Tattoosday (A Tattoo Blog)

Tattoosday Goes to a Galaxy, Far, Far Away (via Las Vegas)

2023-06-28T20:14:00.004-04:00

Last month in Las Vegas I snapped a bunch of random tattoo pictures at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. Here's another:

So it may not be the best Princess Leia tattoo you've ever seen, but the whole concept is pretty cool.

If you are seeing this on another website 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.

Tattoosday Goes Back to Nature (in Las Vegas)

2023-06-25T14:44:00.000-04:00

Last month in Las Vegas I snapped a bunch of random tattoo pictures at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. Here's another:

Tattoosday Goes to Vegas .... And Beyond!

2023-06-24T15:14:00.001-04:00

Last month in Las Vegas I snapped a bunch of random tattoo pictures at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. Here's another:

This guy's sleeve was, literally, out of this world!

Tattoosday Goes to Vegas: Forevermore

2023-06-21T19:53:00.005-04:00

Last month in Las Vegas I snapped a bunch of random tattoo pictures at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. Here's another:

There's a lot going on here but, ultimately, it was the tattoo of Edgar Allan Poe and the banner "Forevermore" that drew me in.

Tattoosday Goes to Vegas: One Dude's Calves

2023-06-20T18:53:00.001-04:00

Last month in Las Vegas I snapped a bunch of random tattoo pictures at the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. Here's another:

Tattoosday Goes to Vegas: The Man in Black

2023-06-16T11:40:00.005-04:00

Last month found me in Las Vegas, attending the Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival. In addition to great music, I was awash in a mass of humanity with great tattoos for the first time in several years. And although the setting wasn't conducive to interviews, I did snap a bunch of photos for Tattoosday, starting with this one, which got the old juices flowing again:

At first glance, I thought it was Clint Eastwood's man with no name from the Spaghetti-western era, but I soon realized that "The man in black fled across the desert," referred to Roland, the protagonist in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Thanks to this concert-goer for allowing me to photograph his tattoo!

Re-post: Mike's Memorial Day Ink

2022-05-30T15:23:00.005-04:00

The following post is from 2009. I have reposted it in 2013 and in 2017, and five years later, it seems worth posting again. This was originally shared to commemorate Memorial Day, and seems well worth sharing again:

It only seemed fitting that, on this Memorial Day, we feature a tattoo that honors our men and women in uniform.

A week ago, I was fresh off of my experience at the New York City Tattoo Convention, and everything I saw on the street was uninteresting. Until I passed by Mike and did a double-take.

This is the tattoo on Mike's inner right forearm:

Mike explained that, as a United States Marine, he was choosing to honor the corps by building a sleeve of iconic military photographs.

If you think this is an impressive tattoo (which it is), seeing the source material further magnifies how phenomenal a replica the artist has created on Mike's flesh:

A page on About.com explains this image further:

"While units of the U.S. Far East Air Forces Combat Cargo Command made an all-out effort to aid embattled units of the First Marine Division and Seventh Infantry Division, the men fighting in Korea were trying desperately to link up in their battle for survival. This marine is shown just as he reached the crest of the ridge at the link-up point. Wet, stinging snow and ice made the operation the most difficult sort, as unleashed hordes of communist troops charge again and again into the United Nations forces. (circa December 1950) "

In addition to this tattoo, Mike has a Vietnam-era photo of a Marine sniper inked on his right biceps.

This astonishing tattoo was created by Randy Prause at Permanent Buzz Tattoo, in Denville, New Jersey.

A hearty thanks to Mike for sharing this tattoo with us here on Memorial Day. More importantly, Tattoosday expresses even more gratitude to Mike and all his fellow soldiers and who have so bravely served our country to ensure the freedoms we enjoy each day.

Have a safe and pleasant Memorial Day!

Al Shares a Rib Tattoo by Bianka Nedbál

2022-01-29T12:07:00.004-05:00

In July 2018, I was on Governor's Island for the New York City Poetry Festival to enjoy poetry and spot tattoos. I met Al who was kind enough to let me take this photo:

Al credited this work to Bianka Nedbál (@bianca_nedbal) who worked out of Edison Bar & Ink in Budapest, Hungary before it closed in September 2020.

Al told me the design was inspired by a photo of a staircase bannister that Bianka then interpreted into this lovely tattoo on her ribs.

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

You Get What You Get For Your Birthday

2022-01-28T06:35:00.000-05:00

Last summer on my birthday, my family and I headed to Crown Hieights, Brooklyn, and celebrated the day, in part, at Electic Anvil Tattoo:

My daughters, Jolee and Shayna, had decided to treat their old dad to a new tattoo. What was I getting? It was still undetermined:

What's this? To those who aren't familiar with the concept, a customer pays for a token that they drop in the gumball machine. A little plastic ball drops after twisting the handle, and inside the bulb is a drawing. That's what you've just selected for your new tattoo. What happens if you don't like it? You can pay extra for a second chance, but you can also walk away. This rarely happens, I am told. Most people who are game enough to take the chance, are not going to walk away.

Needless to say, I liked my design and, as a bonus, the tattooer available to me was none other than Jason Monroe (@jason_monroe), who had tattooed me eight years earlier at a special Sailor Jerry event (read about it here).

The design I got it was this cool little Reaper, which now graces my left leg, just above the ankle.

