Mark It

Sunlight streams through the glass façade of Flats Tattooing in Groton, Connecticut, a small shop in a strip mall where body art is taken seriously. An episode of The Sopranos plays from a wall-mounted TV at the center of the action, and as James Gandolfini digs into an expletive-laced tirade, Thomas Gram’s eyes go wide.

The 53-year-old isn’t watching or even listening to the scene. Instead, to distract himself from the pain, he’s making small talk with anyone who might engage with him, including his tattoo artist, 29-year-old Holli Marie Strobel, who at the moment is intently focused on coloring in the smallest tree within a cluster of cork oaks that compose the logo of Valderrama Golf Club. “Now she’s trying to kill me,” he says.

The half-dollar-sized tattoo in progress resides just below the crook of Gram’s left elbow. It shares real estate on his upper forearm with the logos for Pinehurst No. 2, Royal Dublin Golf Club, Ozarks National at Big Cedar Lodge, Black Diamond Ranch in Lecanto, Florida, and more.

Gram has about 70 tattoos of golf clubs and courses, all of which have appeared on Golf Digest’s lists of the top 100 courses in the world and all of which he has played. When prompted, he starts at the beginning, pointing to Winged Foot’s iconic mark near the middle of his right bicep. “I should know all of them,” he says, trailing off as he searches for the pair of maritime flags that make up the Friar’s Head logo.

“They’re only on you forever,” Strobel cuts in sarcastically.

Gram’s golf course tattoos constitute two arm sleeves in different phases of completion. And with each year, his collection grows larger. Last year, Gram played exactly 200 rounds on 150 different courses. He teed it up in 19 U.S. states and eight countries—and, most importantly, he added two dozen new tattoos.

Early on in this golf-obsessed chapter of his life, which began in his early 40s, Gram’s motivation was the same as the vast majority of players: to shoot lower scores. Ultimately, he couldn’t find gratification in it.

But once he set his attention on accruing memorable golf adventures all over the world—and commemorating them with ink—everything changed. Now, the goal is just to experience the course. The placement of his next tattoo is far more important than the number he writes down on the scorecard.

“That honestly has been a little bit of an internal struggle,” he says, “as much as internal struggles occur when you talk about something as privileged as tattooing top-100 golf course logos on you.”

The tattoos on Gram’s right arm largely follow a chronological sequence; each was placed as he played a new course. When he and Strobel began adding tattoos to his left arm, they took a more thematic approach, grouping together logos with similar motifs or courses with noteworthy commonalities. But Gram has always given Strobel the freedom to determine the final location. He trusts her artist’s eye.

She has loved the multi-year project. “I’ve seen the trends of the infinity signs on the wrists and the tribal armbands,” says Strobel, who twice has appeared on MTV’s Ink Master. “I’ve seen all of that come and go and come back again. But it’s always cool to find something that you’ve never seen before as a tattoo artist. That gets you really excited. Like, who the fuck would get a sleeve of golf logos? But here we are!”

Although he would eventually harbor a passion for well-struck irons and bending putts, Gram, a longtime New Englander who was born in Norway, grew up with a hockey stick in his hands. He owned a set of clubs, but they mostly collected dust at the back of his basement, seeing the light of day only on the rare occasions when he was invited by friends to play in corporate outings.

Around his 40th birthday, however, the self-employed entrepreneur recognized a crossroads looming. Decades of checks and slashes had begun to take their toll. His body was telling him what he always knew was inevitable: He couldn’t continue playing hockey forever. Gram realized he needed a new pursuit to fill the competitive void.

Then, in one swing, the hockey player became a golfer. During a scramble tournament with his buddies on the North Course at Lake of Isles in North Stonington, Connecticut, a perfect storm brewed as Gram stepped onto the 16th tee. Buoyed by equal measures of indifference and natural athleticism—and boosted by the relaxed confidence of a best-ball tournament—Gram took a big swing on the 150-yard par 3.

“I hit a 5-iron as hard as I possibly could—a 5-iron,” he says, reiterating the club selection with a tone of disgust that conveys his scant ability at the time. “And it one-hopped in the hole. Then I made the famous statement, which I’ve since learned is complete horseshit: ‘Golf is just too easy!’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to it.’”

In an attempt to prove himself right, Gram dedicated the next three months to golf, playing every day. “I found out it is not an easy sport,” he says. But he was hooked.

Soon he was investing in memberships at local clubs. Regular lessons would come, but not before an innate stubbornness stymied faster progress. “The hockey player in me was like, ‘I don’t need somebody teaching me how to hit a ball,’” he says with a laugh.

Five years into his love affair with golf, Gram made his first trek to Ireland. He was ready to book a return trip to the Emerald Isle before his flight touched down in Dublin. Soon he added Ballybunion, Waterville Golf Links and Lahinch Golf Club to Winged Foot, Fishers Island Club and Pacific Dunes.

Yet the thought of commemorating the courses with tattoos wasn’t on his radar. That inspiration would come from his son. 

