Multi.Colored—tattooed people, tattoo dreams

I have never used this blog for political commentary before, because it’s not what I’m here to talk about.

However, since we multicolored people are showing the world we can think for ourselves and stand outside the mainstream, I will step up on my soapbox just this once today, and urge California voters to reject Proposition 8.  It’s being supported by a lot of people who don’t think for themselves, and who listen to the worst kinds of scaremongering lies.

Today is the 39th anniversary of my husband’s and my first date.  We’ve been married 36 years.  We believe in marriage and we believe in justice.   Allowing same-sex marriages has changed nothing about “traditional” marriage any place in the world.  Let’s show the bigots in California that it won’t change anything here.

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The other day, I saw a man with a rude, crude tattoo.  Not only was the design not up to junior high art class standards, it was a drawing of a hand making an obscene gesture usually referred to as flipping someone the bird.

I had to wonder why someone would mark himself permanently that way. I’m sure he thought it was a good idea at the time, but now he’s stuck with it, and does he really want to maintain that attitude forever?  I have no idea.  I certainly didn’t put myself at risk by asking.

Of course, I have wondered many times why people marked themselves the way they did.  Blurry ink lines, wretched art work, people’s names that later had to be crossed out or

Image via Wikipedia

covered up, gang symbols, you name it. There’s artwork done by people who look like they could have flunked coloring in kindergarten, designs that leave the viewer wondering what on earth the wearer was thinking, and what the artist must have ingested before picking up the needle.

Don’t these people check the artists out?  Or do they just not care?

And it’s not just bad artwork that leaves me wondering, sometimes.  Some of the calligraphy on gang tattoos is outstanding–why waste talent like that on art that only serves to make its wearer a target for trouble?  Come to think of it, why is the lower-back tattoo called a tramp stamp?

We multicolored people each have our own ideas of what’s appropriate and what’s artistic.  Have you seen anything that made you think someone’s doing his or her best to give multicolored people a bad name?

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While I’m not a regular watcher of “LA Ink,” I do tune it in from time to time, and I watched “Miami Ink” while Kat Von D was working there.

Kat does excellent fine-line portrait work.  I must admit that up till the time I saw what she could do, I was definitely not a fan of tattoo portraits.  Maybe because I’d never seen a really good one.  It always seemed that the pictures might have looked good when drawn on paper, but when translated to skin they were distotred and amateur-artist-looking.  I couldn’t understand why someone would want to honor someone else by putting a mediocre junior-high-art-class-looking drawing on their skin.

Transferring a drawing on flat paper to the curved surface of someone’s body requires a certain amount of adjustment and talent.  And of course a tattoo needle is nowhere near as forgiving as a pencil, and you can’t just go back and erase your mistakes.  But does that account for all the sappy-looking tattoo portrait art out there?  I saw some fairly mediocre portraits turn up on “Miami Ink” and the recipients always said they were pleased, but was that just for the TV cameras?  Who knows?

I’ve even seen portraits of “Jesus” (the standardized Western portrait of a man who certainly wasn’t the blonde-haired, handsome dude used to represent him) that look bad enough that they could be taken for mockery, not faith.

The Total Tattoo Book includes a photo of a man’s back completely covered by a portrait of Charles Lindbergh, which left me wondering why someone would pay good money for something like that.  Of course, my opinion of LIndbergh and his politics might color my opinion a bit. 

What do you think about tattoo portraits?  Do you have one?  Whom does it honor, and who did the work?

photo credit: R.O.K.E.N

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Many people get my blog posts via an RSS reader, but not everyone wants to do that.  If you’d like to receive my posts via email, now you can.  Just click on “subscribe by email” in the banner above and fill in your preferences.

I guarantee I do not now and never will use your email address for anything but sending my blog posts.

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I’m taking an art class this semester, and yesterday I wore my TATTOOS ARE MY WAY OF INVESTING IN ART t-shirt to class.

This led to an interesting discussion with one of my classmates, who has several tattoos herself.  She said that all her tattoos have a common theme, something very spiritually meaningful to her.  Like me, her ink is usually covered by clothing, but she described some of her tattoos and explained why they fit her theme.

I obviously never had a “theme” in choosing my tattoos, but all of them have deep personal meaning to me, so in that sense they go together even though visually and stylistically they don’t match in any way.  But the idea of planning each tattoo with one central theme in mind intrigued me.  I wonder how common that approach to body art must be?

Obviously, the people who get whole-body Japanese tattoos are following that kind of philosophy.  But is a gangbanger whose ink reflects gang sensibilities even though not coming together in one unified design doing the same?  What about a person whose tattoos relate to the same general principle (religious art, for example) but are all done in varying styles or by different artists and present a mish-mosh of visual effects when seen as a whole?

What happens if a person starts out with one theme in mind and then goes off in a different direction?  Can the original ink be altered to match the new theme?  Should it be?  I’m reminded of the tattooed lady in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land who starts off as a standard-issue sideshow performer and then has her tattoos transformed into a religious work of art by her husband, the tattoo artist.

And what if some of the art is done by one artist and some of it is done by another artist with an entirely different style?

I guess what I’m asking is whether having a theme results in a “unified field” of body art or not. 

Do you have a theme?  Do you know anyone who planned their ink in advance?  I’d be interested to hear what others think about this.
photo credit: rasseon

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I’ve written on the subject of religious objections to tattoos before (if you’re interested, you can read that entry here).  I was reminded of that by a story in yesterday’s local paper, on the subject of Jews and tattoos.

Before I begin today’s essay:  I had one Jewish grandfather, but he died before I was born, and I don’t claim any expertise on the subject of Judaism or the Law and the Prophets.  I am an interested outsider, with a nearly lifelong interest in Biblical history and comparative religions.  I belong to no sect, either by heritage or by choice.  All human theological traditions both living and past have an equal chance of being true, in my opinion.

Does Leviticus say no?

That said, it is widely believed that there is a prohibition against making any marks on the body in the book of Leviticus.  The various translations seem to agree that people should not cut themselves “for the dead” (it was a tradition in many cultures for the bereaved to slash their own skins).  But what follows differs depending on which translation one reads.  Some prohibit “making marks” or “printing marks” on the skin, while some use the word “tattoo.”  I can’t read Hebrew, so I don’t know exactly what the original Scripture said.  I am looking forward to Dr. James Tabor’s group’s future publication of The Transparent English Bible, so those of us who can’t read the original IN the original can finally get as close as possible to what it says.

Many Jewish people believe that the prohibition is against tattooing, which made the death-camp marks all the more horrible.  And that memory quite rightly lingers on, lending greater force to the present-day prohibition on tattoos.  Whether a modern tattoo becomes a matter of honor or horror is far beyond any outsider’s business to decide.  But according to the article, many modern Jews are choosing to be tattooed precisely because they value their heritage and wish to say so in a permanent way.

Does 21st century choice enter into it?

In an earlier post, I talked about choosing religious or spiritual designs for tattoos.  I believe those designs should have intense personal significance, and certainly people who choose to override religious prohibitions must have strong feelings on the subject.

Here is a link to the original story. If you do a Google search with “Jew tattoo” you’ll find plenty of opinions pro and con, with good reasons to support both sides.  Do you have an opinion?  I’d like to hear it.

photo credit: hometownzero

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