When Jason asked if I wanted color, I deferred to him, so he was able to add the red he thought was best for the design. I thought getting a grim reaper tattoo on my birthday was pretty iconic, and the fact that it was a gift from my kiddos made it all the more special.

I should add that my daughter Shayna also "got what she got" - the family concluded she got a better design (although I was 100% happy with the outcome):

This tattoo, on Shayna's inner left forearm, was done by Josh Arseneau (@josharseneau) and was also a "Get What You Get" special.

Thanks to my kids for this awesome birthday gift and to Jason Monroe and the rest of the Electric Anvil crew for making it a memorable birthday!

dawn lonsinger and the Three of Swords (The Tattooed Poets Project)

2021-04-30T07:40:00.000-04:00

We didn't want National Poetry Month to end without celebrating at least one tattooed poet.

Fortunately, previous contributor dawn lonsinger has been kind enough to share, with some new ink to appreciate!

dawn elaborates:

"I got this Three of Swords tattoo -- on some level -- to mark the grief of this year, of all the losses piling on top of each other, the pandemic making even more vivid the disturbing social inequities & technological dysphoria & substratal loneliness in this country. In tarot, the Three of Swords card represents suffering from major heartbreaks or betrayals, feeling lonely or lost or both . . . hence the heart (seat of love & beauty & affection) pierced through with three swords, which is also often depicted in front of a stormy sky with rain pelting down, the way mourning feels inside of us. And who among us -- in this warring world -- has not been heart-riven?

Depending on the day, depending on the mood, I name the three swords: childhood, heartbreak, health . . . or capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy . . . or subjectivity, loneliness, death . . . or poetry, poetry, poetry . . . or Philomela, Antigone, Cassandra . . . or after those who have wounded me the most: P, J, K, or after those I have lost & miss: Carol, Sue, X. And, of course, I know I will keep on renaming them, because none of us know what our most profound penetrating incandescent woundings will be until the end. I also think it is meaningful that the swords -- tools of war -- pierce not into viscera, but into our symbol for interiority; the flesh of language against (in both senses) the mayhem of metal & 'progress'.

Of course, when this tarot card is reversed -- which is how I see it -- it means some kind of reconciliation with pain, maybe forgiveness, maybe release or optimism. But I like -- either way -- that it's not a heart broken, but a heart wounded, and in an ongoing way. I think -- because we are addicted to narratives of transformation & transcendence -- that we are often too eager to be done with loss/pain/grief, to be healed, even though the ache reminds us of what we've held precious/irreplaceable, something or someone or some time that filled us with blooming.

I don't buy the old adage that 'time heals all wounds;' rather, time gives us the space to learn how to better dialogue & dance with the pain, which remains. Whenever I get too precious, too tornadoed by how unintelligible and unfair the world, and am tempted to wish things were easier, that we could banish sadness . . . I remind myself that idealism is violent, and GOOD VIBES ONLY is a mantra of the repressed . . . and of something John Keats wrote in a letter: 'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?'

In my tattoo -- more classic in design & color than my other tattoos -- there are three flowers over the heart, and blood & rain (or tears) falling. I'm into its all-at-once wilding & smarting & opening & ablution. Also, my friend Aggie says the blood-tipped ends of the swords look like pencils, and that's a misrecognition I can get behind."

dawn credited the work to Orrin Hurley (@orrinhurley) from Three Kings Tattoo (@threekingstattoo) in Brooklyn, New York.

dawn also shared this poem, which appeared previously in The Los Angeles Review, Summer 2020:

A History

We were too late. The knots of clay & kink
of thorn & prophecy of fur were cleared away & the sun

was already a dividend of glass facades and rearview mirrors.
Between people a line of some sort or another:

grocery line, bottom line, perforation, window sill, the edge
of the bed. Your guess is as good as mine. Between you and me

are 92 blocks, 18 subway entrances, technicolor jungle-print
tablecloths in a dollar store folded into perfect squares

and stacked one on top of the other like prayer books,
kids snaking circles in the waterless fountain while

snowy branches hook around the sky’s bloodless neck.
Between people a line of some sort or another: exit only lane,

exclamation point, barbed wire, zipper, mail slot, trench,
the circumference of your wrist. Between you and me

the problem of fathers, snack packs of applesauce,
the questions of the dead clinging to the wet landscape

of the living, and countless lottery machines curving
tiny numbers like the bones of our inner ears onto slips of paper,

scattered secrets, and an aisle in every hardware store
where assorted compendiums of nails hang suspended like dreams,

beautifully fallow as if they might be spared utility. Between people
a line of some sort or another: deadline, Uber ride, VIP access line, fire

line, hemline, referendum, lip. And above us, chiffon shifts
of swallows unfolding a way out of the infrastructure, but also

above us: the intimations of heaven & our estrangement,
and below the underpaid line cooks & dishwashers, wingless

& sweating. Ours is a ghost story. Ours is a luxury gone
sour and a love gone sweet. Ours are the nameless blooms

we keep calling by made-up names expedient and/or beautiful,
the hydrangeas head-heavy
………………………………………& woozy by the checkout.

