John's Tattoo Identity (With a Bonus Vendetta)

I met John recently in a local drug store in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.

I had actually seen John once previously in the store, but had been unable to speak to him at the time, so I was happy when I ran into him again.

His upper right arm is a Star Wars tribute, but I shot the left arm instead. He was laughing because he had just been questioned by several people at a nearby department store and now that he had escaped to a different shop, here I was questioning him about his work.

This is a shot of his left arm:

Like the Star Wars theme on his right arm, the left arm embraces outer space, what John called his "tattoo identity".

He did note that this had been reworked and represented the repairing  of a much smaller piece. He sung high praise to Alex Franklin of Brooklyn Ink, who did the majority of this work and made the piece what it is today. Alex and Brooklyn Ink are no strangers to Tattoosday. This link takes the reader to all posts tagged "Brooklyn Ink".

Before explaining that tattoo to me, however,  he had shown me something that had not been visible in the department store. He pulled up his shirt to reveal this awesome V for Vendetta tattoo in the top center section of his back:

John loved the graphic novel and the movie as well.

The character of V makes a striking tattoo. This was inked by the incomparable Designs by Michael Angelo in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Work from his shop has appeared previously here on the blog.

Thanks to John for sharing his incredible tattoos with us here on Tattoosday! We hope to bring his Star Wars sleeve to the site some time in the future.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Cody Todd

We are extending the Tattooed Poets Project through the weekend, giving those who have been enjoying the poetic ink, a little bit more to tide them over until next year.

Today we are being visited by an old friend, Cody Todd, whose tattoos appeared here last year.

This is his latest tattoo, four weeks old, inked at Purple Panther Tattoos off of Sunset in Los Angeles:


Cody provided this explanation:

Not too much of a story behind this. It is Marv and Goldie from the "The Hard Goodbye" of Frank Miller's Sin City. The artist who did this is from Tokyo, and her name is Koko Ainai. I admire the precision of her work in copying Miller's extremely elaborate sketching. As Marv and Goldie embrace, he is holding a gun he apparently took away from her and a bullet hole is smoldering in his right shoulder as he lifts her off the ground. That tattoo is the first of what is going to be a kind of sleeve in parts in which I take different scenes from noir films or works and decorate my whole left arm with. Upon seeing Farewell My Lovely with my girlfriend last week, I decided to get the front end of a 1934 or 1936 Buick as my next tattoo.

...I am doing my critical work for my PhD at USC on the "western noir," which is a term I sort of coined for a specific genre of film and literature concerned with elements that typically comprise classical film noir, except they take place in cities in the western part of the United States. As we see in the film, Sin City, it has a "Gothic City" feel to it, but it is most certainly somewhere out in western Nevada, or California. I think the motifs of lawlessness, street and vigilante justice, and the disillusionment with the American Dream are all at work in this kind of genre, and that it also borrows many elements from the Western as a genre as well. If anyone wants to read good literary western noir, I would direct them, promptly, to read Daniel Woodrell, who takes the noir theme and brings it to the Ozarks and southwest Missouri. If Chandler and Faulkner had a love-child, it most certainly would be Woodrell.

Head over to BillyBlog and read one of Cody's poems here.

Cody Todd is the author of the chapbook, To Frankenstein, My Father (2007, Proem Press). His poems have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Salt Hill and are forthcoming in Lake Effect, The Pinch, Specs Journal and Denver Quarterly. He received an MFA from Western Michigan University and is currently a Virginia Middleton Fellow in the PhD program in English-Literature/Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. He is the Managing Editor and co-creator of the poetry journal, The Offending Adam (www.theoffendingadam.com).

Jack Shares His Love for Graphic Novels

I had somewhere to be and a few minutes before I had to be there.

At the intersection of Clark and Henry Streets in Brooklyn Heights, I saw a guy stride into a corner bodega. Something told me to peek in. I did. And there, on the back of his right arm was a cool-looking tattoo.

So when he exited the store I introduced myself and we walked twenty yards to a well-lit frame shop to talk about his work.

His name is Jack and he works as a framer but is also a painter and fine artist. Feel free to check out his website here. His work is quite good.

He shared two tattoos with us, the first being the one on the main section of his back upper arm:


Jack is a fan of graphic novels and this piece is based on a panel from the a Hellboy book (Volume 6: Strange Places) by Mike Mignola.


The words in the upper corner of the panel are "I will cast off my afflictions...". The tattoo was done by Erick Diaz at Asylum Tattoo in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

A Hellboy tattoo has appeared previously on the blog here. You may remember the name of Erick Diaz and Asylum Studios based on an appearance on Tattoosday previously from this amazing back piece.

Getting back to Jack, when he pulled up his sleeve, I saw this tattoo above the Hellboy design:


This art is based on the work from another graphic novelist, Anders Nilsen. The piece in question is from the award-winning Dogs and Water.


Jack credits this tattoo to an artist named Jasmine Morrell, aka Jazzy J, who he referred to as a "kitchen surgeon". In other words, this is an example of a home-inked piece, more commonly known as a kitchen table tattoo. Not to say that she is not a professional. In fact, Jack informs me that she is an artist at Atomic Tattoo in Austin, Texas.

Both pieces reflect Jack's love of graphic novels. He adds "I have 4 tattoos, all from comics, the earliest was a back piece from Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland." Perhaps we'll see that here in the future!

Thanks to Jack for sharing his amazing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Pepper's Apprentice

It was Rush Hour in Penn Station when I spotted a fairly large tattoo on the right ankle of a woman walking, as it turned out, to the same train platform as me.

I was able to grab a few words and a photo from Pepper as we waited for the downtown train:


This one-color tattoo, one would imagine, for its size, should have significant meaning (or so I thought), but that is far from the truth.

Often, Pepper said, she doesn't "even remember that it's there".

About fifteen years ago, she managed a tattoo shop in West Chester, Pennsylvania called Damian's City Tattoo.

An apprentice named Shawn inked this on her as part of his ongoing learning process. Pepper believes that it is based on the artwork from a comic book called "Sláine". She worked at the shop for only a year, and has no idea what became of the artist.

It never ceases to amaze me the variety of back stories behind tattoos. We are so accustomed to the deep meanings, the personal ordeals, the appreciation of art for art's sake. But more often than one might imagine, a tattoo is a signpost marking a moment in time, and nothing more.

I thank Pepper for sharing this tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!