words DOUG GEYER  |  portrait photography DEOGRACIAS LERMA

Part Two: Jeremiah Griswold

In Melville’s Moby Dick, Ishmael chronicles Ahab’s obsessive hunt birthed from his tortured heart. Besting the elusive white whale would surely offer satisfaction and solace after the beast took part of a leg and most of his soul.

In 2007, Jeremiah Griswold moved to Guatemala to travel and find tangible ways to meet intangible needs. Inner peace had proved elusive and he was hunting for his heart. He’d graduated from the University of Cincinnati after completing an intellectually demanding program to earn a degree in literature while also studying Hebrew and Greek as he moved toward some form of ministry. Despite the all-consuming nature of his efforts, he was still yearning for something that resonated with who he was becoming.

As he taught English to imprisoned Guatemalan gang members, he learned their tattoos were deadly beacons drawing unwanted attention as they sought to leave that life behind. When an artist mentor visited him and began offering cover-up tattoos, Griswold began apprenticing. As he watched these formerly hardened and dangerous men beam with childlike joy, he experienced a powerful sense of meaning and purpose. It was during this odyssey that White Whale Tattoo surfaced.

After years of tattooing by appointment, Griswold and his wife Becki opened their studio in Walnut Hills in 2015 before moving to their current location on Main Street where he and the other artists offer a variety of styles in a safe and positive space. The Griswolds and their team have returned to Central America many times and a portion of sales fund their ongoing work through their foundation. He looks back at his time in Guatemala not so much as the culmination but as a continuation of self-discovery.

“What I really loved the most was putting on an album and drawing. I had already connected with the artist I would apprentice under, so I was just really enjoying using my hands and the quietness of that. So there was a kind of shift from head to hands. It’s been a process of figuring out how those things complement each other.”

The artist who mentored Griswold taught him many things, including how to build his own equipment. “Welding needles to a bar, building my machine from scratch. With that first machine, I wrapped the coils in Guatemalan currency, and drilled out a Guatemalan quetzal, the coin, for the washer. I wanted my work to be associated with what I had learned and experienced there.”

As he traveled on this journey to becoming an artist who tattoos, he relished in the calm that could quiet both external and internal chaos. “It created, and it still does, a space of flow where you can kind of turn off the beliefs or the thoughts that are racing and enter into this really lovely space. The only other thing I’ve experienced that feels this way is freediving and scuba diving where there’s no sound, but you’re in this beautiful, infinite space, floating, and everything is relaxed.”

The evolution of working alone before opening their shop has also proved rewarding.

“I’m fairly introverted, so a private studio works well for me and that’s how we started. But we had the extra space and there was a good amount of demand, so when another artist shows up and really feels they’re chasing their own white whale, it kind of makes sense to do it together. You can share the responsibilities on the ship.”

Though Griswold grew up with fear and scarcity driving him on, yet hollowing him out, White Whale is all about embracing hope and generosity.

“This experiment has been about trying to operate out of complete abundance and complete love. When we bring in a new artist does our mind go to a place of ‘What if they take all my clients and I lose business?’ or ‘What if this is my new best friend who is going to help teach me a new thing?’”

Griswold’s process as he prepares for a new project reflects how he has learned to give himself more space to breathe while shedding the pressure that used to dominate his day.

“I used to work five, eight to ten-hour days where I was tattooing so much. Now I only have three to four appointments per week, which allows me the chance to get up in the morning and meditate on the piece, do yoga, or go for a walk to think about the piece and gather resources. I may read a certain passage from a book. I design the piece so that when the client walks in, they really don’t know what we’re doing and they don’t see the image until they come in. And the image itself is only a reference. There’s a level of trust that the tattoo will look better than that.”

He currently divides his time between tattooing and oil painting, which he started by studying with maestro Roberto Ferri in Sutri, Italy. “Though markedly different, they inform each other wonderfully.”

Though he’s still stretching and searching as an artist and human, Griswold exudes a spirit of peace. As a reformed perfectionist, he stays focused on simply giving his best to each tattoo, painting or new friend, whether in Cincinnati or Central America. His formerly tortured soul finds solace through every work of art, every act of love.