~ ~ ~

dawn lonsinger is the author of Whelm (winner of the 2012 Idaho Prize in Poetry and Freund Prize), and recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, Utah Poetry Prize in Prose and Poetry, the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize (chosen by Eduardo Corral), and runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix). Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Subtropics, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Her poem, “Sundress,” was chosen by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book to be featured in their Public Poetry Project, and appeared on 1500 posters distributed to libraries, public schools, bookstores, and universities. She holds an MFA from Cornell University, a PhD from the University of Utah, and is an Associate Professor at Muhlenberg College, teaching Creative Writing, Poetry & Politics, and Monstrosity & Apocalypse in Literature and Film. She has recently finished a creative nonfiction book that tries to navigate the consanguinity and dissonance between erotics and robotics in a Tindering world, and is now working on finishing a second book of poems, The Long and Terrible Taming, which explores taming and wildness in all its manifestations, and a speculative fiction novel, Beast, that strives to upend our ontological assumptions about animality vs. humanity.

I am extremey grateful to dawn for returning to the Tattooed Poets Project and sharing her new tattoo and her poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

If you are reading this on another website 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.net 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.

Jolee's Ghost Light Shines Through the Pandemic

2021-03-12T08:27:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, when the world was acknowledging the first anniversary of the delcaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was thinking about today, the anniversary of the lights going out on Broadway and in theaters across New York City.

This was a particularly big deal in our home, as my daughter Jolee is an actor and worked front of house at The Public Theater.

This made me think of an amazing tattoo she got back in 2018, a "ghost light" on her thigh:

Jolee explains:

"A ghost light is an electric light that is left lit on the stage of a theater when the theater is unoccupied and would otherwise be completely dark. The light stands on a wheeled mount, and the bulb sits within a wire cage, and is placed center stage. Ghost lights also have superstitious justifications, as there are countless stories from centuries of theater about ghost lights being left lit to either appease the ghosts of a theater or to scare them away while no one is there to do that themselves."

She adds:

"I chose a ghost light for a variety of reasons. I wanted a commemorative tattoo for the art in which I've dedicated most of my life's work, but also had a sort of ambiguous nature. A deeply personal tattoo, yet also has a universal understanding amongst other artists. I like to think that the light for my love of theater remains lit throughout my life, no matter what happens."

As we look forward to the future, I like to think that the "light at the end of the tunnel" that is just out of reach is a ghost light, illuminating our way to a day when theaters will be open and vibrant again, as actors re-take their stages and bring their art back to life.

This super cool tattoo was designed and crafted by the incomparable Alex McWatt (@alexthreekings) at Three Kings Tattoo (@threekingstattoo) in Manhattan. Alex has tattooed everyone in our family and his work has appeared numerous times on Tattoosday previously (click here to see what else we've featured).

Thanks to Jolee for sharing her tattoo and words with us here on Tattoosday! I look forward to seeing her on stage in the future, emanating her own light as an actor, and continuing to make me proud.

Kristin's Disneyana Sleeve

2021-03-09T07:55:00.002-05:00

We're clearing out our pre-pandemic backlog and today featuring some Disney-themed tattoos spotted at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade back in June 2018.

I met Kristin pre-parade at the Coney Island Brewing Company and talked to her about her arm.

In addition to the piece at the top of the arm,

but also features Cinderella and Prince Eric.

She also has this Ariel piece:

She credited the work to artist Joe Budds at Monarch Tattoo in New Jersey.

Thanks to Kristin for sharing her tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Amina's Gypsy Wolf Tattoo (from the Archives)

2021-03-07T19:09:00.000-05:00

Tattoosday recently came off hiatus and we're posting all those goodies that never made it to the blogosphere.

Below is another tattoo I spotted at the 2018 Summer Vibe convention out on Long Island:

Amina credited Macho (@tattoos_by_macho) with the work.

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

Hugo's Back (from the Archives)

2021-03-06T15:00:00.002-05:00

Working through some old posts, I stumbled across a few from 2018's United Ink Summer Vibe show out on Long Island.

Check out this work on Hugo, featuring a Mayan theme, crafted by Roberto Castillo (@roberto_castillo1) from Sacred Tattoo (@sacredtattoonyc) in Manhattan:

Thanks to Hugo for sharing his cool back piece with us here on Tattooday!

Jennie's Rabbit (from the Archives)

2021-03-04T08:07:00.032-05:00

Way back in 2018, Jennie, a friend of my daughter's, came back to New York from Chicago, rocking this leporine tattoo:

I photographed it - it was maybe Jennie's third or fourth tattoo - and never posted it, but let’s just say I figured I'd let it "age." Jennie has gone on to fill her arm with some great work, but I thought it was time to give this rabbit it's due. Check out another one of Jennie's cool tattoos (also from '18) here.

Jennie credited the work to a tattoo artist she remembers as "Wolfy." The four stars recall the flag of Chicago, where Jennie was finishing up school.

She notes: “The stars are for Chicago, but he thought the actual Chicago flag stars were ugly, so he made them normal stars instead and I was too meek to correct him.”

And why the rabbit?

Jennie explains:

“I got the rabbit because, on my walk at the ass crack of dawn every day, I would see a million rabbits! They’re a leftover product of Chicago’s meatpacking history! I think there are more of them than there are squirrels.

I think I went [to get the tattoo] on a whim that day. I definitely went with my friend Lily … Wolfy called himself that because he had multiple wolf tattoos [and] kept asking if we were lesbians and then [kept] assuring me there was nothing wrong with that if we were … he had a very strong Chicago accent.”

More about the Chicago rabbit situation here.

