A Weird Day

Here’s a new one for you. A straight narrative, speckled with ink references, which eventually resembled a “traditional” Tattoosday post. It certainly takes the cake as one of the most unusual encounters. I’ve significantly edited it down for space considerations.

I've also waited a week (this is back-dated) to see how it would play out.

Today was a gloomy, sleety, cold New York City day and I decided to go out at lunch, despite the rain.

After an unsuccessful circuit through the Chelsea Whole Foods, I hit the Muhlenberg branch of the New York Public Library and pick up a few CDs (The Black Parade is Dead! by My Chemical Romance, Lost Highway by Bon Jovi, and Rock My World by Bret Michaels) and some books What Is This Thing Called Love by inked poet Kim Addonizio,

Sailor Jerry Collins: American Tattoo Master

and Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art.

I head back toward work and stop under the overhang outside of Fashion Institute of Technology to take a break from the freezing rain.

I decide to talk to two students who are talking outside, smoking. I introduce myself and explain the blog and one of them is un-inked and has agreed to participate in the Unin(k)itiated survey. I’m about to talk to ask the first question when a guy comes up to us to ask a question.

Here’s where the abridging of the conversation begins.

Initially, he is looking to get directions to the Apple Store on 5^th Avenue. He is visiting from San Francisco and needs to pick up a PC from there. He speaks very fast. He has been a web designer since the early 90’s. He rattles off several websites he has built for various companies. He refers to himself as “Apple Pirate,” and he mentions an Apple tattoo.

My interest is piqued. “You have tattoos?” “Four,” he replies. But he is covered in clothing and is visibly cold in the non-San Francisco weather. I don’t expect him to show me anything. I mention the blog, but he is dismissive. He makes a comment about not having time for websites that are small. I am not offended, though I could take issue with what could be perceived as a sleight. But Tattoosday is still a little baby blog, and I’m a small fish in a big blogospheric ocean, despite the occasional delusion of grandeur.

The conversation is all over the place, with Chris leading most of the discussion. Among the topics: where the nearest bike shop is, how he’s been crashing on the floor at The Hotel Chelsea because he doesn’t have the credit card he used to make the reservation at the W Hotel (he was mugged in Baltimore), the quality of F.I.T. as a school, and why the Baltimore School for the Arts is losing students to F.I.T. Also discussed is the weather, some SF vs. NYC banter, technology, design, and more on tattoos.

We drift back to his ink and he has decided that he will show me one of his pieces. Here is where this starts looking like a normal Tattoosday post. This is the tattoo on Chris’ left elbow:

That’s the Apple Pirate logo.

Chris kept talking and I continued standing with the two F.I.T. students, whose names I never got. My lunch was over and I needed to get back to work. However, both women have my card, and will hopefully contact me so I can finish the story.

They never did. Nor did Martin.

It was a truly bizarre little encounter, one which may still be unfolding in the days and weeks to come.

There was actually more to this post. Chris credited his tattoo to a well-known tattoo artist in another state. The original post discussed this artist, along with his shop, and the fact that I tracked down the artist to verify if this tattoo could be attributed to him. Ultimately, the tattooist has no recollection of the piece or the individual.

Another day in the life of the tattoo blogger!

Bad straightedge tattoos volume one: text

I have a confession to make. I secretly love bad straightedge tattoos (maybe because I am straightedge? probably because they are just goofy). I actually secretly love all bad tattoos, that's why I do this blog. But I have a special soft spot in my heart for three x's that are stick-and-poked into someone's ankle. Many people get them, many people regret them later, but they are still awesome. These abominations, however, are not so awesome. Behold: the bad straightedge tattoos, volume one.


Bad font, bad linework, bad coloring, bad placement, just a generally bad idea.


Ditto! Only worse.


Why did he decide to put the text in a pool of water? I don't understand!


And finally- starship troopers straight edge dude. I have to admit this is actually pretty awesome, because I too love science fiction and not drinking. I hope this guy had a sense of humor about what he was doing, because that instantly turns this questionable tattoo into a hilarious and rad one.

If you have any regrettable edge tattoos (or any other kind of regrettable tattoo, for that matter) feel free to email me: alice@vivalavinyl.org.

who ya gonna call?

Man oh man... I loved the movie too, but why?

sports and tattoos, a terrible mix...

Now I am a die hard Yankees fan and will never deny my devotion to the team. I however have always had an apprehension to getting a team related tattoo not because I dislike the team in some way, but mostly because sports related tattoos are normally god awful. They are almost always poorly executed and have stupid subject matter if it's not a specific logo. Here are some real stinkers I've found on my search around our faithful internet.




