I asked Rockstar Jeff, an old source of envy, if I could take a few por­traits of him.

Jeff’s very pho­to­genic, but he does­n’t agree. I’m 75% prep and 25% bad-ass, where­as he’s 75% bad-ass and 25% prep. Sometimes we joke about trad­ing styles because there’s a mix in each of us, and we always like where the oth­er ones goes with it. The truth of the mat­ter is that I could nev­er pull off his style. Anyone can do prep, but he’s got the right face, the right clothes, the right atti­tude for hard­core.

This was his hit sin­gle.

He’s the gui­tarist and scream­er. The band broke up, but he’s cur­rent­ly explor­ing oth­er musi­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s inter­est­ing to hear his oth­er projects; he’s always the front­man, but he adjusts his singing style to the band while adding his own edge.

Tattoos:

Stars on wrist

This was a mutu­al tat­too done with a friend (his “right hand” per­son), which is why there are two of them. His friend has the same tat­toos on her wrist.

Crows on right arm

As the crow is the uni­ver­sal sym­bol of bad luck, Jeff got each crow to remind him of a hard time in his life. Each one of them sig­ni­fy a moment. There’s one red one with a nail going through it, as a sym­bol that his bad luck is hope­ful­ly behind him (but he says it isn’t yet).

Daisy on right arm

The daisy is his mom’s flower. It’s not real­ly wilt­ed or bro­ken (which is what I thought at first), it’s sim­ply miss­ing petals. He got this at a time when he was real­ly angry at her, which is why it’s red. He had drawn two years ear­li­er, but only decid­ed to get it inked when she kicked him out of the house, to remind him of the hard love of fam­i­ly.

Stars on elbows

There’s actu­al­ly one larg­er star on each elbow, with the ini­tials of peo­ple com­ing out of them. They’re the first tat­toos he ever got, to remind him of the tough lessons that he’s gone through with or from these peo­ple.

Heart on chest

This one was inspired by his mom. He was mak­ing mak­ing some fool­ish deci­sions around 18, and his mom remind­ed him that he should be hap­py with him­self when he looks in the mir­ror, that there should be no hid­ing from the truth, and he should always be true to him­self.

The word “truth” is sur­round­ed by peri­ods to empha­size that it’s a strong fact in itself. The word “self” does­n’t start with a peri­od because the heart is a part of the sen­tence.

The only change he would make is to have it drawn back­wards, so he could read it when he looks in the mir­ror.