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

Brewsday Tuesday: Coney Island Brewery Edition

2021-03-02T07:50:00.007-05:00

I won't lie, it has been way too long since we've had an installment of Brewsday Tuesday on Tattoosday, and I am happy to be finally sharing work (and beer) featuring my good friends at Coney Island Brewery (@coneyislandbeer), in South Brooklyn!

I first met Kat, Coney Island Brewery's general manager, at a tattoo convention back in 2019. Last February (yes, February 2020), I popped in and spent some time talking to her about her tattoos, Coney Island Brewery, and the expansion of their location on Surf Avenue.

And then the pandemic started. Tattoosday took a 10-month hiatus. But over the summer and into the fall, I started riding my bike out to Coney Island on Sundays and stopping by the brewery. After closing to the public in March and April, 2020, they started selling beer for curbside pickup and, once dining restrictions lifted, they began serving food outdoors on their expanded patio, weather permitting.

In January 2021, they set up a tent with heaters to make outdoor dining in the winter a little more bearable. All along, the operation has been a safe space - sanitizer at all tables, QR codes to access food and drink menus, and very strict mask rules.

And here we are in March 2021, things are looking up, Coney Island Brewery is releasing a spring saison later this month (more on that later), and Tattoosday is back in business!

Let's talk about Kat's tattoo first:

I'll let Kat explain:

"This is Ninkasi. She is the Sumerian goddess of beer ... the first recipe ever actually written down of beer was a poem to her, it was kind of like a love poem ... when I started working here, I fell in love with the background and history of women and beer, which kind of sometimes gets forgotten ...

When we started doing all of the tattoo expos, I was making friends and sharing our beer and I told an artist who's based out in Ohio (Will Eagle @thebeardedeagle ) ... about this idea that I had for a tattoo to represent Ninkasi and he was like, 'please let me do it...'. So, the next time that he was in the city [July 2018] we did this, we're going to build around it, do like a bunch of hops around her ... I shared my story and love of beer with someone and they were like, let me bring that to life ... this is definitely one of my favorite tattoos."

Coney Island Brewery is a subsidiary of Boston Beer, Co., which is most often associated with Samuel Adams, but it retains a very South Brooklyn vibe; Mermaid Pilsner and Merman IPA are hallmark brands in the borough in which I live. Longtime readers of this blog will recognize it as a favorite place to hang out and spot tattoos, especially during the summer and when the Coney Island Mermaid Parade is rolling down Surf Avenue in June. I mean, merpeople and tattoos go hand in hand!

Kat started as a bartender back in the spring of 2016 and has moved up as the brewery has sprung from a relatively small space to a huge location at MCU Park, still having not exercised its full potential due to the pandemic. "Watching it grow has been really awesome," Kat told me. The fact that they have survived throughout 2020 is an incredible testament to the strength of their brand.

This past fall, I enjoyed their version of Black is Beautiful, a stout whose recipe was shared industry-wide by Texas-based Weathered Souls Brewing, to "raise awareness for the injustices people of color face daily and raise funds for police brutality reform and legal defenses for those who have been wronged."

In the fall, to promote voter registration, the brewery released a delicious doppelbock called Registrator:

January brought back a Coney Island favorite, their New York Honey Stout. It was so good, I grabbed a growler full!

If darker beers aren't your bag, fear not, there are lots of other options! I'm looking forward to this seasonal collaboration dropping later this month:

Brewed with strawberry and black pepper, there will be a can release at the brewery on Thursday, March 18! I know I'll be there!! [For more information on the release, go here.]

Coney Island Brewery continues to be a supportive force in the New York Community. They just announced their "Hops for Hospitality" campaign, in which they "will donate $1.00 from every can, draft, 6-packs or 12-packs of CIB products sold to the NYC Hospitality Alliance at participating locations in the State of New York during the months of March through May." The hospitality industry in New York has been devastated over the past year. This is just another example of Coney Island Brewery's committment to community involvement.

Thanks to Kat for sharing her awesome tattoo with us here on Tattoosday, and to Coney Island Brewery for their awesome beer and commitment to the community in South Brooklyn and beyond!

To be entered to win a special gift from Coney Island Brewery, please be sure to comment on this post, either here or on social media where this post appears.

Coney Island does Sour beer, too!

This Too... (Joolz Denby on the Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-30T09:07:00.000-04:00

Our last post for the 2020 Tattooed Poets Project (in National Poetry Month, at least), comes to us from a returning contributor, Joolz Denby.

Joolz appeared in the Tattooed Poets Project in 2012 here.

Joolz sent us the following tattoo from her leg, noting she "thought it was appropriate."

Indeed, very appropraite.

The artist is Ben Stone (@benstonetattoo) in Derby, UK.

Jools also sent along the following poem:

Boy, You Need the Road

Boy, you need the Road,

the lazy white stitch of heaven’s path leading through the

sun’s bright benediction criss-cross and mazy to some

wild-thyme scented hillside lying silvery sweet and

blood warm under high cirrus clouds embroidering

the lapis-lazuli of the southern sky like prayer flags,

far, far away from the bricks and mortar menagerie

of your home town’s crash-and-burn Saturday night circus.

Boy, you need the Road,

nights of fast-forward spirit-driven dazzling highs;

luminous surf pulse of breathing icy turquoise oceans,

you sprawled on a black beach wrapped in a ragged blanket,

a salt-green witch fire flickering cold and lighting up no earthly place

but burning in your flesh like those lost and long-gone kisses you

miss so much and crave with a junkie’s jack-up fever

in your aching and unmended heart.

