Not Your Typical Knuckles Tattoo

Last month I was trying to figure out why so many interesting people were walking around the Penn Station area when a trio of tattooed guys enlightened me: it was the Friday commencement of the New York Comic Con.

Now, I realize, I could go to one of these events and have a field day with some amazing tattoos on some very committed fans, but then I'd also be writing up posts for another month or two, as well, so I was content to chat with Rob and his two friends (who will appear in subsequent posts - stay tuned-).

Rob offered us one of his three tattoos, this animated creature on his inner right forearm:

This is, I'm sure many of you may know, a character from Sonic the Hedgehog, an iconic video game series that appeared in the early 1990's and has since sold, according to Wikipedia, 70 million units worldwide.

Rob explained that he grew up playing Sonic games and his favorite character was Knuckles the Echidna, who first appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. "He was the only one I wanted to be," Rob told me. An echidna, by the way, is another name for a spiny anteater.

Rob credited this tattoo to "Debbie Doo" at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, New York.

Thanks to Rob for sharing his Knuckles Tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Eric Shows His Dedication to Being a First Responder

In what was the first new instance of inkspotting outside of a tattoo shop since Christmas Eve, I met Eric in Penn Station and he shared this, the newest of his four tattoos:


Eric explained that he is a volunteer firefighter and EMT out on Long Island, and he wanted a tattoo to represent both sides of his service to his community.










This was done by Debbie at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, New York.


Work from this shop has appeared previously on our site here.

Thanks to Eric for sharing his new tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Cogito Chuck Robbins (Literary Ink)

Sometimes I abbreviate post titles and they seem nonsensical, like one of those captcha messages, or a subject line in a morsel of spam.

So I'm sticking with this title "Cogito Chuck Robbins" because I like the way it sounds. So there. It will all make sense eventually.

I met Chris outside of Penn Station one Friday afternoon, intrigued by his forearm tattoo:


"Cogito ergo sum" is a Latin phrase that means, in English, "I think, therefore, I am." It is attributed to the 17th Century French philosopher René Descartes.

This was the first of Chris' three tattoos. He is a philosophy and creative writing major at SUNY New Paltz. This phrase is the "missing link in a belief system," or, in his words, "what I always knew, but never knew".

The tattoo was done at a shop in East Meadow, New York.

Chris also has this dead bird near his right elbow:


Inked at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, this is inspired by the art on the cover of Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby.

Work from Skin Deep has appeared previously on Tattoosday here. Palahniuk also has quite a cult following, and his work is the most often represented in ink here on Tattoosday. Check out other Palahniuk tattoos here.

And Chris' third tattoo is based on the cover art from one of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins:


This echoes the front of the great book Still Life With Woodpecker, which has made many people a fan of the writer.


The piece, which was inked by Mike Vlad at Triple X Tattoo in Manhattan, is a subtle nod in appreciation of Robbins and his great book. Work from Triple X has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

If you like these pieces, and are a fan of literary tattoos, you should certainly check out Contrariwise, a site dedicated solely to contributors' literary ink.

A hearty thanks to Chris for sharing his tattoos with us here on our site!

Ben's Amazing Back Piece

With the Tattooed Poets Series under way last month, I was a bit remiss in posting about the "regular" tattoo encounters.

With apologies to the following volunteer, I am presenting some amazing work on a gentleman named Ben, who I spotted back on April 2 while walking through Penn Station.

Ben was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and had tattoos covering his arms. When I approached him and explained Tattoosday, he enthusiastically agreed to participate. In fact, he removed his shirt to reveal an incredible back piece:



The one problem with featuring huge tattoos like this is not getting all the details in. What follows are some of the finer points of the tattoo.

At the bottom of the back is an hourglass design, within which is, Ben said, kanji representing the word "redemption":


The piece represents that he has "only so much time to redeem himself".

The main set of Chinese text in the center of the back was loosely translated by Ben as "I have trust in no man except for the trust I save for myself":


Also of note on the back are the two kanji representing "father" (the right side) and "forgive me" (the left side). These characters are in disks on either side at the top of the back.

The back was done by an artist no longer practicing at Skin Deep Tattoo on Long Island.

Imagine busy Penn Station, a guy standing there talking to a bespectacled blogger, camera in hand, beholding a subject covered in ink. Where to even begin?

