Jason's Ink Pays Tribute to a Genre

I met Jason and Annmarie in Penn Station as they were headed home to Arizona.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get all the details on their work that I wanted and they haven't responded to my email queries.

Jason is a big fan of horror films and his right arm is an entire sleeve of memorable villains from that genre:


Lacking a lot of knowledge in the area, I am woefully unable to identify any of the characters, but I didn't want that to stop me from posting the arm. Readers are welcome to post in the comments section helping me identify these gruesome personae.

In addition, Jason's left arm has this immense Freddy Kreuger (from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series) wrapping around it.


[...]

Now, I mentioned Annmarie at the beginning of the post. Check out the tattoo she offered up to us here.

In the mean time, thanks again to Jason for sharing his tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Ed. Note:
[...] indicates deletion of text in which I mis-credited the artist and shop.

Horror Goulash with a Side of Power Mushrooms

I was passing through Century 21 Department Store when I spotted Jason, a web designer who estimates he is 50% covered in tattoos.

He offered up this sleeve, which he worked on for six sessions with the tattoo artist Sean Sweeney at Lola's Tattoos in Bogota, New Jersey:


Sean has subsequently moved to Virginia.

They called this piece "Horror Goulash" as it was a big pot of ideas for a sleeve, with an emphasis on the dark and macabre. Over the period of its creation, they collaborated to add ideas to it.


Jason also had this piece tattooed on the back of his left calf:

These are, for the uninitiated, the power mushrooms that are sought after in the Nintendo Super Mario Bros. video games.

Jason loves Nintendo and admitted, it was a "spur of the moment" piece tattooed "somewhere in the Village".

Thanks to Jason for sharing his amazing ink with us here on Tattoosday!

Death Metal Tattoos: part 2

I wish I knew what this was, I really do. It looks like a totem pole of demons? With some kind of weird scarred-out blob in the middle. Is it a tribal-mutant batman logo? AND DO YOU SEE THE SCRATCHED UP FETUS ON HIS ELBOW? I mean really, how could you miss that? I don't even know what the stuff on his forearm is. If anyone can help decipher this, please let me know! I was staring at this guy for ages trying to figure it out.



I wish I knew what was on his back, too. You can see a bit of it poking out. I bet it's incredible.

scary-guy-1.jpg

I think the title says it all, really. This is a truly scary guy.

A PSA against home tattooing

I've posted some awesomely ridiculously terrible and rad stick-n-poke tattoos here in the past, and I will again. I have a soft spot for bad tattoos that friends do to each other. This one, however, is pretty inexcusable, and shows how home tattooing is generally a really really really really bad idea.



ow ow ow ow ow ow ow. This makes me hurt all over just looking at it. So scratchy!!!! I can't even imagine what it must look like healed. I think my favorite part is that he only has one eyeball.

More Zombies

Please excuse me for posting about my own tattoos so much this week, but I can't help myself! I'll post some legitimately terrible tattoos soon, don't worry!

You guys should all know by now that I am fascinated by flash tattoos and tattoos that come from the same drawing but look different. The tattoo I got on Friday was part of a Friday the 13th special, where you could get any flash zombie on a sheet for $40. I chose the classic coming-out-of-the-grave-zombie, and it turns out three of my friends went for the same thing. One of my friends and I got sxe zombies, my other two friends got the zombie as he was on the sheet. Here are all four zombies for comparison (done by three different artists, see if you can spot the two that were done by the same person).

Day Of The Dead Good

Something a bit more striking from Ed Perdomo this time. A frightening and frighteningly good zombie geisha.

Day Of The Dead Good

Something a bit more striking from Ed Perdomo this time. A frightening and frighteningly good zombie geisha.

The Return of Eryn's Ink: Frankenstein's Monster and the Little Girl

At lunch, I ran into Eryn, whose yarn skull, was one of my favorite posts of 2008.

We've been exchanging messages for a while, and I have been anticipating another sample of her work (she has a lot of tattoos).

She has added to her yarn skull, and her whole right arm is a sleeve-in-progress. We decided to wait and showcase the whole limb when it's complete.

Her January offering was this brilliant portrait from the 1931 classic Frankenstein:


The picture above is the one I took, the one below is from the artist's portfolio:


This tattoo is based on this famous scene from the movie:

That's Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and Marilyn Harris playing the little girl. The scene is simultaneously poignant and horrifying. It is a commentary on the innocence of childhood and society's destruction of that innocence through its creations. The little girl does not see a monster, but someone with whom to share a beautiful experience.


But the end result is tragic. The monster is even more innocent than the child, until his unintentional curiosity drowns the little girl.

The scene can represent many different concepts. One of which is the way society judges people based on the way they look. Adults see the creation as a monster, whereas the little girl sees him for what he is inside: a child with a curious innocence (soon to be lost).

Eryn has a lot of tributes in ink, commemorating "the darker things [she] loved as a child". This scene is her favorite one in the film, for all the meaning she finds in the brief couple of minutes therein.

The tattoo is inked on the back of her right calf. The detail in the portrait of Karloff as the monster is phenomenal:


The piece was inked by Randy Hall at Hero Tattoo in Conway, South Carolina.


Jeff Cribb, who founded the shop, is credited by Eryn as being the leading force behind the legalization of tattooing in South Carolina.

I also photographed Eryn's knuckle tattoos, which will be appearing in the future on KnuckleTattoos.com.

Thanks again to Eryn for sharing her awesome body art here with us on Tattoosday!

Bleedin' Nice!

Bloody Hell! Nice work John Sweeney!

Bleedin' Nice!

Bloody Hell! Nice work John Sweeney!

Oh, The Horror!

Horror tattoos, in one form or another...

First, the amazing back pieces:





And second, the bad guys.

The shine on this one makes it hard to see, but to me it looks like a big blob of cow manure with teeth and horns attached to it.


Look at the shading in the hat. It's sooo scratched and uneven. And the skin is supposed to look messed up, but not like there are a million triangles glued to his face.