Spray-painted at least 63 times on walls and buildings on both sides of the Willamette River since February, the word has become Portland’s latest graffiti nuisance.
   In Southeast Portland: “Vagina.”
   In Southwest: “Vagina.”
   Downtown: You get the idea.
   “It’s kind of crazy,” said Brent Canode, interim deputy director of the city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement, the agency in charge of removing graffiti in Portland. “Honestly, I can’t even imagine the person doing this.”
   An informal profile Canode described suggests the tagger is a woman, probably an artist and probably acting alone.
   “I mean, look at the script or font she’s using,” he said. “Very feminine. Someone took a lot of care in designing this. Of course, it’s illegal, but still.”
   The nonprofit Youth Employment Institute, which holds the city contract to erase graffiti, became aware of the tag Feb. 3. Through April, institute staff removed 35 tags. Since then, another 28. Variations include “Vag” or “VA,” all in the same smooth, modified-cursive script.
   Canode said he had not yet referred the tags to the Portland Police Bureau for investigation.
   “But it’s getting to that point,” he said.
   LaRae Ross, YEI graffiti removal program coordinator and Northeast Precinct crisis response team member, said the pace at which the tags appeared seems to have slowed in recent months.
   “There’s more out there,” she said. “We haven’t gotten to all of it. I would call it an interesting nuisance. I don’t find it all that offensive, not when we have a guy out there right now who makes what looks like the top of a penis and then paints it to look like a person. I mean, it could be worse.”
   A Reed College student left the tag “Maul” all over Portland in 1999. Charged with 44 counts of the unlawful applying of graffiti, the student paid nearly $3,000 in restitution, spent 400 hours performing graffiti cleanup and made four public apologies.
   And recently a Portland man circled some 8,000 bits of graffiti with doughnuts of silver spray paint to highlight the problem. His sentence included removing his silver circles.
   Marcia Dennis, Office of Neighborhood Involvement’s graffiti abatement and residential siting coordinator, grew stern when addressing the “Vagina” tags.
   “We don’t want to advertise their tags for them,” she said. “All they want is attention. I’m afraid anything that looks like we’re promoting their tags is a negative for us.”