Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/804303
LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 4.17 29 Outside one of the many stables at Turfway Park in Northern Kentucky, Tyler Picklesimer, the track's racing secretary, picks numbered dies from a briefcase in the trunk of his car. Picklesimer, serving as a tattoo technician (one of his many roles), is preparing to ink the inside of the upper lip of a three-year-old gelding named Neighbor's Outlaw. This registration number, provided by the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, will allow the horse to begin his racing career. (Racing officials double-check the number after each race to make sure they've got the right horse.) Each stainless-steel die, which sort of resembles a pestle, has spikes on the tip that form a number. Picklesimer dips the dies into a cup of black ink. "This one's gonna be R13996," he says, explaining that the letter at the beginning indicates the year the horse was born. "2014's an R, 2015's an S, 2013's a Q." This will be the second tattoo he has administered today. He does about 1,000 a year. Picklesimer runs down the list of descriptions on Neighbor's Outlaw's certificate, a necessary precaution due to a tattoo's permanence. "Dark bay or brown colt. A few mixed hairs in forehead, which we've got. Cowlick at top of eye level, which we've got," he says. An assistant uses a foot-long steel clamp resembling a giant paperclip to roll back the lip, revealing large yellow teeth. Picklesimer takes each ink- dipped die and hardily presses it into the pink flesh, leaving behind a square blotch for each number. The horse doesn't make a sound and hardly moves during the two-minute process. "The clamp probably numbs the upper lip a bit, making it less painful for the horse," Picklesimer says. When he wipes away the excess ink, you can clearly read the large black print: R13996. — Thomas Elmallakh THE BIT TOOL OF THE TRADE WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO? Readers had quite the response to the filly shotgunning a beer on the cover of last year's Derby issue. Atrocious. Degrading. Beneath the class and legacy of the Kentucky Derby. We decided to let the horse respond. Welp, they wanted to throw me in the halfway barn once they witnessed my Derby rodeo, ending snout-deep in the toilet, spewing oats. It was Derby, so I reached for the stars — Horsehead Nebula, my winning name — but all some readers saw was Girls Gone Wild Horses. So I shotgunned a beer for the cover of a magazine. Nothing like those two-footed fillies strolling Central Avenue the first weekend of May, cursing and cigar-sucking, cha-chas sans bra-bra. — Arielle Christian