Since I mentioned I am a Yankees fan, it's only fair to start with them. I've been to enough games in my day to see some really terrible Yankees related tattoos. This one is just bad all around. Terrible idea, terrible execution and just poorly done. I would hide this from my friends and neighbors who might be fans themselves. I would be ashamed that I disparaged something I liked so much with absolute shit results.




Now it wouldn't be fair to all those Yankees fans like myself to allow our beloved pinstripers to be defaced in such poor ink fashion. So it's time to retaliate against the Boston Red Sox by exposing what is just utter crap. They took the team logo, which is fine, but the, added matching sweet, sweet tribal. Tribal that is color matched to the logo, absolutely brilliant. What is the point of the tribal? To show how you can make something that much more awesome by putting lines around it? I will never understand the obsession with tribal.




Holy Christ, quite possibly the worst logo reproduction I have ever seen. What this person must have done was found the best blind tattoo artist in the New England region of the United States and just described what this logo looked like. Imagine being proud of this enough to take a photo of it to show to people on the internet.



Ok so another combo of total stupid. Let's take a dragon (a wonderful tattoo cliche) and give him a soccer ball. What the hell, who gives a shit what nonsense you put on your skin. The dragon itself is barely recognizable. I mean is the soccer ball in the dragon's mouth?



Tough guy here thought he would show that playing hockey on broken, melted ice was a way to express his devotion to the game. Is the the hockey man wearing a gas mask? I don't blame him, this friggin thing stinks.



You save the best for last. This is the best. A pink bunny playing basketball. See ya next time...

Joel Marks Memories with Some Significant Ink

What is this? Read on.....

Last week I met Joel, a writer and a marketing director for an artist management and development company.

Joel couldn't tell me how many tattoos he has (he has that many), but he did share two of them with me.

The first is posted above and, despite being a little blurry in the photo, this small piece is an early band logo. In fact, Joel informed me that it was the first tattoo ever inked in honor of the band Linkin Park, one of the first acts to achieve a massive audience with their blend of hard rock
and rap.

Joel explains that, in September 2000, he was travelling with the relatively obscure band in Utah, working as a driver and director of merchandising. They were touring just prior to the release of their breakthrough album Hybrid Theory.

Tattoos are often road maps for one's personal history and this tiny Linkin Park tattoo marks that moment in time.

More important to Joel, however, is this, one of his more recent tattoos:


It's an interesting and unusual take on the knuckle tattoo. Rather than the 4x4 knuckle piece, it's a 2x2, with the letters "M" and "C" on the right hand and the numbers "5" and "9" on the left. When the fists come together, the MC 59 display, representing Mike Conley and the year 1959, when Mike was born.


Joel described Mike as his best friend, who died tragically in February of this year after falling and hitting his head in a parking lot of a Chicago motel. Mike introduced Joel to the work of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac, and to the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He was the owner of The Avalon Bar in Costa Mesa, California. I could see the sadness in the eyes of Joel, as he recalled the friend that was taken from life
too soon. Joel said "I'm never gonna be over it."

This was inked by Hek at HB Tattoo in Huntington Beach.

I learned later, by visiting the Mike Conley Family Memorial Fund website, that Mike was a founding member of the Southern California punk band M.I.A. (Not to be confused with the hip hop artist of the same name.)

I encourage folks to visit the website and, if so moved, to make a donation. There are links to some nice articles about Mike and his influence on the music scene.

Thanks to Joel for sharing his tattoos with us here at Tattoosday. And our condolences to Mike Conley's family and friends who lost so much when he was taken at such an early age.

Building Their Own Nation

At the tail end of my discussion with John about his tattoo (see the post above), he revealed that he was here in New York with his new wife Liz. Ah, a honeymoon in the Big Apple!

Liz and John posed the above tattoos for the occasion. I generally don't go on and on about the photos I take, but I just love how this photo came out: John's wrist nesting lightly in Liz's hand. The matter-of-fact delicacy and naturalness of their two arms connecting just makes the photo that much more compelling.

Anyway, Liz explained that this was the logo for the Young Pioneers, and that their slogan "Build your own nation," or "Make your own country," seemed an appropriate visual metaphor for a new life together.

And, I completely agree.

But, as a disclaimer, I had difficulty locating this exact emblem and connecting it to the youth organization in the former Soviet Union. But, my being able to do so is moot. The logo is striking and it's symbolism is brilliant.

Thanks to Liz and John for sharing their nuptial ink on Tattoosday. Here's wishing them a long, happy life together!

Vincent Bears the Spear of Longinus

I met Vincent Corrigan on the way to the subway on 33rd Street between 7th and 6th Avenues. It was a giant arm piece that crawled up under his shirt and onto his shoulder that first caught my eye.

