Looking closer, I saw that the shoe-polish-style tins actually contained Rocco’s Old School Tattoo Healing Balm! I was delighted to find such a useful product in such a tempting position in the store. This just reinforced my feeling that tattoos are becoming so popular that the products one uses to help heal them aren’t just a niche item any more.

I’ve never used this product and I have no link to the manufacturers. I was just happy to see a tattoo product right out where people could grab it on their way through the Walgreens checkout. I need to go back in there one of these days and see what other tattoo related products I can find.  I’ve already mentioned that Burt’s Bees Hand Salve contains almost the same ingredients as Tattoo Goo–maybe the Tattoo Goo is there on the shelf as well.

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I browsed through the book to see what the TattooFinder web site felt worthy of publication.  I’ve visited that site, and they have a huge collection of flash of all styles and extremely variable quality.  The images are for sale, so they are copy protected by Flash animation of black bars that scroll through the designs when you click to enlarge the thumbnails (the thumbnails themselves are watermarked).  I completely understand why they do this, but it makes it difficult to see the details and decide whether you want to make the purchase.

The book was an extremely mixed bag.  Some of the artwork was very good indeed, but all too much of it was amateurish at best, and I was left wondering how intoxicated one would have to be to allow it to be applied.  Perhaps that’s why it’s on the clearance shelf.  Amazon notes that it’s “currently unavailable” but it is available through other sellers (you can click on the title of the book above to get more information on that).

I’d be interested in a sourcebook full of great art (I am still thinking of getting a bracelet done) but I don’t know if I’d buy a book whose images are so varied in quality.  Have any of you seen the book? What do you think?

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I tried out a plugin for WordPress this past week that lets me take my blog posts and assesmble them into an e-book.  Unfortunately, the plugin didn’t work right and I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do with it.

That was just an experiment, but after I’d done it I realized that I could easily turn the blog content into an e-book all by myself.  I’d add more to it, of course, and make it a bit more substantial than just a bunch of blog posts strung together.

Would you guys be interested in reading something like that?  I would release it through Smashwords, which creates e-books for all the popular book readers plus PDF, HTML and plain text, so everyone could read it one way or the other. (You can see my novel Closed Circuit on Smashwords here, if you’d like to see how it works.)

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photo credit: megpi

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Good thing I enjoy learning something new every day, hmm?

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But if any real person’s wondering how to do it, just look up above the banner and click on the RSS link. 

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He noticed me looking at his arms and we struck up a conversation, as multicolored people often do.  It turns out he’d gotten most of the tats when he was in the Marines, years ago.  I made some comment about how he must have been out in the sun a lot because his ink had faded, and he laughed.

“No,” he said.  “Think about writing on a balloon with a marker and then blowing up the balloon.  That’s what happened to that ink.”

Now, that’s something I had never considered.  People talk often about tattoos sagging when we get old, but I don’t think I’ve ever had another conversation about ink getting faint when it’s stretched over time.  But that makes perfect sense when you think of the balloon analogy.

I know most of us don’t get, or not get, inked based on the possibility of stretching, sagging, or fading.  Have you had any of your ink get “modified” by your body with the passage of time?  What did you do about it?

photo credit: Felipe Katsumata

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Image via Wikipedia

I got my calendars mixed up, and thought that the Diabetes Expo and the Ink & Iron tattoo show were both in Long Beach last weekend. (Ink & Iron’s next month.) I thought it’d be an interesting combination of venues, and people could go from one to the other without too much trouble (Diabetes Expo at the Convention Center, Ink & Iron on the Queen Mary).

People who have chronic diseases can’t be as carefree and casual about getting tattoos as perhaps they’d like to be.  While it might not be a case of “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” for everyone, certainly the process of invading your skin with foreign substances can stress some people’s bodies more than others.  Diabetics don’t heal as fast.  People with autoimmune disorders might be pushed into a flare-up.  People with allergies, especially nickel allergies, might have inflamed skin for years.  People with latex allergies should definitely make sure the artist is using some other kind of gloves.

I have three tattoos, and I’m a Type 2 diabetic.  I also have nickel allergy.  I got my first tattoo before I got my diabetes diagnosis, but I went to the tattoo parlor fully informed the second and third time.  Interestingly enough, I was never asked about health conditions by any of the artists who inked me.  In retrospect, I think I should have been.  I don’t think it would have changed anything, but (again in retrospect) I think it’s only right that the artist should know that much about the person he/she is working on. If I get another tattoo (still under consideration) I’ll tell the artist up front if he or she doesn’t ask.

And, of course, people with chronic medical conditions should absolutely do some research before getting body art or piercings.  The more we know ahead of time, the better we can be prepared for possible problems afterwards.  If I’d known there was a connection between tattoo ink and nickel allergy, I might have changed the colors of my designs (although as it turned out, I had no problem with the blue or green colors, only with the red which does not contain nickel).  Knowing that diabetics heal more slowly would not have stopped me from getting any of my tattoos, but knowing that I had diabetes did inspire me to make sure my blood sugar levels were well under control before I got inked.

Have you had to take your health into consideration before getting inked?  Have you been asked about health problems by your artist?  How did you handle the issue?

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Thanks!

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