NO TATTOO ROLL CALL

HA! too much Blanchot and jokes take longer to sink in

Eventually I plan to have my arms covered from shoulder to elbow and at least one leg covered from knee to ankle, but I only have bits and pieces in these places now. I think about chest pieces sometimes too but that's a ways off.

Left arm is half sleeved already plus a big one inside the forearm, to the point that I look at it wonder why I don't just cover the whole thing up to my wrist.

The only one that I regret (and it's pretty regrettable) is that I decided circa 1995 that getting a tribal tattoo would be AWESOME but I wasn't ready to have it visible yet. So I got it on my lower back. Someday I'll have to turn it into a giant black rectangle.

I used some of those temporary stick-on tattoos that wash off with soap a few times. I think hearing that Offspring lyric about getting a 31 instead of 13 when I was a teen forever scared me away from getting a tattoo....

"skin untouched by ink like ever"

i've managed to live 40+ years by this rule and cannot see the situation changing.

will be interesting to see what happens with my teenkid given the popularity of such things these days.

there's a gal in the nursing school here who has a FACE TAT. she got it immediately after being accepted (or so i've heard), and is now (shockingly) running into trouble getting placed into clinical rotations to finish her training

Face tattys legit kinda freak me out

I've seen them done well on occasion, but mostly they are fucking mental.

I have no, neither does wife.

2 kids, as mark e says it will be 'interesting' to see if either want when older. Guessing not.

I don't really know many people with tattoos. I'm old obviously.

Oh, I know quite a few. They are younger, admittedly, but then again...

well, i have heard my teenkid use the phrase 'tramp stamp' in regards to certain styles of tats, so i'm hoping that my teenkid is of the same opinion as me.

cos there's no doubting it, they look great when the skin is all youth'd up, but add a few years and beers, and that stuff can end up looking worse for wear.

and i've not seen enough flesh of my social circle (thank the lord) to make any call re who has one or not.

and i've not seen enough flesh of my social circle (thank the lord) to make any call re who has one or not.

Yeah, that's more like it

Never bought the "what will that look like when you're old and grey" line of logic. When I'm old and grey, my tattoos aren't going to be what makes me too embarrassed to go out in public. It'll be my old, saggy, haggard self that keeps me indoors.

i still don't have any tattoos

hi-5

i figure that by the time we are old and grey the laser technology to remove these things will have advanced to a simple, painless procedure. and that we'll all have robot butlers.

Never bought the "what will that look like when you're old and grey" line of logic. When I'm old and grey, my tattoos aren't going to be what makes me too embarrassed to go out in public. It'll be my old, saggy, haggard self that keeps me indoors.

OTM!! for a long time, i thought 'oh but what about when i'm OOOOOLD?!?" but then i realised that i wouldn't be showing off those bits of skin when i'm that old anyway so it won't matter. another thing for me was that i'm not particularly enamoured with my body, so i didn't feel like i was "ruining" my leg by get it half covered in a tattoo.

As covered as I aspire to be I'll never get face, neck, or hand tattoos. I believe strongly in the "nothing you can't hide while in front of a judge" rule.

i don't know when i'll get another one but i have a couple things that i wouldn't mind having on me forever (himalayan tahr, tree shrew).

i am just going to end up covered in weird mammals (the first one was a pangolin).

Just gis'ed pangolin and, damn, that's like the perfect tattoo animal.

Anyone have words of wisdom on making a bunch of individual tattoos work together? I like all my tatts (except one tiny huge mistake) but the next step has to be something to integrate them all into something that makes sense, otherwise I'll just be a mass of disparate marks.

here is my pangolin (1st tattoo at 32):
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-kkVIq1Yc42Q/TpJfLwuJRFI/AAAAAAAAALU/yrak4Lky9EQ/s512/cid_497.jpg

it looks a bit lighter now that it's healed.

ugh i did an image search on "waveform tattoo" and they all look terrible. back to the drawing board, i think.

Nice. Were you the one saying that your underarm tattoo hurt? It looks like it took a long time.

it wasn't that bad until the last 45 minutes, when my tattoo artist was coloring over the parts that had already been tattooed. it took about 2.5 hours total!

ayo uninked btw

jess3, find the best tattoo artist in your area and just tell them you want to integrate all your pieces - if they're any good, they'll figure out a great way to do it for you.

