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Showing posts with label tattoos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tattoos. Show all posts

Miss Juliet's sketchbook...OUT NOW!

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Finalmente è arrivato! lo sketchbook di Miss Juliet è subito disponibile in negozio, oppure potete mandare una mail a donttellmama@hotmail.it!
Dentro troverete più di trenta bozzetti e sketches di tatuaggi realizzati da Miss juliet...per trovare l'ispirazione giusta o anche solo da sfogliare!

Miss Juliet's sketchbook is finally available at our shop! if you're interested in buying it you can contact us by mail at donttellmama@hotmail.it!
Featured with tons of doodles and sketches, you can find true inspiration for you tatts or just browse it!

Tattoo Regret

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The following excerpt comes from this past Sunday's (9/23/07) popular "On Language" column by William Safire in the New York Times Magazine.
“As tattoos become more popular,” reads a headline in The International Herald Tribune over an article by Natasha Singer of The New York Times, “so does ‘tattoo regret.’ ”

On the other side of the world, in Brisbane, Australia, The Sunday Mail warned last year: “Think before you ink. That’s the message skin experts are preaching as ‘tattoo regret’ booms.” It reported that a Queensland athlete — embarrassed about a smiling devil’s face etched on his back — complained in rhyme of suffering “severe tattoo-rue.”

“The regret combining form is found in a lot of current writing,” notes Ann Rubin Wort, a former Times colleague. “Nowadays people are acting more impulsively; thus, regrets aplenty and the resulting need to nullify capricious choices.”

Regret about the permanence of skin illustration is rising. The Washington Post reported that a Harris Poll a few years ago indicated that nearly half the young women between 18 and 29 surveyed had at least one tattoo, and that 17 percent of all tattooed Americans who had tattoos regretted getting them. It seems that many of the aging former teenagers have had a skinful.

Etymology of the dermatology: Earliest use I can find of nostalgia for an unmarked epidermis is a headline above a 1989 Times column by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.: “For Those With Tattoo Regret, Here’s Hope.” Back in that day, laser treatment was the great hope; now it seems that a new tattooing ink has been developed that, it is claimed, may make removal of tattoos by laser more practical.

This column’s interest, as Wort notes, is in the collocation combining form — the way a new phrase is made by substituting one element of a familiar phrase. (A generation ago, the lexical response to backlash was frontlash; applying that replacement technique to a phrase, a moderate critic of our present war policy suggested that the answer to the charge of “cut and run” should be a centrist approach of “cut and walk.”)

Tattoo regret is formed on the analogy of buyer’s regret, more vividly and widely expressed as buyer’s remorse. Until this collocation was formed, the idea took longer to express, as in this 1891 citation from a San Antonio paper: “They who bought winter hats . . . early in the fall are now repenting their rashness at leisure.” The same anguished repentance happened this year to early buyers of Apple’s hotly touted iPhone, who plunked down $600 only to find the item reduced to $400 a couple of months later, lowering the puissance of the status symbol.

Buyer’s remorse is a phrase probably coined in the auto industry a half-century ago. Grant Barrett, editor of the online Double-Tongued Dictionary, has a citation from The Los Angeles Times in 1946 reporting a customer’s complaint that her auto dealer “told her she had ‘buyer’s remorse’ and since she had signed the contract she had to stick to it.”

In 1957, Leon Festinger came up with a theory of “cognitive dissonance,” in which he posited the opposite of buyer’s remorse: Most of us tend to embrace the choice we make, so as to reduce the self-critical dissonance in our minds. When we buy a Ford, we read Ford ads and shy away from reading the ads of Toyota.

The regret or remorse combining form has an immediate future in politics. As the states play backward leapfrog with their primaries, we face a stretch of nine months of campaigning leading up to the national parties’ conventions next summer. As the political winds blow hot and cold, as candidates’ poll ratings rise and fall after each statewide election, primary voters and contributors will experience a kicking-oneself feeling when their candidate fades and they wish they had chosen the victor to oppose the other party’s choice.

And what will we call that sinking sensation felt by all the primary voters who failed to back the winning candidate of their party? Those afflicted with tattoo regret will have company: as we plod through the primaries, watch for voter’s remorse.

Tattoosday #6: Going Mobile

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Sorry for the delay in posting, I was worried I would have to improvise, but found two participants today. Last Friday I had my first rejection: a guy at 53rd and 6th Avenue sitting on a bench was the first person to decline. He had many colorful tats on both arms and seemed open at first, but was adverse to my taking any photographs.