Boy, you need the Road,

playing your old guitar through dawn’s blue incense

that rises over canyons of crystal sheathed skyscrapers

in a hotel room so bleach-clean and anonymous it hurts,

the songs you pick so idly the diary of your flight,

staring into the lying whore of a mirror that shows a face you

would not have known to be your own - a face that shows everything

but tells nothing to the world you travel like a cruel angel.

Boy, you need the Road,

it will be your sweet and savage consolation, Star,

it will be your demon lover and your loving mother both,

wrapping you in webs of contradiction and razor-bright illusion,

as sinning saint and sanctified sinner you eat magic, breathe voodoo,

try everything as you search through souks and shanties, plazas

and favellas - dirt and diamond-crusted alike - for a way

into the shadow-land to find your true name and your dead love.

Boy, you need the Road,

if you don’t go, go, go - fast as those great opal wings can bear you

out of the stink and ceremony of your expected life -

if you don’t go - and this is no word of a lie, my sweetheart,

real life will get you, and a nice girl and her babies

will get you and bang-up straight-time work will get you

and you’ll choke on it all in the neat little chain-store bedroom

where you cry when you think no one hears your terrible pain.

Boy, you need the Road,

better run, baby, better run right now and don’t look back

because you mustn’t regret and you mustn’t hear the siren song

sung by the ones who stayed and lost and drank and drugged

their way to their own safe and stinking seat at the bar in Hell Town:

so run fast on those long legs and shake the clinging dust

of home from your boot heels as an offering to Holy Mother Mary,

a sacrifice for your last chance free and clear rock n’ roll great escape.

Well, that’s my prayer for you, anyhow, that’s my last blessing.

So, boy, you need the Road;

you need the Road,

Boy listen, listen, listen - before it’s all too late.

You need the Road.

~ ~ ~

Joolz Denby is an artist/tattooist/writer /poet from England and can be found on Facebook here, Twitter (here), Instagram (here), YouTube (here), Amazon (here), and at https://www.joolzdenby.co.uk/.

Thanks to Joolz for contributing again to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2020 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

Sea Sharp and Their Cicada (The Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-29T07:34:00.001-04:00

Our penultimate tattooed poet for April 2020 is Sea Sharp, who sent us this absolutely stunning tattoo:

Sea Sharp tells us:

"All of my tattoos relate to nature and include designs of bees, wildflowers, a snail, a bird, a butterfly, a fawn, a caterpillar and a whole lot of wheat. This chest tattoo portrays a cicada emerging from wheat.

This piece was done at the Gilded Cage (@gildedcagetattoostudio) in Brighton, UK by Paco (@pacocasero). I chose this design with the plan to add watercolor and ink splatter details later to better unite with my other tattoos, but I liked this version so much, I’ve just kept it as is.

In my second book of poetry, I often refer to my mother as a cicada bug, loud and brown and magical. The wheat represents Kansas, the place where she was born and resides to this day.

When I see this tattoo, I think of my mama."

Sea Sharp contributed this accomopanying poem, as well, which was first published in Black Cotton (Waterloo Press, 2019):

Mama Bug

You see, when she was our age, mama was a cicada bug sing-sing-singin’

all sorts of mess and to this day nobody knows why she hang her brown

skin on doorknobs the way she did actin’ like she could just leave behind

a reasonable apology for lookin’ like that.

~ ~ ~

Sea Sharp is an award-winning poet and author of Black Cotton (Waterloo Press, 2019) and The Swagger of Dorothy Gale & Other Filthy Ways to Strut (Ice Cube Press, 2017). In the Arts Council England-funded theatrical show, Brother Insect, Sea Sharp was both playwright and performer.

On the stage or on the page, their work is known to be “emotively confrontational and politically charged”, unflinching with uncompromising critiques on how we continuously mistreat each other, ourselves and our planet.

To this day, Sea Sharp is still black and queer (but sometimes invisible).

Thanks to Sea Sharp for sharing their poem and tattoo with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is ©2020 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another website 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.net 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.

Ma'at's Feather (Naomi Foyle on the Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-28T06:36:00.001-04:00

Our next tattooed poet is Naomi Foyle, who shared this feather tattoo:

Naomi recounted the history of this feather:

"I acquired my tattoo in Brighton UK, back in the early nineties. I was working in a bookshop and living in a rented room at the top of a tall house above an aquarium shop owned by a Welshman with flowing white hair who let me give him Tarot card readings every month in payment for the gas bill. The room was furnished, and I liked the feather design on the bed quilt so much I decided I wanted it as my first tattoo. As a writer, I was attracted to the feather, of course, as a symbol of the pen. And as a Tarot reader, using and studying the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris Tarot deck, my decision was also influenced by Egyptian mythology. The Ancient Egyptians believed that when we die we meet Ma’at, the Goddess of Harmony, Truth and Justice, in the Hall of Two Truths. There she lays our hearts on a scale opposite the ‘Feather of Truth’– an ostrich plume. If the heart is lighter than or equal to the feather, the soul may continue to paradise, the Field of Reeds; but if the heart is heavier, then the terrible Ammit, with her lion’s mane, crocodile jaws and hippopotamus body, leaps up from her seat at the foot of the scales and devours it. I thought it couldn’t hurt to give my heart a constant reminder of this test ahead, and so I decided to have the feather tattooed on my left breast.