It's like taking someone to the world's largest buffet and telling them they can only fill one small plate with food.

The back as a whole was impressive, but Ben was willing to share more, and we settled on this view, with a dragon and a geisha:


Ben credits this part of his body's tapestry to an artist named Loco working out of Dharma Tattoo in Miami Springs, Florida.

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

Karen's Colorful Ink Glows in More Ways than One

Autumn has not been good to us here on Tattoosday. Inkspotting has been, um, spotty, at best, and most of the work I have seen has been indoors and/or below ground.

On Tuesday, I glimpsed some color peeking out from a woman's sleeve as she walked south on Seventh Avenue.

When I stopped to talk to her, Karen was gracious, despite the chill in the air, and filled me in on the two pieces (yes, just like last Tat-twosday) on her right wrist:


Karen is a student at Fashion Institute of Technology and was inky of another sort, with smudges on her hands and arms from her projects. She is an artist specializing in textile surfaces, designing such things as wallpaper, tissue boxes, and other items requiring her craft. She cleaned some of the ink up from around her body art, enough so we could get a clearer shot of her tattoos.

The one on the left is the insignia from the Gunslinger's revolver featured on the covers of Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

This is referred to as the "Eld Sigul" insignia and stands for the Gunslinger. I'm sure fans of the series will correct me and/or expand on the topic should they find that explanation lacking.

Do note that we had a Dark Tower tattoo recently on these pages, here back in October.

What's noteworthy about this piece is the ink used has special qualities. Karen originally wanted a hot pink tattoo, but the shop (Skin Deep Tattoo) had just received a shipment of ink that illuminates under black light. I've not seen one of these in person, but have seen samples elsewhere in the blogosphere.

The other piece, on the right, is a "third eye" designed by the artist Alex Grey, who is renowned for his cover art for the band Tool:


In fact, this "third eye" piece is from the art of the Tool album Lateralus:




This, also, was worked up at Skin Deep. Karen believes that Rob was the tattoo artist for both pieces. The extreme close-up at the top of this post emphasizes how vivid the ink used in the piece is.

Karen has two other tattoos, but they were well-protected from the elements, and were not visible higher up on her arms.

I do thank her again for being so amenable to stopping and sharing her work with us here on Tattoosday!

Tom's Two-for-Tattoosday Ink Honors His Heritage and His Love of the Yankees

After a bit of a drought of inkspotting, I finally caught some new tattoos in Penn Station on Tuesday, along the L.I.R.R. corridor.

Tom has "19 or 20" tattoos and is working to some day achieving a full sleeve on his left arm. He offered me these two tattoos (for Tat-Tuesday), whose close proximity on his forearm made them the natural choice.


On top is the trinacria of the flag of Sicily. This symbol contains the the (winged) head of Medusa and three bent legs, which supposed to represent good luck and prosperity.


It is a nod to his Italian heritage.

Below that is a New York Yankees tattoo which is very similar to my wife's cousin's stars and stripes-filled NY logo. Tom gave it a simple explanation: "I'm a huge Yankees fan".

Say what you want about other cities, but I would venture to guess that the greater New York City area has a higher per capita count of hometown tattoos than any other metropolitan area.

Tom's ink was done by Rob, owner of Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, New York. Work from the shop has appeared previously here.

Thanks to Tom for sharing his work with us here on Tattoosday!

Representing Levittown

This isn't the first Long Island tattoo here on this blog (see Ian Jones' post here), but it is the first specifically marking one place on Long Island.

This tattoo belongs to Dave, who told me that he and about 8 or 9 friends share the exact same piece, "geographically correct".

There's not much to this piece other than that it is an homage to his home in Levittown, a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead located on Long Island in Nassau County, New York. If one is not familiar with the place, it's worth a perusal of their wikipedia page here. The historical significance of Levittown as one of the first planned suburbs is generally undisputed.

Dave's friends had their hometown tribute inked at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown itself. Dave's piece was done at East Coast Tattoo & Body Piercing in Bethpage which, he informed me, has relocated to Reno, Nevada.

I have a deep respect for geographic tattoos, as they say much about a person, and their permanent presence on the body means that the place journeys with the individual, even after that person has moved on to other locales.

Thanks to Dave for sharing his Levittown tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!