An autobiography in ink: The stories and sentiments behind Gary Trent Jr.s tattoos are more than

When Gary Trent Jr. walked into Immortal Ink in Salem two summers ago looking for a tattoo, his body was an open canvas.

Oh sure, there had been some work done on him before. A tattoo of a rocket on his left shin … a memorial to his grandmother on his left forearm … the words “God’s” and “Child” etched on the inside of each biceps. But for the most part, his body was a parcel of open land, and the expanse was needed.

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Inside his mind, and really, inside his soul, Trent Jr. had a story to tell.

“You know how some people just get tattoos to get them?” Trent Jr. said. “Not me. Every tattoo I have has a meaningful reason, or a story behind it.”

By nature, he keeps to himself. His father — the former NBA forward who bears his name — said it was important to him that he raise his oldest son to be emotionally balanced, and it was with great pride that the elder Trent noticed Gary was calmer, more mature and more even-keeled than his childhood peers.

Today, Trent Jr. often wears a far-away stare as if he is lost in thought, a man more apt to be thinking of his story rather than willing to tell it. Often, the most emotion he shows is when he is playing basketball.

His steely demeanor, he admits, is just a cover. Inside, his mind is often swirling, his emotions burning. So when he got in his car and made the first of many 35-minute drives from Portland to Salem that summer, it was with the intention of revealing himself. The man who said he lived behind a mask had decided all his aspirations, inspirations and memories that had formed him, would be unveiled through the art of ink.

“My grandmother always told me that if I ever got tattoos, they better mean something,” Trent Jr. said.

When he first made that drive, he was in NBA parlance, a nobody. He was a teenager, a second-round pick whose biggest claim to fame was that his father played in the NBA. And when he first walked into the tattoo parlor, co-owner Mario Rosales guessed that few, if any, in the shop knew Trent Jr. was a guard for the Trail Blazers.

Today, nearly two years and thousands of dollars in tattoos later, Trent Jr.’s story is playing out on the NBA stage. He has become a sensation in Portland, a breakout that started in January when he scored 30 points at Oklahoma City on his 21st birthday, and has carried through to this week, when his late 3-pointers helped seal wins against San Antonio and Miami.

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His rise into the spotlight has been highlighted by physical defense and a feathery jump shot, but really this path was long ago outlined in that Salem tattoo parlor. See, Gary Trent Jr. knew this day was coming. He put it there, in ink, on his skin, for everyone to see.

“The one thing I’ve learned about Gary is that he is a deep thinker,” said Rosales, who has etched nearly all of Trent’s tattoos. “Ever since I’ve met him, everything we’ve done has had a meaning.”

As a result, that once blank canvas is now the road map of his life, a collection of lines and shadings that show where he has been and where he is headed.

It should be no surprise that one of the first, and one of the most prominent, tattoos Rosales etched was of Trent Jr.’s father, the 9-year NBA veteran who also broke in with the Trail Blazers, in 1995.

Nobody shaped, pushed and nurtured Trent Jr. more than his father, so his muscled image — in a Minnesota Timberwolves jersey — screams out at Trent Jr. from above his left elbow.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for him,” Trent Jr. said.

Not that it was ever easy.

From an early age, Trent Jr. was pushed like few, if any, kids his age.

When Trent Jr. was 5, his father asked him if he wanted to be good at basketball. The son shrugged his shoulders and said why not, having no idea what that meant. The next day, they were at the middle school track near their home in Columbus, Ohio, and for the next year their basketball training consisted of the same exercise: Dribbling around the track, and stopping every 100 meters to do 10 push-ups and 10 sit-ups.

“He always told me if you can’t dribble, you can’t ever get off a shot,” Trent Jr. said.

By age 7, he was asked by his father to forego birthday parties, lest the cake and ice cream hinder his performance on the court. By age 9 he was put through two-a-day workouts.

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“The only thing I knew was to train him hard,” Trent Sr. said. “It was developing a mentality and how to prioritize.”

That mentality was a carryover from his NBA career. In nine seasons between Portland, Minnesota and Dallas, Trent Sr. played on six one-year contracts. That meant he could never relax, never take anything for granted, never stop working. So when he retired in 2004, when his son was 5, his focus shifted.

“At the time, he was my only child,” Trent Sr. said. “So we became best friends. And his life became my life.”

The workouts intensified as Gary became older. Perfection was not a goal, it was an expectation. Over and over, the drills would be accompanied by the baritone voice of Trent Sr.: “Do it until you can’t get it wrong … do it until you can’t get it wrong … do it until you can’t get it wrong.”

It led to some clashes, Trent Jr. said.

“He pushed me, pushed me, pushed me … sometimes past the limit,” Trent Jr. said. “Sometimes we got in arguments. We fought a lot. We butted heads.”

There was a method to the madness. Today, the Blazers coaching staff credits work ethic for Trent Jr.’s sudden burst onto the scene, in particular his improvement on defense. Turns out, last summer no player was at the practice facility more than Trent Jr., according to Neil Olshey, the team’s top executive.