However, he offered up the piece above and, in the course of speaking with him, I took pictures of three other tattoos that were notable. I am going to discuss them in reverse order.

First, this piece may be familiar to many:


That's the Guinness harp, a trademark recognizable to beer connoisseurs:


Not to overstate the obvious, but Guinness is a dry stout beer that originated in Dublin, and is thus a matter of pride for the Irish. Mr. Corrigan, as one might venture from his surname, is of Irish ancestry.

The harp is on the top of his left bicep and is one of his older pieces. In fact, he credits Ryoko at Brooklyn Tattoo for taking what was previously a bit of shoddy inkwork, revitalizing it with some excellent restoration and making a respectable tattoo out of it.

Further down the arm, on Vincent's inner left forearm, are two symbols I recognized immediately:


The top one is the logo familiar to fans of the band Audioslave. The fiery emblem appeared on the band's debut album cover.

Vince is a singer and a huge fan of the singer Chris Cornell (lead singer of Audioslave, and more famously, Soundgarden).
I also am a fan of Cornell's (although I haven't seen him in concert,
unlike Vince who guesses he's seen him twenty times).

Below the Audioslave logo is one of the four runes representing band members from Led Zeppelin:


These runes appeared first on the band's fourth album. The rune tattooed on Vincent's arm is the one on the far right and according to Wikipedia:

Robert Plant's symbol is the feather of the Egyptian goddess Ma'at, representing truth, justice, fairness and writing, encapsulated by an unbroken circle representing life. According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris, the god of judgment and death, would take the heart of those who died and put it on a balance with the feather of Ma'at. If the heart outweighed the feather, the person's soul would go to hell, but on the other hand, if the heart was lighter than the feather, the soul would go to heaven.

However, Plant's rune is significant to Vincent because he is the lead singer.

And now to the amazing piece at the top of this post, well worth another look:


Vincent indicates that this is the "Spear of Longinus," one of the many names given to The Holy Lance, which was the weapon used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ during the Crucifixion.

The name Vincent has an origin in the meaning of the word conqueror and the surname Corrigan
derives from a root word which means "spear" or "lance". It is this primary parallel that gave Vincent the urge to ink this relic of Christianity onto his arm. It appears that the tattoo is modeled after the Hofburg Spear which is kept in Vienna.


This spear is an object of fascination in literature and the arts, often as the subject matter for narratives pertaining to the Crusades, with a link in some cases to Ireland. This brings the spear of Longinus an additional link to Vincent's pride in his Irish ancestry.

The spear tattoo, along with the Audioslave and Robert Plant tattoos, was inked by artist Eric Wigger at The Devil's Rose Tattoo in Blue Point, New York, on Long Island.

Thanks to Vincent for sharing all his ink with us here at Tattoosday!

Correction on the Dell tattoo

Okay, so a while back I posted here about really bad logo tattoos. One in particular stood out, a Dell tattoo:

To me, Dell is a kind of lame, nothing-brand-- not one that I thought anybody would be stoked about enough to get it branded on them for life. So I made fun of the dude with the Dell tattoo. He emailed me today:

"i am emailing you. about your post about tattoos, 1 special one tho, the dell tattoo, see that tattoo is actually my tattoo, see my name is Todd Dell, in my life i always got the DUDE YOUR GETTING A DELL. and stuff like that i always laughed it off, so my friend was like dude you should get the LOGO tattoo on you i was like sure, thus knowing i could get away with it, no im not a nerd, i dont even own a dell computer, im actually a mma fighter lol."

So, I take it back. Sorry, Dell guy. You have a sense of humor about your name and you got a tattoo to prove it. You are officially awesome.

Shattered Faith

On Tuesday, I met Shawn in Penn Station. He and a friend had visited to New York City from Albany to catch the band Shattered Faith last Monday night at a Brooklyn venue called Club Europa.

The band is not familiar to me, despite the fact that they are an Orange County-based punk band that has been playing since the late 1970s. They grew out of the same scene that spawned the great L.A. Punk scene in the early '80s, but they never made my radar.

According to Shawn, this was their first U.S. tour, so he was glad to catch them live on the East Coast.



Shawn has about a dozen or so tattoos, half of which are band logos. He had a sweet X tattoo on his right forearm. The piece featured above is the Shattered Faith logo and was inked by Jack Kowalzyk at Primal Graphics Tattoo in Albany.

Check out Shattered Faith at their website www.shatteredfaith.us. You can listen to some of their music in the audio section. You can also check out their MySpace page here.

Another benefit to writing (and reading) Tattoosday is the fact that I am occasionally is educated about bands that had been prevoiusly unknown to me.

