Frank's Koi Blends Traditional and Modern

Back on the first of July, I met Frank as I was headed home through Penn Station. He shared this tattoo on his lower leg:

Frank explained that the tattoo artist was Gus, who works out of John's Tattoos in Islip, New York. He elaborated, telling me, "I originally wanted a koi fish ... not too traditional, but a little bit different. Some modern twist on it ... Gus put the traditional with the modern and there it is."

 

Thanks to Frank for sharing his koi fish and cherry blossoms 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.

Leigh's Skull with a Mouthful of Blossoms

Last month, I ran into Leigh, getting off the C train at 34th Street in Manhattan. She estimates she has 40% of her corporeal canvas covered, and she offered me this tattoo on her left forearm:

We've had  a lot of sugar skulls here on Tattoosday, but everyone is different and unique. This one, inked by Myles Karr at Three Kings Tattoo in Brooklyn, stands out from the bow at the top of the skull, and the open jaw full of cherry blossoms, both items not generally associated with the traditional sugar skull design.

"I'm always talking," Leigh told me, "and it's always positive, so I wanted something that would keep the mouth open." She collaborated with Myles on the piece, saying she wanted a skull, but didn't want a "cliche," and pointed out it's also "kind of a take on the Suicidal Tendencies skull."

Thanks to Leigh for sharing this great tatoo 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 can contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Don't Sit Under the Cherry Tree with Anyone Else but Me

I spotted Christina one Friday afternoon in Penn Station, sporting this awesome cherry blossom tattoo:

She took some photos in to Jason Loui, then at Redemption Tattoo in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He sketched out a design, and the rest is history. Mr. Loui now works out of Good Faith Tattooing, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Thanks to Christina for sharing her cherry blossom tree 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.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Alicia Adams

Alicia Adams is today's tattooed poet. She contacted me back in February and told me she was moving out to Brooklyn from Southern California in March. So, last week we met in a large Union Square flagship bookstore and I snapped a photo of her stunning tattoo:

I'll let Alicia explain the story behind this beautiful piece:

This tattoo was done by an artist named Shay Bredimus at Outer Limits Tattoo and Body Piercing in Long Beach, California, the city where I was raised and educated.  I had always known I wanted a tattoo, but I could never settle on exactly what I wanted.  When I went in to Outer Limits, I still didn’t know.  I decided flowers were pretty and timeless and could mean whatever I wanted them to mean.  I decided on a peony because I had just seen my first one and fallen in love with it.  I didn’t know what peonies symbolized, and I didn’t want to know.  I decided I had a lifetime to figure out what it meant to me. 

I was getting my MFA in fiction writing, and when I met Shay he told me he had his MFA in painting.  For hours we talked about art and literature and grad school and our lives.  It was the best tattooing experience I could have hoped for, and I fell in love with the finished product immediately.  As I was leaving he invited me to his gallery.  I went when he wasn’t there.  His pieces were huge, each one taking up the better part of a wall, and they were exquisite and done in black tattoo ink only.  I wrote him an email telling him how amazing I thought his art was, and he asked me to come back in for touch ups, and that’s when he added the cherry blossoms. 

I buy cherry blossom shampoo now and cherry blossom soap.  It’s a silly thing maybe, but it makes me feel pretty and reminds me that I am part of a work of art.

In addition to this tattoo, Alicia is sharing the following poem, "Red Room," which was originally published in The Mas Tequila Review:

Red Room

By Alicia Adams

You wish you had been born from your father’s head. 

Like Athena.  When you picture Athena in the womb

of Zeus’s skull, you picture her in a hollow red room

with no corners.  You picture her curled in a ball

and growing larger, fully clothed with battle gear, spear

stuck behind her father’s eye, a migraine pulsing.  When you

picture your own father’s head, you picture it crowded. 

But you could have curled around the deep-set grooves

of gray matter, your tiny hands pressed against his frontal

cortex and into his dreams.  And when you were ready,

you could have stood on your shoed feet and pushed

up and hard with rhythmic contractions until your father,

unable to take it any longer, found a way to open

himself and let you out.  You think about this often. 