“To be all the way honest with you, ever since I can remember, me and my dad have worked,” Trent Jr. said. “It was never something where I woke up one day and said I was going to start working. I feel like it has always been a part of me, from my dad pushing me as a kid. I just know I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him. He showed me what hard work was, he introduced me to it, and now, it’s just a part of me.”

Opposite the tattoo of his father, on his right forearm, is a reminder of the softer side of his relationship with his father. It’s an image of the character from Spike Lee’s children’s book “Please, Baby, Please.”

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Inside the Trent family, “Baby, Please” is the nickname of Gary Jr., although often times it is shortened to “B. Please.”

The gruff Trent Sr. chuckled at the mention of it, surprised his son had shared the meaning behind it.

“Every night when he was little and it was time for him to pick out one of the books to read before bed, he would get “Please, Baby, Please,” Trent Sr. said. “So, everybody in the family started using that.”

It’s one of the first tattoos Trent Jr. points out, and as he traces the image with his fingertips, he speaks slower and lower as he explains the origin.

“This is from a story my dad tells me from when I was younger,” Trent Jr. said. “They say they would always go tell me to get a book, and I would always come back with the same one. And to this day, the family still calls me Baby Please, or B. Please.”

When Rosales was remembering the tattoos he had done on Trent Jr., he asked if Trent Jr. showed the Baby, Please piece.

“I think that one was very important to him,” Rosales said. “He told me it reminds him of being a kid, and how his dad used to read that book to him.”

On the crease connecting his left elbow and forearm is a roman numeral X, along with a two and an eight. It is to remind him that his perspective on life changed in 2018.

It was Feb. 10 and Trent was in Atlanta, where his Duke basketball team would play Georgia Tech that night. He was awakened in the morning hours by Tiffany Elliott, the mother of his best friend, Jordan Bolton.

Since the fifth grade, Jordan and Gary were inseparable. They played video games together, and after school they were usually together at one or the other’s home. And more than anything, they were always the two best athletes in sports.

“We pushed each other,” Trent Jr. said. “He has always meant a lot to me.”

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And now, Jordan’s mother was on the phone, telling him he was dead.

There had been an accident at Lake Region State College in Devils Lake, N.D., where Bolton was a point guard. Trent Jr. is reluctant to give details and newspaper articles are just as hazy, stating only that a person was arrested at the scene for illegal possession of a pill.

“When she called me, she said he had passed away, and that they were trying to bring him back to life,” Trent Jr. said. “I was kind of in shock, like, ‘Is he really gone?”’

Bolton ended up being revived, but he had broken vertebrae in his neck and was paralyzed from the neck down.

“It gives you a different perspective on life,” Trent Jr. said. “But I don’t think about it in a negative light.”

Instead, he gains inspiration from Bolton, who has far surpassed the initial diagnosis that he would remain paralyzed. Bolton, whose Twitter heading is a picture of him and Trent together, is attacking his rehabilitation and school work in between retweeting every one of Trent’s accomplishments. Bolton is studying to become a lawyer (“because he loves to argue” Trent says), and he also has aspirations of becoming an inspirational speaker.

My Lil bro almost back 🤟🏽@KingBolton25 https://t.co/WS7uzPDxql

— GARY x TRENT x JR 🌹 (@gtrentjr) February 10, 2020

“He’s confident he’s going to be back; he says it could be a year or two to where he is 100 percent,” Trent Jr. said. “He was always in super shape, and he was young, so everything is starting to come back quicker. He’s making some decent noise. It’s a pretty cool story.”

Further down his left arm is one of his first tattoos, and one of the few that wasn’t inked by Rosales. It’s in remembrance of his grandmother, Jo, who passed away from lung cancer in 2005 when Trent Jr. was 6.

For a period of time, he lived with grandmother Jo and can remember the family throwing a celebration of her life in her closing days. It was a BBQ, and he can see a pool, a swing, and he vividly remembers taking a picture with his grandmother and cousins.

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“It was the last time I saw her,” he said.

But not the last time he thought of her. One of his memories was that she loved butterflies, and he could remember her saying she would come back reincarnated as a butterfly. So a large portion of his left forearm is a tattoo of butterflies around a rose bush, with “Rest in Peace grandma” etched in the bush. Two of his uncles also have similar tattoos, and his mom has a butterfly on her foot.

For all his sensitivity — the tattoo of Baby Please, the remembrance to his grandmother and the tribute to Jordan — Trent is notably guarded. Almost to the point of being intimidating.

So perhaps not surprisingly, on the back of his left arm, near his shoulder, is a tattoo of a ski mask.

“That kind of explains who I am as a person; I don’t let anybody in,” Trent Jr. said. “It’s like a mask, in a sense. It’s just the way I was raised. I keep stuff in, I don’t really show emotion, except on the court. But I’m always behind the mask, you will never know if I’m going through something.”

