattoo means to her today,” Allan said.
Allan also ended up getting a Salt Spring tattoo done by Mott, so a self-portrait is included in the exhibit, with a tattoo of a scene he sees from his and his wife Linda’s Fulford Harbour home.
“It’s Mount Maxwell and the light at the head of the harbour, and about a kayak length from there . . . we laid some of my mother’s ashes — and some of my wife’s father’s ashes are there — and it’s likely where Linda and I will have our ashes go. So part of my story about this tattoo — and we look at the light every day — is that connection to place, and that connection to where we go when it’s all over.”
Interestingly, Allan had lived on Salt Spring for a short time in November of 1986 when an event called An Interview With the Tattooed Lady was presented by a woman named Miki Troesch at the former Off Centre Stage performing arts space. It definitely helped forge love for his new home, and then five years later he ran into Troesch at a kayaking symposium in Port Townsend, recollecting the 1986 evening. (There he learned that the giant erupting phallus tattooed on her back had been removed and replaced with a phoenix rising.)
Allan, who is a Pemberton Holmes realtor and once owned a kayaking and cycling outlet in Fulford, has also studied art history and done sculpting in addition to fine art photography. He was a Salt Spring Gallery member for a time and His No Public House photo exhibit in 2014 explored the island’s lost pubs.
He feels privileged to practise art-making on Salt Spring Island.
“We get to live where we live. We get to do what we do. We get to carve out time to make art and that’s a privilege. To have the means and the time is not a given,” he said. “I don’t take that for granted at all.”
Allan’s exhibition is viewable in the library’s program room Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., whenever the room is not otherwise in use.