Yeh, you're right. I realized that was a pretty useless question. I was just thinking "aloud."

the answer is clear anyway - massive rebel flag goes with everything

i checked -- no tattoos yet

By the time all of us are old, no one will be bothered by tattoos. Tattoos will be as mainstream as having your ears pierced.

Bene g, that's fresh.

no tattoos and I've lived my entire adult life in Portland so

<3 the crusty hedgehog pangolin!

Jesse, the integration thing was one of the things that prevented me from delving in for the last few years. I eventually decided I just needed to have it all conceptualized at once and make the plunge.

No tats so far after 36 years although I've toyed with getting one of the Stereolab cartoon guy from their early album covers.

Here in Austin it's unusual to not have a tattoo

disappointed that nicole doesn't have this tattoo tbh

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f1/Detroit_Red_Wings_Original_Logo.svg/220px-Detroit_Red_Wings_Original_Logo.svg.png

i didn't feel like i was "ruining" my leg by get it half covered in a tattoo.

Can I say your leg tat is PERFECT and GORGEOUS? I wish I had that talented of a tat artist in my area (that and the bank to get one).

I have been thinking of getting some full calf piece like that, sleeves seem like a bad idea as a public school teacher. In fact there is another student teacher in my grad program teaching seventh grade biol. He looks like Benjamin Franklin, long wavy grey hair and tiny wire frames, but fully covered in tats except on his face & hands. I went to observe his class and his kids were giving him amazing levels of shit about it. "Why does a REALLY OLD MAN have SO MANY TATTOOS?? YOU ARE TOO OLD TO HAVE TATTOOS!" So while I can talk for days about how I'll still love my tats when I am old and wrinkled and they are all weird saggy blurs, I do not want to have to up my class management game to avoid being grilled about WHY ARE YOU SO OLD AND ALSO TATTOOS OMG???

And even if I did up my game it would still happen.

i don't really wanna encourage you, but i have a lot of faith in yr game

This is life, the one you get, so go and have a ball.

Students will mock regardless of what you do, so might as well do what you want.

hahaha

Don't worry guys I am not holding back my truest of dreams.
I did decide I was going to try and get an apprenticeship when I'm done w/college so I can be a tattoo artist in the summers, though.

oh! ok

is that yr truest of dreams?

thank you abbott! that means a lot coming from an artist i truly admire. my tattoo guy is one of the top names in the profession (h3nry l3wis), and yes he is pretty expensive, but i knew i would only get it done if i had full confidence in the person doing it. i'm getting it coloured first week of jan! i def want to get my other leg done, too, and also half sleeves (shoulder to elbow), but that is some serious cash so may not happen.

also: abbott, i really hope you go through with the apprenticeship, bc you would be an exceptionally awesome tattoo artist.

My husband's a very good artist. (He almost got a job with Disney in the early seventies, except that they didn't like men with long hair in their studios any more than they liked them as customers at Disney World.) We've been looking in to getting him a job as a tattoo artist if he can't get on disability, but we have no idea how to go about doing such a thing.

i'd like to go on record as saying that pangolin is pretty fucking awesome

Christine if you're husband is a good artist perhaps Pixar would be a more lucrative career?

Christine it probably would not be the kind of job where you go from having no money to having a paycheck in a very short time. You start out doing an apprenticeship with a good tattoo artist. An apprenticeship is usually not free, you have to pay the tattoo artist (and why shouldn't you? you're getting a lot of professional help). Even if it is free that's weeks/months where you're not making money. And once you have those skills under your belt, it's still not a steady job, and there are many costs associated with doing it. Like starting any skilled job, it takes some initial investment if you want to do it. Not to be SUPER DISCOURAGING but oops lol I just was.

I think to make it a full-time career you really have to be passionate about tattoos & tattoo culture & you have to hustle pretty hard. My friend & former manager at Kinko's started his own shop w/his wife after quitting Kinko's and I think it was 3-4 years before he was in the black with it. They are both talented artists and also workaholics and I really think the latter is the key to their success. He was happy in the years the shop wasn't profitable because he was doing what he truly loved, but he was also working as a waiter in his spare time and putting in 80-90 hours of work a week between his two jobs. And still putting in 60-70 as just an artist now. I don't know if this is the most typical story but it does take a ton of effort, I think, to get anywhere useful with that career. And I think you have to really love tattoos.