Through the local music scene I’d met tattooist and DJ Sean Cypher, well-known for
his own occult leanings, with whom I shared a mutual love of Einstűrzende Neubauten and the Crowley/Harris deck. I carefully copied out the design from the quilt and took my drawing to his home-studio. ‘I don’t do badges,’ Sean remarked, and proceeded to draw a larger version on tracing paper. I was a little nervous about this executive decision, but I also knew he was an artist, and when he applied the tracing for my approval, it was obvious he was right: there was an elegant and harmonious relationship between the curve of the tattoo and my breast. As Sean told me, his hand was steady; he therefore didn’t need to anchor the needle deeply in my flesh, and over time the ink did not spread too far into my capillaries. Nearly thirty years later, it’s just a little blurry, not a hot grey blotchy mess.

Sean is still in Brighton, and he and I are still talking about adding white ink to the
crest, to bring out the resemblance to a Japanese wave. Right now though, I’m just happy to have it just the way it is: when I had cancer three years ago I feared I would lose the whole breast. In the end I only had a lumpectomy, but if I’d had to have a mastectomy as originally planned, regardless of whether my feather survived intact and unwarped, I would have had more tattoo work done as part of the psychological healing process. As it is, Ma’at’s feather seems to have done its job: surviving the cancer that killed my mother has, so far, cured a chronic depression that has dogged me since I was a child. I’ve also become deeply involved with social justice issues over the last ten years, including protesting on the streets of Cairo against the siege of Gaza. So it’s clear to me that the ink from Ma’at’s feather quill has travelled into my bloodstream and lightened my heart.

Naomi sent us this poem, as well:

After the Biopsy

An iron pea

in a skinned pillow,

mushrooming marble

in a sack of aspic,

trespasser acorn

sprouting in flesh –

yet, strangely, it doesn’t feel

strange to be hosting

this small numb planet,

possible death star,

this bullet caught

in a clutch of blubber

suspended

a shade from my heart.

What my fingers have found

is the nub

of my days here on Earth ―

a dark maternal pearl

secreted

by my oyster breast.

from Adamantine (Red Hen/Pighog Press, 2019)

~ ~ ~

Naomi Foyle is a British-Canadian poet, SF novelist and essayist. Her many poetry
publications include The Night Pavilion (Waterloo Press), an Autumn 2008 PBS
Recommendation, and Adamantine (Red Hen/Pighog Press, US/UK, 2019). Also an SF
novelist, and the author of cyberchiller Seoul Survivors, and eco-SF quartet The Gaia
Chronicles, she lives in Brighton UK, and has read her work widely in the UK, North
America, Europe, South Korea and Iraq. Find her on Facebook and at www.naomifoyle.com.

Thanks to Naomi for sharing her poem, her tattoo, and its story with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

Nicholas Gulig on the Tattooed Poets Project

2020-04-26T10:00:00.001-04:00

Today's tattooed poet is Nicholas Gulig, who shared these tattoos:

Nicholas described these pieces:

"I got my first tattoo in Khon Kaen, Thailand when I first met wife. I was finishing my dissertation by day and working as a bartender by night. Fon, my wife, was a server there, and so we worked together every day from about 3pm to 3am. The bar was often empty, so I’d bring books—poems mostly—to pass the time. One of the books I brought to with me was Richard Siken’s Crush. Wanting to improve her English, my wife would borrow these books from me and read them at the bar. She kept coming back to the last poem in the book, 'Snow and Dirty Rain,' asking me what lines meant and how to pronounce certain words. One night, late, we decided to walk across the street to a small tattoo parlor on the corner to get tattoos together. I chose a line from the poem she loved and had it translated into Thai. In English the line reads: 'a love that transcends hunger.' And in Thai: 'A love that is north of hunger.' My second tattoo, the coordinates, point to the shore of a lake in Canada where I spread my father’s ashes."

Nicholas sent us the following, as well:

from BOOK OF LAKE

For months I wanted to take you to the wrecking place. The light goes shaking there and enters. In unison, down below the fury and the beauty. Take me up and I will take you back to anywhere that you remember fondly, a field of rock encrypted in your neck, the place the wind goes killing in, an actual locality. It doesn’t matter. Then, when the letters of our names are stitched together, almost singular, it does. In this the spell the weather casts can cull at will the temple left to rot atop the mountain. There where the water doesn’t touch. Can cast us thus ashore

Recently the waves have started to go out. I put my foot in the sand and the sand is made of light, so I put my face away. It’s not supposed to be like this. I put my wrist against my other wrist and nothing happens. The waves push further out, more black, as if the land was not itself, not even terrible or able to be spelled. Spilling back and forth, the mind across the hard horizon, changes, your voice becoming colder, more irregular, the antithesis of sun, dark glass we strung with copper wire from the trees, small jewels in which the light had space enough to twitch

In the space around the joy the darkest thought is bettered by your asking of the dark to carve a path behind you, a doorway in a forest painted blue. Lift the branches up. Clash and grind and scatter. Above us, nothing less is still enough to spin a wish into the sky. Here, where even stones are eyes to set within our heads if we arrange the symbols underwater. Constructing answers out of clamor, out of scratch. So much as we have known, your throat within the house like however many ghosts, an absolute in which the faces of the dead are windows. Facing upward, one of them is open

As for this, the actual subtracting of the attic from the stone foundation, enter blindly and in love a middle place. Keep your faith in wreck. Even gods grow smaller here, less quiet. Kill the quiet when you speak and then pretend it’s not the magic but the math which makes you miss it. My enemy, my empty. Forgive me if I shake, here where the water edges past us and draws back, I want to cage a bird beneath your dress and listen. Mostly it is echo. Mostly drone the music makes of us and so we make again in unison, the dark and not dark stitched together, a circle woven into other circles

opened into // wound

~ ~ ~

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. The author of North of Order, Book of Lake, and Orient, he currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives in Fort Atkinson, WI with his wife and daughters.