About a decade ago, Gram’s son Marcus—then 15 years old—bravely approached his parents with a request: He wanted a tattoo. Gram and his wife, Brigitte, were prepared for this scenario, and they had an answer ready to go.

“Sure,” they said. “You can get a tattoo. But only if we come with you and we all get tattoos together.”

The strategy seemed foolproof: For a teenager, nothing could more effectively kill the cool factor of getting a tattoo than having your parents tag along.

They were wrong. Perhaps Marcus truly didn’t mind getting tattoos with his mom and dad. Or maybe he recognized that immediate embarrassment was a small price to pay for long-term satisfaction. Either way, he called their bluff, and Gram got his first tattoo.

It was the Chinese symbol for “family,” emblazoned on his left ankle. Gram liked the experience, and as time passed he found himself wishing the piece was even larger. Over the next year or two, he got a couple more—the Tree of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings on his left calf, and a Green Day logo next to it. It’s said acquiring body art can be addictive. Gram was starting to believe it.

One day, Marcus, then 18, came home with an entire sleeve of tattoos down his left arm. Gram was equal parts shocked and impressed. He expressed a desire to get his own sleeve, but his kids rebuked the idea, telling him he was too old. “Oh yeah?” their father said. “Watch me.”

Gram didn’t rush out to cover his arm with ink; he knew the best tattoos were ones that had a personal meaning. He just didn’t know what his next additions should be. “The dumbest thing in the world is to get a tattoo everybody else has,” he says.

Eventually, Gram landed on the idea of a golf tattoo. He’d seen a couple guys with Augusta National and others with Titleist’s signature script permanently displayed on their bodies, but he didn’t see the point in either of those. He’d never been to the Masters, so why get an ANGC tattoo? And what if he someday stopped playing Titleist balls?

Then he thought of the six bucket-list courses he’d played. Their logos were distinctive and cool. A conference with Strobel about getting some of them—maybe all of them—tattooed somewhere produced an even better idea: If he could play a few more of those top-100 courses, she told him, she could incorporate all of those logos into a sleeve—or half a sleeve, anyway. 

That was all Gram needed to hear.

As Gram’s collection grows, so does its impact.

“Because of the sheer amount of them,” he says, “people are beginning to understand. It’s not just some weirdo getting a couple of golf tattoos.”

His list of passions has expanded as well. “Wanting to get a sleeve and to play all the top-100 courses led to me developing an addiction for travel,” he explains. “I love traveling, to the point that I’m getting on planes and going to foreign countries by myself.”

Gram’s adventures have introduced him to players who share his love of a bucket-list quest. It’s been quite a revelation for someone who previously considered himself to be antisocial.

“I can’t be the guy who’s chasing the low-handicap index,” he says. “That drove me bonkers. I wasn’t having any fun. I don’t care if I go out and shoot 100 or I shoot 71. For me, it’s about the course, it’s about the travel, it’s about the people, and it’s about the tattoo.”

And the tattoos are starting to open doors previously unthinkable. A pro at Boston Golf Club helped him get on at Friar’s Head, and the connection Gram made at Friar’s Head is now working to get him a tee time at Maidstone. An instructor at Shinnecock Hills learned of the mission and is working on a round there. “He thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous that I don’t have a Shinnecock tattoo,” Gram laughs.

The project has also forged an unlikely friendship between a mostly retired, middle-aged, golf-obsessed father and a tattoo artist in her late 20s who admittedly knows nothing about golf. Gram confesses to not having a high pain tolerance, and he’ll often chat with Strobel as a coping mechanism while she works. “That’s usually my favorite part of the process,” she says. “It’s asking him, ‘Where did you go this time? Where have you been now?’”

The conversations have done more than just distract Gram and entertain Strobel; they’ve also had an effect on her husband, Alex. As a child, Alex played golf with his father, but he drifted from it during his teenage years. Gram’s sessions in the chair have brought the game back into Alex’s life in a way he never expected. “It’s rekindling this memory that I have of playing golf as a kid with my dad,” he says. “I wouldn’t be thinking about playing again if Holli wasn’t every month working on a sleeve of golf logo tattoos.”

As word of his project continues to spread, Gram acknowledges that the odds that someone else might follow in his footsteps are increasing.

“One part of me thinks, ‘I wish other people would do it,’” he says. “But then the other side of me thinks, ‘Please don’t. That’s my thing.’ Tattoos are supposed to be extremely personal. They’re supposed to be something that’s representative of you and who you are. So I take great pride in coming up with the idea.”

Even as Gram continues to travel the world, gathering more logos each year, he recognizes that he’ll likely never complete the quest. The lists change every year, with courses added and dropped. And Gram knows gaining entry into places like Cypress Point, Pine Valley and, yes, Augusta National often takes something akin to a minor miracle. But he long ago made peace with that.

“That’s the thing with golf, right? You’re never done,” he says. “You’re forever chasing improvements in your game or a lower handicap. And it’s the same with this.”