The “one million” is somewhat of a stretch. It counts all the possible variations on the designs, including the different ways they can be combined and the different ways they can be colored or altered.  The designs themselves are fairly standard and include old-school-style sailor flash, fairly generic tribal designs, and Asian style fish and birds, among others.

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You know what? I’m 60. If I’m still around in 20 years and looking at my tattoos, I will be happy no matter what they look like. 

Are you concerned about how your ink will look later on?

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Registering is free and you have my promise that I will never use the information you provide for any purpose whatsoever. Someone who hates spam as much as I do isn’t going to spam anyone else.

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All of my tattoos are in areas usually covered by my clothing.  That was a conscious choice on my part, because I knew I’d have to meet employers’ dress codes for years to come and I didn’t want to ink myself out of a job.  This is not to say I didn’t want a visible tat (or more than one) but I had to put other considerations first.

Well, now I’m retired and running my own business (OK, I have to put in a plug for that here, because I am proud of it, Logan Books) I can set my own dress code, and I’m strongly considering getting a bracelet tattoo on my left wrist.  I’m proud of being a tattooed person and I’d like to show off my ink a little more. Besides, I’m hitting my 60th birthday in November and wouldn’t getting some new ink be a grand way to celebrate? 

Have you had issues with hiding your ink to please your employer?  Do you sometimes wonder what the guys and gals in the “suits” are hiding under all those conservative clothes?  I sure do.  It’s fun to think that the guy in the oh so proper suit might have a pinup girl on his leg or a koi on his back, and the lady in the go-to-meeting dress might have a dragon on her upper thigh and a Japanese half sleeve.  My Egyptian tat shows off very nicely when I’m wearing a dress, but you know what?  I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress.  Retirement means a lot less money but a lot more fun.

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OK, I have to confess that I am a Judge Judy aficionado.  There is just nothing more entertaining than watching her give some fool the talking-to that was decades overdue.  You can tell that a huge number of the people standing before her have NEVER been talked to like that, and that’s half the fun.

Yesterday, though, was unusual in that every case involved people with really bad tattoos.  I mean, of the do it yourself with soot and a guitar string variety (or these fools paid an artist to do the equivalent).  One even had blobs of black ink all over his face and admitted to “tattooing his friends.”  One would hope that the friends were dead drunk at the time and have very poor eyesight and no mirrors in their abodes.  Yuck.

And last night, one of the local TV stations did yet another installment in the sweeps-month tabloid-style interview with the exceedingly well-inked hottie that that idiot Jesse James was sleeping with.  Even she admits she doesn’t like all that ink any more, but there’s no real way to get rid of it now.  They haven’t done too many closeups of her tattoos, but the ones I could see were mediocre (and having blue ink on her face was not a beauty treatment).

Much as I appreciate body art, sometimes all I can do is ask “What were they thinking?”  Why would people want to deface themseves (pun intended) like that?  What message are they trying to convey other than “I don’t give a crap”?  I know we all firmly believe we’re not going to get any older (I’m not, but I still want to be Lwaxana Troi when I grow up) and our outlook on the world is never going to change, but truthfully, what kind of life are these young men going to have when they’re pushing 60 like I am and still have black blobs all over their arms, necks, and faces?  They didn’t look like they’d be able to earn enough money for laser removal.

Heck, when I was 16 all I wanted was a flower doodle on my left ankle, in green ink.  I drew it on my skin myself and wished I could get it put there permanently.  If I’d been able to get my wish (fat chance of that in an armpit Nebraska town in the mid 1960s) I suppose I would have managed to live with it in later years, but I would have been showing it off as “Here’s what I did when I was too young to know better.”

Have you ever encountered people who seriously mess up the whole concept of tattoos and body art?  Not just the gangsters, whose ugly tattoos are there for an actual reason, but people who’ve got junk on their skin they’ll never be able to fix?  Do you think those people give the rest of us with our tasteful tattoos a bad name?

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• Doh! Burglar Is Nabbed By His Face Tattoos (news.sky.com)
• There’s no eraser for a tattoo mistake: Tat Chat (cleveland.com)

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It is now possible, with the help of the right artist, to re-color the whites of your eyes.  The process has to be done with a syringe, not a regular tattoo needle.  Color is injected just under the surface and spreads out.  All reports indicate that this is an incredibly painful procedure.

Here is a recent story from the Huffington Post about a couple of guys who got the eyeball tattoos done in prison.  Apparently it is one way to prove how tough you are.  No kidding.  Given the decidedly nonsterile environment in prison cells, and the decidedly nontraditional equipment available to do the job, it’s a wonder these guys lived to tell the tale.  Whether they’ll still have their eyesight a year or two down the road, who knows?

Ordinarily my attitude toward body art and body mods is “whatever floats your boat.”  Tongue splitting, lizard spots, plastic beads under the skin, whatever.  But to deliberately put your eyes in jeopardy?  This is the only time I have found myself saying out loud, “What were they THINKING!!!”

There are quite a few web sites out there devoted to eye tattoos / scleral tattooing / etc.  I’m not going to link to them, because the few I looked at while researching this post made me queasy.  It’s my blog and I ain’t a-gonna make myself sick. 

What do you think about this?  Do you have any tattoos in less-common places yourself?
photo credit: dullhunk

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In honor of this weekend’s major wingding, here’s another bad-tattoo site:  Sports Worst Tattoos.  Don’t be eating those corn chips or drinking that beer while you look. 

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I have a link to Hanzi Smatter (for Asian character stupidity) in my Blogroll, and it’s well worth a look if you think you really really want something in an Asian alphabet.

Today’s discovery is Bad Hebrew Tattoos.  It never ceases to amaze me the amount of trouble one can get into, not actually being able to write a language. 

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I”ve already talked about people who get Asian characters they don’t understand inked on themselves.  It appears that Asian languages are not alone.

Thanks to Tales of a Wayward Classicist for this lovely discussion of bad Latin tattoos.

It seems there’s no end to the stuff people don’t know they’re putting on their skin. 

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As a tattooed person and a cat lover, words simply cannot express my disgust.

What do you think? You can read the article here.
photo credit: Vironevaeh

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