Thanks to Nicholas for sharing his tattoos and poem with us here on the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

Amie Whittemore and Her Kankakee Mallow (The Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-24T08:49:00.001-04:00

Today's tattooed poet, Amie Whittemore, is also a prior contributor. She appeared here before, in 2018. She sent us this photo:

Amie tells us:

"This tattoo is special to me on several levels. First, it is of a Kankakee mallow, the only extant wildflower native only to Illinois; it was considered extinct before a pocket of it was discovered on Langham Island in the Kankakee River a few years ago. Kankakee is my home county and my parents live on the river so it felt like the perfect tattoo to get to capture my love of home. Obviously, I also wrote a poem about this magnificent flower.

I also got the tattoo in a former home. A house where I lived in Portland, Oregon in 2003-2005 became a tattoo studio (Oddball Studios @oddballtattooery) after my roommates and I moved out. While I was in Portland for AWP 2019, my old roommate and I visited the house-turned-studio and Sarah Crosley (@sarahecrosley) worked her magic. It was surreal seeing how the house had transformed; and now that past life, even the idea of getting a tattoo, feels even more distant, on the other side of the chasm of the pandemic."

Amie also sent the following poem, which originally appeared in The Heartland Review:

Don’t be Shallow, Vote for the Mallow

Slogan promoting the Kankakee mallow, the only surviving wildflower native to Illinois, found in Kankakee County and considered endangered, as its state flower (Habitat 2030).

Bright blister, bold break

in the brush of alien

honeysuckle, rarest

perfume in a disaster

of farmland, groping

for sunlight, recluse

requiring fire

to suss your seeds

dormant for decades

on Langham Island,

chewed bubblegum,

pink cap, drowsy

trumpet, your fan club

guards, films, and undresses

your flanks of scrub

so you’ll sidle up the sky.

These weekend naturalists

arrive by canoe to strip

weeds, count your seeds,

then eat bologna at noon—

faux meat the same color

as you. Hinge in the thicket,

foxed cream, leaves

the champagne of green things,

like any secret, your needs

outpace your means—

as you know. You’re no

fool. You shimmy

as if your near extinction

was a dream. The crew

goes to bed smelling the hem

of your pink skirt, lips

buttered with your velvet.

Nice work, you lucky flirt.

~ ~ ~

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Thanks to Amie for coming back to us and contributing more work to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

Darren Demaree and Emily (The Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-22T08:26:00.001-04:00

Our next tattooed poet is Darren C. Demaree, who first appeared on Tattoosday in April 2013 (here) and, again, in April 2014 (here). Darren heeded my call for returning contributors and sent the following photo:

His tattoo, which reads, "Emily says I'm a good man," crosses his ribcage. He tells us that he got the inscription "at a shop on High Street in Columbus that has since changed their name a couple of times."

Darren sent us the following poem from his Emily series:

EMILY AS A SMILE WOULD HAVE RUINED THE PICTURE

There was one look, one picture

of Emily in a bathtub right before

we got married, she was travelling

with her family, she was in Madrid

or Paris or Istanbul, she had been gone

for a couple of weeks, so I had been

drunk for a couple of weeks

& she knew that I had been drunk

for a couple of weeks, so she sent me

a picture of her in the bathtub, one

breast covered, hair in a way I’d never

seen before, looking directly at the faucet

& so surely the tatters of my world

collected into a whole woman

so beautiful that when I got the picture

I accidently deleted the picture.

I remember it clearly though, her face,

elegant, angry that she didn’t have

her hands wrapped around the back

of my head to pull me off of the bottle.

She wanted to bury me in her beauty

& that almost worked too well.

I am sober. I don’t have that picture.

I have Emily. She looks at me now.

~ ~ ~

Darren C. Demaree is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently So Clearly Beautiful, (November 2019, Adelaide Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. @d_c_demaree (www.darrencdemaree.com)

Anyone interested in the collection of “Emily as” poems can get it from Harpoon Books here.

Thanks to Darren for returning to Tattoosday to contribute to the Tattooed Poets Project!

The Light Shines in the Darkness (Courtney Thrash on the Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-20T07:20:00.000-04:00

Our next tattooed poet is Courtney Thrash, who sent us this photo:

Courtney recounted how she got thi tattoo:

"Several years ago, I endured a very difficult period in my life. After the dust settled, I looked over my journals and poems from that period and found dozens of instances where I had written about the concepts of darkness and light and their interactions--with no conscious realization of the theme. Once it was part of my awareness, I could trace the thread of light (hope) shining in and bringing me out of many varieties of darkness throughout my life. The light, for me, has a very specific and religious meaning, which is why I chose this phrase from the gospel of John for my tattoo. In its entirety, the phrase reads: 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' My tattoo serves as both memorial and prescript, totem and prescience, proclamation of truth and victory and desperate prayer for times of doubt and defeat. The tattoo was done by Betty Rose (@bettyrosetattoos) of Rose & Crown Tattoos (@roseandcrowntattoos) in Austin, TX."

