Multi.Colored—tattooed people, tattoo dreams

Sorry I have taken so long between posts lately! I have been working as an intern on the Lifehacker web site, and the time I used to spend browsing around for body art information has been spent on other things. 

However, to make up for that a little bit, here’s some great links.

Evil Tattoo’s Tattoo Gallery
Tattoo Finder
5 W’s Tattoos
Tattoo Art of Pat Fish
TattooArtists.org
BMEInk (a lot of adult oriented material; viewer discretion advised)
About.com’s tattoo and piercing galleries

What are your favorite web sites featuring body art?  I’m always up for someplace new to look!

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In my last couple posts I talked about rude, crude tattoos and images of death. In the wake of the elections in the USA, I think it’s now time to focus on upbeat, positive images that reflect well on us and send a positive message to the world as well.

I wrote earlier about spiritual designs.  Putting an affirmation of your spiritual beliefs on your skin could be one way of sending a positive message, although in today’s increasingly fractured world other people might not see the message you are trying to send.   But in thousands of years of religious art, there are plenty of examples of designs that uplift both the wearer and the observer.  It’s worth doing research to find exactly the right design.  The usual run of religious (mainly Christian) flash can be found just about anywhere.  You want something that represents you, not a bazillion others with exactly the same flash, right?

Another form of positive design is a memorial to a lost loved one.  I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of fine-line portraits.  I think there are plenty of other ways to honor those we have lost.  Think about what mattered to that person and find a design that showcases that.  I have a stylized dragon on my back to honor my grandmother.  That, to me, is more profound than just getting her name or a portrait inked on my skin.

And of course there is a wide lexicon of images that are upbeat and postitive all on their own.  “Sunshine, lollypops and rainbows” is more than just the title of a 60s bubblegum song.  :)  Well-done Celtic designs can combine the spiritual and the decorative.  The tried-and-true images of four-leaf clovers, lucky horseshoes and the like are popular for good reason.  There are more elaborate designs representing good fortune from pagan beliefs and non-Western cultures.  Once you set your mind to it, the possibilities are limitless.

What kinds of positive images does your ink show the world?
photo credit: showbizsuperstar

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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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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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….put a sports logo on my arm?

There’s a TV commercial that’s getting a lot of airplay these days, showing sports fans displaying their lovefor their teams in different, mostly creative ways. Painting a car like a team uniform. Wearing a costume representative of the team name. Getting a credit card with a team logo. Getting the team logo tattooed on your arm.

It’s obvious, of course, that the team logo in the commercial isn’t a real tattoo. (Obvious to anyone who’s ever come within ten feet of a real tattoo artist, that is.) But I have no doubt there are people so devoted to their teams, or to their favorite athletes, that they’ve got some kind of sports logo inked on their skin.

I’ve never been a big enough fan of any team or athlete that I’d want a sports emblem permanently attached. Heck, I never even replaced my Green Bay Packers jersey when it finally wore out (I’m not as big a Packers fan as I once was–I guess the days of “The Pack will be back! Way back!” did my early enthusasm in). My grandfather was a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan, but I can’t imagine him buying a jersey, much less getting a tattoo.

On the other hand, I watch “American Chopper” and look at how crazy Grandma Teutul is about the Yankees. I could totally see her getting a Yankee logo tattooed on her arm (and Paul Sr. paying for it with no questions asked). Sometimes I tune in the Channel 5 news a few minutes early and catch the last minute or so of their wrestling extravaganza du jour, and I can totally picture the people screaming in the audience lining up at the local tattoo parlor to get a pro wrestling emblem or a portrait of their favorite bruiser permanently applied.

Would you get a tattoo of your favorite team emblem or something else related to a sport of some kind? Or is that the kind of thing you might be seeing a tattoo removal specialist about after a few bad seasons or big losses? Is that kind of “sports memorabilia” worth the money?

photo credit: Mac(3)

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I am a big fan of tattoo web sites, as one might imagine. This one caught my eye today and it definitely deserves a wider audience.

Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium. My daughter the Linguistics Ph.D. candidate would like the tattoo of the glottal stop.

Yet more proof that not all tattooed people are hirsute bikers.

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Even though tattooed people are highly individual, there are a lot of tattoo designs that show up more often than others. People like hearts and flowers and butterflies and stars and military symbols. They like dogs and religious symbols and tattoos that show they love their mothers. They like dragons and Celtic knots and abstract tribal designs.

But what about the ones that are more offbeat? Like a bar code, or an outline silhouette of a person with an arrow pointing to the tattoo’s location and the caption YOU ARE HERE. How about a tattoo that looks like a window through the person, or an open wound, or that contains deliberately misspelled words?

My own tattoos are a combination of the common and the offbeat. My first tattoo was a “swoosh” of seven stars amongst multicolored dots. (Yes, I had a reason for wanting that, but it’s really too personal to explain.) My second was a dragon, which is a common motif, but I adapted it into an abstract, multicolored design to at least make it a bit less common. And my third was a scarab and Eye of Horus, which was later expanded into a larger Egyptian-themed design. I felt it was important to make my designs as uncommon as I am.

