Chris and His Empirical Pin-up

Well, little did I know, but yesterday, when I posted some of Fernando's tattoos, the R2-D2 and Megatron pieces in particular, it was coinciding with the opening of Comic-Con 2011 in San Diego.

Since I am not traveling to the big convention to inkspot (maybe some day, when I have the wherewithal), let's continue the Comic-Con theme over the next few days with some material I have encountered over the past few days.

Cue Chris, who I met at the end of June on Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street, and offered up this killer tattoo:

Chris credited this tattoo to Mike Ski, an artist who works in Philadelphia.

According to Chris, Mike is well known for his Old School style of tattooing, which includes that classic pin-up girl look.

Chris said that the tattoo was also influenced by the work of Alphonse Mucha from the late 1800's. This, Chris told me, is "an Old School take on that. We just thought it's be fun to do and," he added, "I've always loved Star Wars."

For those of you not in the know, this pin-up is sporting the garb of the Imperial Stormtroopers.

And, just so to sate our taste for the Empire, the inner part of Chris' arm has a portrait of Darth Vader:

Thanks to Chris for sharing his love of Star Wars with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Fernando's Trio of Whimsical Ink

I met Fernando a while back outside of Penn Station and he had a lot of work to share. He estimated that he had around thirty tattoos on his canvas, but we picked three to spotlight here on Tattoosday.

As a Star Wars fan, he couldn't resist this portrait of R2-D2:

The banner "YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE" refers to the scene in the first movie, when Princess Leia sends a holographic distress message to Obi-Wan Kenobi via R2-D2 that ends, "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."

Both the tattoo of R2-D2 and this one, were done by Evan at Revolver Tattoo in New Burnswick, New Jersey:

That is Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons in the Transformers franchise.

And thirdly, Fernando shared this take on a sugar skull:

This piece was tattooed by Mike Rivelry at Immortal Ink.

Thanks to Fernando for sharing a few of his dozens of tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Dispatch from the 2011 New York City Tattoo Convention (A Recap)

 

Yesterday I spent a half dozen hours at the Roseland Ballroom, where the New York City Tattoo Convention was holding court. This was my third trip to the show, and each year, I have a different experience, as Tattoosday has evolved as a site (read about 2009 here and 2010 here).

In years past, I have only highlighted one or two pieces, as I go into sensory overload. What, outside of a convention's setting, would normally pique my interest, seems commonplace and ordinary. This year, however, I took many more photos, and actually interviewed four people, so this will be Convention Recap Week.

I do want to say the best part of the show was hanging and chatting with Marisa and Brian from Needles and Sins, as well as with Nathan from Knuckle Tattoos. It's not a portrait of future world domination, yet, but here's the three of us, masterminds of three of the best tattoo sites around, and hands and above, the best three inkbloggers at the show:

Nathan, Marisa and Me (photo by Brian Grosz)

That moment of self-adulation aside, I spent the first few hours talking to vendors about advertising, chatting with colleagues, and saying hello to people I've met in years past, like Greg who was the high point of last year's show for me.

I also like to introduce myself to artists whose work has appeared on the Site before, so I said hi to Adam Rosenthal of Th'Ink Tank in Denver, and Vinny Romanelli at Red Rocket in NYC.

I also took a slew of photos of people I didn't interview, so I will just throw them up here. Unfortunately I can't credit any of the amazing artists responsible. However, if you see your work here, shoot me an email and I can give you your proper due. Many of these shots were taken during the first round of the contest, which centered around black and gray work:

This one was one of my favorites, especially considering the woman's reflection in the blade of the knife:

And this Star Wars leg was totally cool:

Finally, through social media, my friend Ben in Hawai'i requested a shot of "80s West Coast punk rock logos." I thought I had failed in my quest until, as I was leaving, I captured this tiny Black Flag tattoo on a guy named Crash, who works for Tattoo Artist Magazine:

Mini-Black Flag Bars Tattoo by Oliver Peck

and this incredible Misfits piece to boot:

Tattoo by Frank Lee at Tattoo Blues in Ft. Lauderdale

Yes, we know, Misfits are an East Coast band. But it was too nice a tattoo to not photograph. Can you blame me?