Thanks to Shawn for taking the time to talk to me and helping introduce Shattered Faith to Tattoosday readers!

Bonus: A YouTube video featuring Shattered Faith performing in 2006:

San Diego Tattoos Visit The Big Apple

I spotted Mike and Tracy on 34th Street on Thursday, July 17. They were the third and fourth people I photographed that day.

Mike had the logo from his favorite band, The Misfits, on the back of his left calf. It's one of his three tattoos.

Tracy liked the art for the piece she has, on her upper left arm:

It's one of her four tattoos:


Both Mike and Tracy, visiting New York from San Diego, had their work done at their local shop All-American Tattoo Company. Stevie inked the Misfits piece and "Little C" did the work on Tracy's bicep.

Thanks to both of our visitors for sharing their ink here at Tattoosday!

UPDATE: Mike sent me the link to his band's MySpace page. They have a great name, The Filthy Few. Check them out here.

Tom's Pearl Jam Stickman Tattoo

So last night I caught Pearl Jam at Madison Square Garden and, of course, there were tattoos aplenty. But, as I mentioned yesterday, concert-goers generally seem a little more focused on the event at hand than the pursuit of blogfodder by a fellow concert-goer.

Luckily for me, Tom was sitting right behind me and I got him to show me his "Stickman" tattoo. This is one of the band's oldest logos, and is a common piece to get inked by the biggest devotees of the group.


Tom had this inked in 1994 at Da Vinci Tattoo Studio in Wantagh, New York. He had yet to see his first Pearl Jam concert when he had this tattooed on his left ankle. Last night was his 14th show (it was my fifth).

Thanks to Tom for sharing his Stickman with us!

Ian Jones Has Thirteen Tattoos. Here Are Four.

I saw this hannya mask outside of Penn Station and went up to talk to its host, Ian Jones, a Long Islander waiting for a train.

Despite a light rainfall, we chatted for ten minutes or so about his tattoos and the stories behind them.

Since the advent of Tattoosday, participants' reactions to the project range from total disinterestedness to moderate amusement. Ian, however, took it a notch higher, to the point of downright enthusiasm. He sounded sincere in his appreciation for the blog (and the idea behind it), and I got the impression that he would have let me take pictures of each tattoo, had time and weather permitted.

The big piece that first drew my attention was the colorful half-sleeve on his left bicep. The hanyya masks are traditional elements in Japanese tattooing styles, and he has two masks representing good and evil.


This tattoo, about ten hours worth of work so far, was done by Kristen at Artful Ink Tattoo Studio, in Bohemia, on Long Island. He noted that it was also a cover-up of a "bad sparrow and flower".

Ian says he gets the most questions about his Volkswagen logo on the inside of his right wrist.

He explains why he got an automotive emblem on such a prominent spot: he's always loved German engineering and has always had VW vehicles. His first car was a VW Eurovan, but his second car, a VW GTI 2-door hatchback, was what cemented his love of Volkswagens for life.

Ian told me how he was in his GTI when he was in a horrible crash. The other vehicle was purportedly going 100 MPH and Ian is convinced that the VW's structural shell protected him from critical injuries.

As a tribute to the GTI, and as an expression of his love of Volkswagen, he had the VW logo inked on his shifting arm (he now drives a VW Jetta) as a reminder of his survival from such a harrowing experience.

His left arm sports two tattoos:

There is Long Island on the forearm and a star on his inner wrist. The star was inked the same time as the VW logo to provide balance, but it grew to take on a more important meaning. It's a reminder symbol about a friend of his who is in the Marines.

The VW and star were inked by his friend and bandmate Tony Coffins at Resonance Tattoo, also on Long Island (Center Moriches). Ian and Tony are in a band, Phoenix Rise, together. See their MySpace page here and listen to them play.

The tattoo of Long Island, which Ian admits is not done that well (although I would say at least looks like Long Island), is nonetheless, still near and dear to his heart. Ian was adopted when he was a baby, and he feels that he could have ended up anywhere, and Long Island was his home. He is proud to be a Long Islander, and thus wears this as a badge of honor.

Thanks to Ian for his enthusiasm for Tattoosday, and let's hope we see more of his ink here in the future!

Logos

These tattoos are like getting someone's name tattooed on you, except worse. I don't get it. If you really love video games, get some awesome video game characters tattooed on you. If you really love cars, get an awesome vintage car tattoo. If you really love movies, get a tattoo from your favorite movie. If you really love a particular brand of computer... ok, I don't know what to say to you. Getting a tattoo of a Dell computer would be more lame than their logo.

I can't even comment on these individually. But seriously. DELL? BUICK? What are these people thinking?