But yet, I have seen lovely work done with standard flash. Those pictures are on the tattoo parlor walls for a reason. They are tried and true. And of course the artist is free to adapt a standard flash design to make it a bit more original while it’s being applied. But truthfully, if a person wants the Marine Corps symbol or a classic butterfly, no need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

So which do you think is best–a completely original new design, or a good piece of standard flash?
photo credit: graphic.ward

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My late father had a unique sense of humor, and he delighted in the ridiculous. Which is why he was a big fan of the Marx Brothers and the British comedians who did the Goon Show and “Beyond the Fringe.”

At one point in my childhood, we had a housekeeper whose first name was Lydia. My father, of course, thought it would be appropriate to sing “Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, the en-cy-clo-piddea” to her, assuming she’d get the reference.

She didn’t.

And thus ruffled feathers had to be smoothed, and explanations had to be given, and my father learned that not everyone is a fan of classic comedy.

Lydia, the tattooed lady of the song, was covered all over with miscellaneous designs. You could see “Kankakee, or Paree, or Washington crossing the Delaware.” From the pictures I’ve seen, heavily tattooed people in those days mostly did the same thing–just kept adding ink-work till there wasn’t much skin left to be covered. There was no overall design. And in those days, heavily tattooed people did make a living as circus performers, so if the average person were to see someone with a lot of ink, that’s what they would have seen.

If you’re only going to get a few tattoos, it doesn’t really matter if they “go along” with each other in any way. Inspiration strikes, ink is added. What feels right at one stage of the game might not be so appealing the next time around. My own three tattoos don’t coordinate with each other visually in any way (although I must admit I have considered commissioning a gifted artist of our acquaintance to design me a sleeve that would incorporate my seven stars). Given that no two of my tattoos are anywhere near each other, it doesn’t matter at all that they don’t coordinate.

However, it does seem to me that if one’s goal is to get pretty well covered, a grand plan makes the whole thing look a lot better. That’s why those Japanese bodysuits look so good. If we just keep adding stuff till there’s no skin left, it comes out looking like what it is: a mish-mosh. Better, I think, to have at least some plan to coordinate everything. But then again, I don’t plan to get completely covered, so what do I know?

What do you think? Grand plan, or individual inspirations?

By the way, if you want to see Groucho singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” in his prime, you can find his performance on YouTube here. I have had no luck embedding videos properly, so better you go see it at the source.

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The Chinese zodiac assigns an animal totem to each lunar year. Each animal has both positive and negative qualities that are supposed to be evident in people born in that year.

On rats…

2008 will be the Year of the Rat. We westerners might think the rat was a very unappealing totem, but people born in the Year of the Rat are said to be clever, ambitious, and resourceful. George Washington and Winston Churchill were both born in the Year of the Rat.

Chinese zodiac symbols are very popular as tattoo designs. They have a rich symbolism and lend themselves to a wide range of artistic interpretations. And, of course, the animals themselves can be beautifully depicted even if one isn’t using them to represent signs of the zodiac.

….and cats

We just adopted a new cat, which leads me to think about the popularity of cats (in all sizes and varieties) as tattoo designs as well. From the snarling tiger to the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet, there are infinite variations on the design of the cat. I’m guessing that many people pick an image of a big cat to represent fierceness and strength. Some of the Japanese classic drawings of tigers are truly magnificent (and I’ve seen photos of Japanese style tiger tattoos that are just as magnificent).

Would I get a cat tat? I don’t know. It’s something I would have to think about very carefully. But on the other hand… I was born in the Year of the Tiger (and so was my maternal grandmother). I might choose that symbol to represent all my strengths, like being affectionate, generous and rebellious. I won’t think about the negative traits, because I don’t have any… right?

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(Otherwise known as Everything Old Is New Again)

Even if you’ve spent plenty of time thinking about your design, and working with your artist to create it, the old saying that “There’s nothing so sure as change” still applies. As time goes by, you may well change your mind about that tattoo. So, then what?

How about having it re-worked into something else? Not every design is suitable for this, of course, but with enough imagination and careful ink placement it may well be possible to transform something old and/or unwanted into something fresh and new.

Amy Krakow’s Total Tattoo Book includes some photos of old designs being covered up by, or reworked into, new ones.

A lot depends on what color the ink was in the original design and where it’s located. Black ink, of course, will be the most difficult to cover up. But even that can be worked around if you’re willing to take time and think about it.

My own transformation

I had a small Eye of Horus on my ankle that I was never entirely happy with. The artist went too deep on the outline, and over time the black outline spread into what was supposed to be the gold color of the Eye, and obliterated the nice little spiral in the “eyeball’ that had originally been highlighted in white ink. When I consulted with another artist about re-doing the gold color, she explained to me that tattoo ink is transparent, not opaque (which, believe it or not, I had not known up till then) so it would not be possible to color over the excess black with more gold. However, she suggested that she could highlight the entire area with gold after she applied the new surrounding design, to make it look like the Eye of Horus had been designed with a golden highlight. And that’s what she did.

Here’s how that turned out:

So if you’ve changed your mind about your ink, don’t make the tattoo-removal clinic your first stop. Get someone to take a picture of your tattoo, and print out several copies at life size on plain paper (the quality of the reproduction is not as important here as is having a good surface to draw on and paper that doesn’t cost a lot if you toss out several sheets while you’re working through your idea). Try drawing a new design with the old one. If you don’t have much in the way of artistic skills, sketch in what you want as best you can and take the drawing to your favorite tattoo artist and see what he or she says about it.

Even if you’re not a fan of the Transformers, you can still be transformed.

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