He is proud to note that his name, Gary, means spear in German and brave warrior in old English. So on his left shoulder is a prominent samurai, carrying a long spear.

And on his left thigh, he sports a gorilla, his favorite animal because of  its strength.

“A gorilla has a certain mindset …a beast,” Trent Jr. says, and judging from last week’s game in Salt Lake City, Utah’s Donovan Mitchell might agree.

Lol…. 🤟🏽😂🤟🏽 https://t.co/9ljDQjczns

— GARY x TRENT x JR 🌹 (@gtrentjr) February 8, 2020

But not everything is serious or poignant.

He is a Star Wars fan and has Darth Vader on his left calf. On the inside of his left arm, he has a bag of money that is running, signifying Trent Jr. “chasing the bag” or a big contract.

Damian Lillard said he will never forget his first interaction with Trent Jr.

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It was right after the 2018 draft, where Trent Jr. was chosen 37th overall, a disappointment at the time to Trent Jr.

“My first conversation with him was after he was drafted and he said, ‘They don’t expect me to come in and be ready. I’m going to wake them up,'” Lillard remembered. “And the other day, I told him — it didn’t happen right away, but what you did is exactly what you said you were going to do.”

In fact, in a season when the front office and coaching staff touted Anfernee Simons as the youngster poised for a breakout, it has been Trent who is making the big splash.

In February, Trent is averaging 14.8 points in 27.5 minutes a game while shooting a scorching 27-of-49 from the field and 16-of-31 from 3-point range. For the season, he is averaging 7.0 points and is shooting a team-leading 42.3 percent from 3-point range.

“I mean, I think he is giving us something to be excited about, because he’s been consistent,” Lillard said last week after Trent hit 6-of-7 from 3, including 4-of-4 in the Blazers’ comeback win over San Antonio during the fourth quarter.

Then, after Trent scored 22 points and hit two more important 3-pointers late to secure a win over Miami, Lillard revealed that he recently pulled Trent Jr. aside.

“I told him the other day — I don’t know if I’ve ever been more proud or happier for another player, or younger player since I’ve been in the league, than I am of what he’s been doing,” Lillard said.

Trent is now the top reserve off the bench and he has been playing both shooting guard and small forward, showing that at both positions he has been up to the task defensively.

All the while, he has remained the same, silently striding through the locker room, his tattoos out for everybody to read them.

“It’s easy to look at him and be like, ‘Oh yeah, young dude with a bunch of tattoos, a second-round pick who left school early’ … it’s easy to judge,” Lillard said. “That’s why it’s important to take the time to get to know people, because he’s actually a really nice, young dude. A good teammate, good person, not cocky, he listens, and it’s ‘Yes, sir’ to the coaching staff … he deserves this.”

There is one tattoo that is unfinished on Trent Jr.

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On the back of his right arm is an hourglass, with the sands of time passing through.

“It’s a motivational piece, to remind me that my time is slowly coming,” Trent Jr. said. “I did it at a time when I wasn’t playing a lot, I was just coming into the NBA, and everything was new, different. I was just waiting for an opportunity.”

Now, his opportunity has arrived, and he is taking it with both hands. He is driven by his motto — “Just Be Great” — whose initials are on his right elbow. And on his left wrist are cards and a roulette wheel, over the words “Bet on Me.”

But like the hourglass tattoo, he knows his game is not finished.

He wants to be even better on defense.

“It’s about knowing your angles, knowing player tendencies and really, just having heart,” Trent Jr. said. “Not letting anyone score on you, and take it to heart if somebody does score on you. Have some pride about yourself on the defensive end.”

And he wants to become even more consistent.

“I’m nowhere near where I want to be, so I’m going to continue to work,” he said.

Back in Minneapolis, where his father and three younger brothers — Garyson (12), Grayson (8) and Graydon (7) — live, there is controlled enthusiasm. When asked his reaction to his son hitting 6 3-pointers against San Antonio last week, Trent Sr. scoffed.

“I’m never going to be jumping off the couch watching what my son does,” Trent Sr. harrumphed. “My son has been ballin’ all his life. There’s not a basketball player that is in my son’s class or two classes ahead of him that has spent more time in or around basketball, because that was my life.”

The father said his son used to tell him that the NBA was waiting on him, and once he got there he was going to show the world. So it was interesting on Sunday when Lillard made one final observation about Trent Jr.

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“The biggest thing to me is it looks like he was waiting for this,” Lillard said. “You can tell he was preparing like he knew this opportunity would come. And now that it’s happening, he’s doing what he’s doing, and he’s not surprised by it.”

That brings us back to that unfinished tattoo. The one of the hourglass with the sands of time sprinkling down. One day, Trent Jr. says, he will drive down to Salem and meet with Rosales at Immortal Ink, and have him put the finishing touches on it. The final product will no longer show sand passing through. All of the sand will be at the bottom.

“It will mean my time has arrived,” Trent Jr. said.

(Top photo: Abbie Parr / Getty Images)

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