Courtney sent us the following poem, as well:

Mama, I Don’t Believe

After C.D. Wright’s More Blues and the Abstract Truth

The first freckles appear on his nose.

Nerf gun bullets whistle like real ones;

He shares a birthday

with his great grandfather.

And I say, No, he didn’t come

to the party. He was already dead.

In early April, we thumbed seeds into the dark;

At the end of June he asks after

the watermelon vine absent from the sill.

I bury the tiny planter in the trash

and say, I’m still learning

how to grow things.

Then there are the jokes he tells, doesn’t get,

the legos in my purse, the toes

rubbing holes through his shoes, moving

notches up the door frame.

He tells me his love in numbers.

And I say, love is infinite

or nothing.

Well, mama, he says.

What about apologies. What about waterfalls

that never end. And superheroes who stop

bad guys. Lock them up in vaults

like your papers and Mamaw’s brooch,

day. after. day. And will Papaw Richard

come back to life with Jesus?

He cries when a cartoon robot longs for love.

And I say, a hornworm will strip a tomato plant

Faster Than You Can Say Famine.

~ ~ ~

Courtney Thrash is a poet, writer, editor, mom, and wife in Austin, TX. You can find her work on the American Scholar’s poetry column “Next Line, Please,” in Rascal, and on Instagram @courtneythrashwriter, but mostly in notebooks and word documents.

Thanks to Courtney for sharing her tattoo with us on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

TC Tolbert: A Joy To Be Hidden/A Gift to Be Found (The Tattooed Poets Project)

2020-04-13T06:54:00.001-04:00

Our next tattooed poet is TC Tolbert, who sent us this photo:

TC explains:

This is a riff on a quote by psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. He said: It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found, and while I wholeheartedly agree, I just did not want to tattoo the word 'disaster' on my chest (for many reasons) and so I tweaked it. It now reads It is a joy to be hidden and a gift to be found.

I’m trans (FTM) and I decided not to have top surgery about a decade ago but I often wear a compression shirt (though not always) and I’m on testosterone. This piece is the decoration that most accurately celebrates and speaks to the both/and of so much of my experience and especially my chest. It was inked on me in Santa Fe by Dawn Purnell – an incredible artist I’ve been to for several pieces (including Duchamp’s Fountain and Magritte’s Treachery of Images).

The photo of my chest is a selfie with my partner’s fingers covering my nipples.

TC shared the following poem, as well, which was first published in The Nation in July 2019:

felo-de-se—Melissa

physicists say we change an object simply by turning
our attention to it—really I am a grandson
only when we are eating at Panera—one of us is lying
always about her particular hunger—I love the children outside of me
counting to 30 while covering their eyes—whose body
will we sacrifice to be in the company of another—each
day across my ongoing—I haul the husk of her—fire
towers are designed for distance viewing—and I am right
here—mothering you into the next life—call me cover
when you don’t know who I could be—time’s
psychologic and legal assault—no one is listening to
ice become water—burying you to keep us alive—

~ ~ ~

Photo by Shawnte Orion

TC Tolbert identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, mover, and poet. And, s/he’s a human in love with humans doing human things. S/he is author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press 2014), five chapbooks, and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books 2013). TC was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets’ Laureate Fellowship for his work with trans, non-binary, and queer folks as Tucson’s Poet Laureate. S/he is Writer in Residence at Pratt Institute, 2019-2020. www.tctolbert.com

Thanks to TC for contributing to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

Rochelle Hurt on the Tattooed Poets Project

2020-04-07T06:28:00.002-04:00

Our next tattooed poet is Rochelle Hurt, who offered up these tattoos:

Rochelle explains:

"The girls in the tattoos are from Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Tanning is one of my favorite visual artists. She was a surrealist who made incredibly strange and moving paintings, sculptures, and poems. She once wrote that this painting in particular was about confrontation and depicted the ways in which our fear of the unknown is 'a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.' In it, one of the girls looks wild as she contends with a giant sunflower, while the other seems to have already struggled with it. In my mind they were always the same girl on either side of her private nightmare. Both states seemed important, necessary to the whole. That's why I had to get them tattooed together. (Only later did I read that one of the girls is perhaps a doll, which opens a whole new world of thought on the private nightmare.) The tattoo was done by an amazing artist named Kaitlyn Anne (@kaitlynxanne).

Rochelle also sent us this poem, which was first published in Grist:

Prayer for Exposure

O my hallowed CAT-scan, my X-ray of hope,
my moral microscope, my consecrated blood draw,
my pious pee test, my forensic father almighty,
my soul-seeking sleuth, my perpetual black light,
my sublime radar, my most private eye of eyes,
my silent paparazzo, my righteous nanny cam,
my reverse peephole, my sudden curtain pull,
my MagLite in the back alley of bedtime prayers,
my spiritual lock-pick, my sacred search warrant
my heavenly two-way mirror, my holy wiretap,
my giant ear to the wall of this profane heart,
my magnificent magnifying glass, my magic decoder:
look quick while I write all my sins on my skin
with the disappearing ink of your forgiveness.

~ ~ ~

Rochelle Hurt the author of two books of poems: In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in the Best New Poets anthology and she's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Orlando, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and runs the review site The Bind.

Thanks to Rochelle for her contribution to the 2020 Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!