(no subject)

[aslant]

this morning on the subway, i saw the worst tattoo. not the blurry $50 cocoa beach rose on the ankle kind, but the obviously expensive, poorly planned kind.

picture a really pretty young girl, 17 if she was a day; on the nape of her otherwise lovely neck there are a series of tattooed holes. like, bloody holes rent in her flesh, about an inch wide, going up the back of her neck like shoelace holes. eight or ten of them. now picture that out of the bottommost hole is hanging the colorful, warty, green, limp tail of a caterpillar that is enthusiastically diving in and out of the holes and winding its way up the entire tattoo, which was probably five or six inches high altogether.

why, i thought silently. why? that really unfortunately-too-large ring she can eventually take out of her lip & let heal. that hideous brow plucking job? will eventually fill in. with care, she will probably learn one day that her skin tone just looks all wrong with purple eyeshadow. but that obviously expensive, otherwise very skilled work of unfortunate body art will not go away without a lot of money. i have trouble thinking how one would arrive at that tattoo design. see, with bloody holes in my flesh! and the caterpillar, which is not cute but nasty, see, because i'm hardc0re, it dives in and out of the holes! awesome. here's my dad's visa card and my fake ID. even better, she and a bunch of her teenybopper friends blocked the ENTIRE subway door, at 8 in the morning, and were clothed head to toe in celtics gear. a bad tattoo AND a shitty teenage hockey party, all before i've had my coffee! excellent. happy tuesday!

Comments

[nevers.livejournal.com]

ugh!
that's why i don't think i could get a tattoo at all. so irreversible. although i do still lust after my sacrum tattoo.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

see---i always liked your tattoo idea. it is in a secret place that you could easily hide (although even if it weren't, it is still a cool idea). whereas a giant worm and holes on your neck? not so invisible.

[nevers.livejournal.com]

hehe, yes. but, see, i still have my dreams of nude modeling! even barring that, i have dreams of becoming francesca woodman (minus the gory suicide) and i just don't think the tattoo would be congruent with all that.

[zougwa.livejournal.com]

I came very close to getting a tattoo in college, when I was away from the parents but still lived off their money, but now I'm glad I never did. I mean, I'm all for artistic expression, but how much artistic expression is there in someone else's comic book drawing of a rose/sunburst/yin-yang/whatever? It's like clip art for the skin. These kids are too dumb to notice that their sign of "individuality" has a catalog number.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

clip art: my thoughts exactly. what little creativity there is, is too often translated into unfortunately creations like the one above.

[relativid.livejournal.com]

I wish this was in color and more clear.

http://www.inkleaf.net/wires/tucson1_06.htm

This is one of the nicest tattoos I've seen. It's sharp and vibrant. The design is based on a stained glass piece by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I'm not much into tattoos, but this one is gorgeous.

[tasteetriceps.livejournal.com]

That's one of those tattoos that sounds fabulous to me--on someone else. A great idea best left unexecuted.