Check out the Tattoo Artist Magazine blog here.

Check back throughout the week to see what four tattoos I found most blogworthy for us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

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's Murals - Star Wars and an Interpretive Tribal

Today's tattoos come from Cody Todd, who was referred to me by Carol Muske-Dukes:

The first one is a back piece, still in progress:


Cody explains this as "a Star Wars mural--the Millenium Falcon in front of a meteor pursued by a TIE Fighter, from The Empire Strikes Back with the specter of Boba Fett looming above the chase." He credits an artist named Skip (since retired) at Old World Tattoo in Arvada, Colorado (North Denver). This was primarily done in 1996.

Cody expands on the piece:

...the one on my back is still in progress--I foresee at least 5-6 more sessions and touch-ups before I can say it is certainly complete. I like visual collages and pastiche, just as I like the poetic collage of Eliot's Prufrock and The Waste Land, Marianne Moore's Poetry, or Frank Stanford's "The Battlefield where the Moon Says I Love You" and Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids, are other examples. Poetry that synthesizes subject matter, speaking voices, speaking subjects, and stitch together otherwise independent and unlike things--unified by the mode of collage.

Why a Star Wars tattoo? Well, I guess I buy the argument lent forth in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with A Thousand Faces, that the mythical embodiments of the epic, the quest, and the hero are not just culturally shared, but I think each generation has their own embodiment as well. Hokey, cheesy, and melodramatic --yes, but I still watch Empire... with great nostalgia, and I don't think enough credit goes to [George] Lucas and his literary homage paid to Aquinas, Emerson, Plato, and Homer, to name a few. However, the revisions of Star Wars Episodes 1-3 are so bad I cannot watch them without getting sick. Maybe I am old now, but I just don't get them at all. Nevertheless, my parents still joke about the fact that I was conceived in the backseat of a Ford Pinto while they were "watching" Star Wars at a south Denver drive-in in the summer of 77."

The second piece is a "tribal-esque mural," of sorts, and was tattooed by a friend of Cody's named Bryan in 1997, at Your Flesh Grappling (now known as Your Flesh Tattoo) in Durango, Colorado. This piece was drawn by Cody and wraps around his left thigh:

Cody added:

"The leg tattoo was a personalized redefinition of the "Tribal" tattoos that were the craze when tattoos were no longer isolated to deviancy. Loosely quoting Mike Ness of Social Distortion, in the 1990's, kids could go to a mall and get their little "parts" pierced or walk out of there with a barbed wire tribal band around their biceps. I took a one-page graffiti collage from a notebook that I penciled of hooks, circles, ovoids, anemone-shaped and flame-shaped patterns with tentacles--my first name is actually on the upper left, and a small skyline of Denver with that wacky cash-register shaped building [The Wells Fargo Center] is just 1:00 o'clock from the family of bubbles or spheres centered in the band. I am going to amend this tat with another piece of similar solid black-ink graffiti to wrap a 4-inch band around my knee. That is the thing about tattoos--they are addictive; they beg to grow new limbs, and in that sense they are like little monsters."

I've been posting the tattooed poets' work over on BillyBlog and you can check out not one, but two of Cody's poems here. One is called "Boba Fett". But, as an added treat, I'm including one here, as well, because it just seemed appropriate:

Tattooed on the Backs of Eight Fireflies:

Under a dark loam of night,

pure barbed wire.

*

Apparitions dancing

dancing and dancing.

*

Some of us just might bite

the apple those cursed birds already did.

*

Old story: cat bats us away

to reanimate or destroy.

*

Words are the ruse, flight

is the guise, and we are the fakers.

*

Return the favor: grace for

sex or salvation for dust.

*

Time is the knife. Gods the size

of thumbs. Men with bloody hands.

*

We captured our god, the sun,

and feasted on him by torchlight.

Thanks to Cody for not only sharing his tattoos with us here on Tattoosday, but for expounding on them at such length. It's always fascinating to hear people go beyond the literal meanings of the tattoos themselves, and explore the deeper significance of the art form as it pertains to themselves and society.