On Tattoosday Eve, Labor Day, I still had nothing for the post. I stopped someone in front of my building yesterday with a really cool Hellboy tattoo. He seemed receptive but wanted to check out the blog first.

I found myself with many opportunities but passed, not necessarily out of lack of nerve, but because the tattoos were not so nice, old, faded, or blurred by too much sun. I
have seen a handful of dolphin tattoos like the one the Ancient One sent me.

Today was the kids' first day of school, so I took off from work. Around 11 AM, I decided to ride my bike, eventually making it to Coney Island, where I guessed I could find some good ink. Yet it was still sparse, I had ridden down the Boardwalk and had circled back when I found my first subject.

I approached two young ladies who were taking pictures. One of them had a tattoo on the back of her neck:


The Japanese characters spell out the woman's name, Fernanda. Unlike on the recently-aired episode of VH1's "Rock of Love," in which one of the contestant's gets Bret Michaels' name tattooed on the back of her neck, as a show of devotion, Fernanda has inked her own name. I see a lot of people that do their own names on their arms or legs (I work with many who have done so), and have never really understood the phenomenon.

But in Fernanda's case, I get the artistic expression a little more. These are Japanese letters that have a greater aesthetic impact than Roman letters. When I asked Fernanda why she tattooed her name, she merely expressed that she loved Japanese letters and Japanese culture. She was born and raised in Brazil and has only been living in New York for a year. She did not remember the name of the shop where she had the tattoo done, but narrowed it down to the Astoria section of Queens for me.

I have to agree, it's a pretty cool tattoo.

I made another pass and headed back home. Once I made my way to the Shore Road promenade, where I do the majority of my cycling. I have several spots along the several-mile route from which I can head home. I decided to go down to the 92nd Street footbridge. Standing on the bridge was a gentleman who seemed to be cooling off from running. He had earbuds in and a large biceps piece. He also had an ankle piece and another tattoo on his triceps.

I passed him while walking my bike and then headed back and said loudly, "Excuse me!" He removed his earbuds and I explained my mission. He was game. His name was Mike and he had 6 tattoos in all and didn't mind which one I photographed. I asked him which one was the most special and he held up his arm and pointed to the piece on his triceps. This one:


He explained it a tribal Native American designed mixed with the American flag which he got as a tribute after 9/11. The piece was done by Craig Cooley at Abstract Tribal Tattooing in Brooklyn. I asked him if he was a fireman, and he said, "No, a police officer." I thought, with the 6th anniversary of September 11 just a week away, it was a perfect punctuation mark to end a week of tattoo-spotting, and begin a week of reflection on this somber anniversary.

Thanks to Fernanda and Mike for their participation in this edition of Tattoosday!

Tattoosday #4: Ozzfest Edition

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Well I had this all worked out. This week's Tattoosday was going to kick butt. I went to Ozzfest last Thursday and figured it would be a piece of cake to get a cavalcade of awesome tattoo shots. Hmmm.

One problem: I'm a dork. Going up to people twenty years younger than me and asking them if I can take pictures of their tattoos for my blog, Sephora and I agreed, would be the pinnacle of dorkiness. Not quite, we later acknowledged, when we saw a young metalhead going to his seat with his mother, who looked like she was there to chaperone, rather than enjoy the show.

The scale of body art was unfathomable. I imagined I would see an incredible range of tattoos, and I was not disappointed. We arrived around 3:30, and I decided around 5:00 that most of my tattoo shots would be candids, without the hosts knowing they were being photographed.

Here are some of the folks I shot whose tattoos didn't come out so well:







Snap enough random pictures of passers-by, and you'll get a few good candid shots:



A closer view reveals a pretty nice "Don't Tread on Me" tattoo:


But ultimately, I did get some fairly nice pictures, especially of one back piece after the concert when everyone was reeling homeward.

First, there was this cool tattoo from someone sitting a few rows ahead of me:


Then, there was this one on the shoulder of someone sitting a few seats over from me:

The detail and coloring of this Aztec piece is quite impressive:


There were so many amazing back pieces and sleeves that it would have been impossible to catch them all. As mentioned before, this guy was ahead of me as we exited after the show. The eyes are amazing. Not anything I would do myself, but still a bit awe-inspiring. Note his friends Misfits tattoo on the right:


I can only assume he meant to spell Alligator with an "e" instead of an "o".

Ultimately, though, I really missed the Tattoosday theme, which is to get back story on the pieces I photograph. Wouldn't you like to know who this guy is? And why did he do his back like this? How long did it take? Whose eyes are those? And did he mean to spell Alligater the way he did?

For those shortcomings, I offer my heartfelt apologies. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy this week's edition of Tattoosday.
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