In the back of your own mind, dark and polluted, you can feel

a tumor growing.  One that will ripen and mutate,

killing you slowly, and with little effort.

~~~

Alicia Adams graduated from California State University:  Long Beach’s Fiction MFA program in 2010.  She co-hosted Prose and Cons Radio and is the co-founder of After the Carnival (Literary Events).  Her work has been published in several magazines and anthologies, including most recently How Dirty Girls Get Clean and Beside the City of Angels.  

Thanks so much to Alicia for sharing her tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

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.

Chris's Cherry Blossoms Grace His Forearm

On Friday afternoon, I ran into Chris near the 34th Street subway station near the Manhattan Mall.

He had this wonderful tattoo on his left forearm:

Chris explained that this tree resembles a cherry blossom tree that he played on with his cousin when he was a kid. His cousin has passed, so this is, in essence, a memorial, "without being over the top".

I found it interesting and quite poignant that I spotted this piece on the day of the earthquake in Japan, when the plight of the residents in the northern part of that country was on so many minds. The cherry blossom, as many know, is often associated with the temporary, fleeting nature of life.

I particularly like the shadowy effect in the background of the tattoo:

Chris credited Ryan at ArtCore Tattoos in Naples, Florida with this tattoo.

Thanks to Chris for sharing his tattoo 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.

Darya's Bi-Coastal Peacock and Cherry Blossoms

I met Darya coming out of the subway in Bay Ridge and asked if I could take a picture of her tattoo. She kindly allowed me to do so and share it here with everyone on Tattoosday:

Darya explained that she always wanted a peacock tattoo, and she has fourteen tattoos in all (not all peacocks). Joe Maggs at Brooklyn Ink tattooed the peacock.

The cherry blossoms, symbols of regeneration, were added by Illya at Studio City Tattoos in California.

Thanks to Darya for sharing her tattoos from both coasts here on Tattoosday!

Two for Tattuesday Saturday: Wanderful Love Under the Cherry Blossoms

In honor of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) , we're sharing this tattoo, which I spotted back in September:

This belongs to Rich, a musician and rap artist. He's a big Harry Potter fan, as exemplified by the magic wand. The snake at the base of the wand not only symbolizes infinity, it is a nod to Severus Snape, a character associated with the House of Slytherin, of which the serpent is the mascot.

The concept of the tattoo is exemplified by the music coming out of the wand, illustrating that sounds can be magical and that Rich is under music's spell.

The piece was inked by Chris at Lady Luck Tattoo Studio in Montville, Connecticut.

When I met Rich, he was sitting with his girlfriend in Penn Station. She introduced herself as Kytti, and asked if I wanted to see her tattoo.

But of course!

She actually has two tattoos, but lifted up her shirt to show me this beautiful design:

Kytti explained that this represents her and Rich together in Japan. They've been together for over a year and they'd both love to go there together and experience the culture. The tree is filled with cherry blossoms, a flower often associated with Japan.

Chris at Lady Luck also was the artist behind this tattoo.

Thanks to Rich and Kytti for sharing their magical and romantic tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Rebecca's Memorial Butterfly

I met Rebecca a couple months ago in Penn Station and asked her about her tattoos.

Of the eleven, she shared this one from her leg:

This beautiful, yet battered, butterfly is a memorial to her unborn child. She lost the baby when she was just nineteen. The cherry blossoms are often symbolic of the fleeting nature of life.

The tattoo was completed on October 13, 2007 by Nate Hudson when he was at Virginia Beach Ink. He now tattoos at Folk City Tattoo in Suffolk, Virginia. As today is October 13, I've been hanging on to this post, not only to correspond with the day the tattoo was finished, but also the due date of the baby that was lost.

We here at Tattoosday truly thank Rebecca for sharing, not only this poignant tattoo, but also for allowing us to relate the emotional story behind this butterfly.

Sandra's Cherry Blossoms

I met Sandra at the local laundromat at the end of August and she shared this lovely tattoo on her upper right arm:

There are two elements to this design, the cherry blossoms and the quote. The cherry blossoms were inked after her father was initially diagnosed with cancer. The quote was added when Sandra decided to move to New York from Oregon.

Reading "When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme...", this quote is from the film Pinocchio, in the song "When You Wish Upon a Star".

The tattoo was done by Dragon at Star Tattoo, in Portland, Oregon.

Thanks to Sandra for sharing her lovely tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!


Here's a little bonus:

Marie's Anchor of Hope

I met Marie outside of Penn Station last month after spotting her sleeve of naval designs. She picked this one on the inside of her upper right arm:

This tattoo reminds her the importance of "loving where you're from" and having "faith in where you live". The anchor and cherry blossoms are a nice blend of traditional tattoo designs from the East and the West.

The design is an allusion to a song called "Anchor and Hope,"  from the album Wall of People by alternative rock band Monty Are I, out of Cranston, Rhode Island.

Check them out in this video of them doing the song acoustically:



Marie is originally from New York, moved to Virginia, and has relocated back home to New York City.

The tattoo was done by Rob at Brooklyn Ink. Rob was a subject on Tattoosday a couple of years back. See his post here. And this tag will show you the work previously featured on Tattoosday created at Brooklyn Ink.

Thanks to Marie for sharing her cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Michelle's Tattoo Takes Your Breath Away

Michelle has a lot of ink, twenty-one tattoos, all told, but when I stopped her in Penn Station, she chose to share this one with us:

Boldly planted on her upper right arm, Michelle explained that she paraphrased and pared down a longer quotation to read, more simply, "Live for the moments that take your breath away". I believe she was referring to the saying, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."

The flowers in the photo are cherry blossoms that were done in blue, rather than the traditional pink because, as Michelle tells it, she's "not really a pink kind of girl".

This tattoo was inked by Fat Tony at Hobo's Tattoo Shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Thanks to Michelle for sharing this tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

The Lovely Tattoo of Legs Malone

I couldn't help notice the striking woman standing on the subway platform waiting for the R train. She was tall, had long shapely legs, a close-shaven head, and a small tattoo on the back of her left calf.

The R pulled in and, as luck would have it, we sat down next to one another on the train.

I had to introduce myself.

Turns out, I was sitting with a burlesque performer named with the stage name Legs Malone.

We didn't have a lot of time to talk, as she was exiting the train a stop or two earlier than me, but she obliged me for a photo by taking my camera and shooting the tattoo on the back of her leg:

She told me that this small tattoo (the only one visible on her frame) was inspired by a heart-shaped bruise that she wanted to replicate on her skin, but in a more aesthetically-pleasing way. The flowers around the heart are cherry blossoms.

The tattoo was inked at Fly Rite Studio by Charlie Foos, who is now at Read Street Tattoo Parlour in Baltimore. Charlie's work most recently appeared on Tattoosday here.

Thanks to Legs Malone for sharing her tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!