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 babysat for Our Official Grandson the other night. His parents have a fairly large hi-def TV, which is something we don’t have, and won’t be getting any time soon.

What’s that got to do with tattoos? Well, I watched “American Chopper” in HD for the first time and got a better look at Paul Teutul Sr.’s tattoos.

Yuck. 

He’s had multiple artists work on his arms, and if I recall correctly, he had one of them try to unify all the separate artworks.  He’s got odd litle blobs between the designs, mostly.  I’m not sure what they were intended to be or to do, but the overall effect looks pretty bad.

I understand the desire to turn separate tattoos into one.  I’ve done it myself.  When it’s done right, it enhances the artwork.  (I like to think that my additions turned a mediocre tattoo into a good one.)  When it’s done by a lesser artist, as apparently Paul Sr’s was…   well, the result is unfortunate.

But what happens after something like that is done?  Does the tattooed person just consider all the work that went into it, and accept it despite the fact that it doesn’t look good?  I wouldn’t, myself.  Of course, I had the artist draw out the transformation before agreeing to the work.  So if it had turned out badly I would have been just as responsible.

Have you tried to unify separate works?  If so, how did it turn out?

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Naturally, a reality show isn’t really reality. The camera crews have to be there, and no matter how much the people in the show get used to the presence of the crew, they are never going to act the same for the TV show as they are when nobody else is watching. Plus, the show’s not going to waste time filming the humdrum events of the average day–they want drama and flash and stuff that’s out of the ordinary so as to attract the audience. I think “Inked” came closest to showing reality and that’s because it focused more on the artists and their interactions than it did on the customers. But how much can you do with a half hour show, especially in a shop where the owner is taking care of other businesses as well?

I’ve seen reports in several places that life on “Miami Ink” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The artists aren’t there every day, the people who supposedly spontaneously walk in to get a tattoo have actually been auditioned ahead of time, and so forth. I don’t know if all that’s true, but it certainly seems to be a common topic for discussion. It is pretty obvious that the entire process of applying the tat to the skin can’t be shown, because good, careful work takes hours, and the audience would go to sleep. Not to mention that they want to show multiple customers, not just the work that goes into one piece.

I haven’t watched “LA Ink,” but I did think Kat got a raw deal when they booted her off “Miami Ink.” Too many big egos in one small shop. I’m glad to see she got the last laugh. But I doubt her show reflects the reality of life in her studio any better than the previous one did.

Do shows like this encourage every Dick, Jane and Harry to go get inked? Does it mean that people have unrealistic expectations when they walk into the shop? Is the process shown clearly enough that people realize that it’s messy and painful and time-consuming to end up as beautifully decorated as you want to be? It just seems to me that cutting everything down into a few quick clips gives people the entirely wrong idea.

Anyone else have an opinion on that?

photo credit: leedsyorkshire

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