21 Tattoo Girls

Rabu, 06 Juli 2011

Fresh, Flesh & Hot Chrome

☠ Saints of Los Angeles by Roos Apparel Inc. ☠

Airport Run

Airport Run from tbm on Vimeo.

☠ Saints of Los Angeles by Roos Apparel Inc. ☠

I spotted Ryan in my local laundromat, a surprisingly good spot for finding tattoos in the neighborhood. As I mentioned a long time ago over on BillyBlog here, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite books, and the illustrations of Ralph Steadman only enhance the volume's sheer brilliance.

So, once I realized the theme of Ryan's sleeve, I hoped he'd agree to share his ink with us here on Tattoosday. Thankfully, he did:

Ryan is a native Brooklyn resident, and is a huge fan of Steadman. And this iconic image above graces the cover of Thompson's best known book.

The tattoo artist that Ryan is working with on this sleeve is Cris at Puncture Tattoo Studio in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

The figure at the top of this piece is the Steadman-imagined Hunter S. Thompson.

The image below Hunter is from the cover of Steadman's America:

Ryan says that all of this work spans "about a year and a half, altogether, session by session, [over] five or six sessions." He adds, "it’s not done yet, it’s gonna go all the way up ... I’ve just been at this stage for a little while now."

I was particularly interested in the piece with the American flag, which Ryan told me was from America, referenced above.

Ryan's work is certainly ambitious and the fact that he intends to continue the work into a full sleeve is certainly intriguing. I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

Thanks to Ryan for sharing his work with us here on 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.

Selasa, 05 Juli 2011

Melissa's Afterglow

I took a little break here at Tattoosday over the long weekend and I hope that you didn't miss us too much!

Today's tattoo is one of the simpler ones, but I think it is also spectacularly original.

A couple weeks back, I ran into Melissa at a Dunkin' Donuts and she offered up this intriguing piece:

Melissa explained:

"It's just an abstract representation of my [home]. So instead of having pictures of my family or the family shield, it's an outline of a house I grew up in, the tree and the yard - it just represents my family."

As for the word "afterglow," Melissa explained that her dad had passed away a couple of years ago and there was a poem on the back of his mass card and that it is in memory of him. The poem in question is likely this one:

After Glow
I'd like the memory of me
to be a happy one,
I'd like to leave an afterglow
of smiles when life is done.
I'd like to leave and echo
whispering down the ways,
Of happy times and laughing
times and bright and sunny days.
I'd like the tears of those who
grieve, to dry before the sun
Of happy memories that I leave
When life is done.
------ Author Unknown

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

Senin, 04 Juli 2011

AMERICAN BODY PAINTING

Sabtu, 02 Juli 2011

Jaimie's Emersonian Ink

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself" are the words inked across Jaimie's back. I spotted her down the street from my home in Bay Ridge.

I asked Jaimie to explain why she got these words from poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" on her back:

"This has been my favorite quote for years," she told me. "I studied American literature in college, so I studied a lot of Emerson." She also noted that the quote is "very true".

She had this tattooed in Manhattan on St. Mark's.

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

U.S. ARMY MILITARY BODYPAINT - Army PT shirt and Daisy Dukes

U.S. ARMY MILITARY BODYPAINT Army PT shirt and Daisy Dukes