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Sorry to those that have already seen it on Instagram, but I'm so stoked that I have to post it here also. Paul Dobleman is one of my favorite tattooers and I wanted to plan a trip out to SF to get tattooed by him; I've even been saving this spot on my arm for him. Saw that he was doing a guest spot here in NYC at Kings Ave, but he got booked up very fast. Luckily, I was able to grab one of his cancellations (thanks to @CABS for the heads up!). So I got my bike running over the weekend and took a rainy ride out to Kings Ave in Long Island on Monday. Rode home with this pretty lady from Paul. A very cool experience; couldn't be happier with this one!

So here she is.. I'm pretty in love with her.. shes different from the other girls hes done for me. Its right above my elbow on the back of my arm (look how swollen my elbow is!) Back next week for a butterfly in the elbow ditch. Did i mention....I love her? Taken from Alec Benjamin's Instagram @alec_redhotandblue

I put this in my newbie thread, but figured I'd post it here in case folks were interested. Dana Helmuth at Read St in Baltimore. update: smaller photo

Newest tattoo, as well as the second tattoo I've done on myself. Testing out the feel of my first set of machines (I had been using some of my boss'), and decided to keep it straight edge, to go with the Minor Threat coil wraps. Many thanks to Kevin Riley for making such a great set of machines. Side note... we'll pretend that lettering is super clean. I need to work on tattooing in yoga positions for these occasions.

Blonde nurse ladyhead on the back of my left arm done today by the wonderful Alec Benjamin at Red Hot n Blue tattoo in Edinburgh. Pics to follow once he posts up on Instagram. I absolutely bloody love her. ( you can check out Alec's work on Instagram @ALEC_REDHOTANDBLUE he's visiting America as of June and is guesting at a few places starting in Minneapolis )

I want to get tattooed by Jeff Rassier ASAP. When I got tattooed by Robert Ryan, all I asked for was a skull with a hand coming out of it. He pretty much took care of the rest.

"How'd you get a pizza face tattoo?" Because the artist drew a pizza monster. It mostly comes down to an artist and their style. Others are just up to asking. I told Jesse Gordon I wanted a dagger through something weird. Lets get weird was my motto. I came out with an eyeball being daggered. I think getting weird tattoos are some of the finest. Sometimes you just gotta get weird

Hi and welcome to the board. Please take the time to watch the artist interviews, read and learn from old and new threads, and appreciate that this is a community that is pretty unique on the internet. To quote a poster from this forum who I have a tremendous amount of respect for:

I usually think of kids as children below high school age. I usually say is it safe to bring one extra person along with you, but leave the entourage at home, but again there are times when Mom and Dad and Uncle, and Grandma, all stroll in with someone on their 18th birthday video camera in tow, and we don't kick them out, we just make fun of them later after they leave.

i'm considering it.. patience now Mister... as soon as he's posted pics i shall have them with you.. im all wrapped in cling film and oozing currently. - - - Updated - - - with retrospect this comment could also be on the wrong forum.

Get Pharoah's Moz's.

Well they aren't called "artists" for nothin'! I imagine in most of those cases, the customer went to a tattoo artist they already admired and said, "go to town". Or maybe something like: "I'd like it to have a rose and the shaking hands, but you can put your own spin on it."

Saint Christopher is considered the patron saint of travellers. My grandfather had a Saint Christopher medallion which he wore throughout WWII (including getting shot down and parachuting out of a flaming lancaster and evading the gestapo with the help of the Danish underground, but that is another story.). The medallion got passed down to me which I wore instinctively at all times and felt safe or protected by it. My other grandfather and my parents always had a Saint Christopher statuette on the dash of their vehicles. They all believed that it protected them from the dangers of the road because the one time the statuette was not in the car was the one and only time each of them ended up in severe car accidents. My first tattoo was of Saint Christopher. May 6, 2003 to be exact. Hours later I am leaving the tattoo shop all bandaged up. A friend of a friend picks us up. 2 blocks from the tattoo shop, some dude runs a stop sign and T-bones the car on the passenger side. Nobody was injured thankfully but the car was a write-off. To this day I can't settle on whether that post-first-tattoo car accident was either a) God punishing me for getting the tattoo of a religious icon OR b) Saint Christopher protecting me from serious injury. It still haunts me. But at least I got some fodder for the story of my first tattoo :)

You know, if that tattoo was on me I'd also post it to the May tattoo of the month competition because that's a great one.

Keep calm @keepcalm

So... I have no news, no pictures, no nothing. I'm just here to complain about how impatient I get when waiting for my appointment for a new tattoo. I know what I want and I want it now! I am beginning to see the appeal of walk-ins and spur-of-the-moment decisions, haha. ::whine:: This post brought to you by boredom and a couple of hours of looking at pictures of tattoos on the internet.

That things is pretty weird, but cool and fun at the same time. Usually the problem I have with weird tattoo is people do em all wonky and new school, this seems to be a pretty solid tattoo. But also I would like to add that Dave Lum has being doing weird, but technically perfect tattoos since before most of us even thought of getting a tattoo. Edit Also Jeff Rassier, just pointing out weird is not really a trend and most tattoos are weird, and the idea of getting a tattoo is pretty weird. Imagine if no one had tattoos and someone suggested the idea of letting someone stab you repeatedly with a needle and ink to create a permanent design?

That Dietzel repaint is killer!!! His eagles are seriously the shit. Here's one of my interpretations of his work:

I'm getting super excited for this! I don't think I'll be able to get anything other than what I already have booked (poor me, I know you all feel so bad for me right now), but I am super psyched because I'll get to see tattoos done by a lot of people I am super stoked on and hopefully it will make me want to get tattooed by them in future years. Also I have been hearing about the trash plate for years and I am finally going to be given the opportunity to eat one.

@hollyjoybee Yes! I do Smiths/ Moz tattoos and my good friend Mike Adams does a few as well. If you're ever near the Portland area I would love to do a Moz/ Smiths tat on you! I've got 2 flash sheets based on the Hatful of Hollow album as well as a few other designs and do custom ones as well. You can check out my stuff on Instagram (@losingshape) or my website: losingshape.com. It links to my Tumblr as well as my Bigcartel shop. In regards to that Moz painting you posted, if I were you, since you're in the UK you should just find a tattooer who's style you really like to draw something up for you. Everybody over at Rain City (Manchester), Cock-A- Snook (Newcastle), and all the fine shops in London - Frith Street, etc, etc would most-likely do a great job. I just don't trust people on Etsy who aren't tattooers who sell "Tattoo Prints" who don't actually know anything about the craft of tattooing much less designing a good tattoo. That doesn't mean it isn't a good reference for style and how you'd like your tattoo to be designed.

I managed to get in with Frank Carter again while he was at Frith Street Tattoo last week. He tattooed this eagle on my chest. The photo is from Frank's Instagram

How do people get weird tattoos? What I mean is, I subscribe to Our Endless Days and a couple other blogs and watch the tattoos scroll in each day and sometimes they are really super weird. I would not ever come up with ideas like that and I can't imagine if I did that I could ever communicate to another person the details of my crazy idea. Here are some examples. What did the customer say? "Please give me a skull and flowers and put an afro on half the skull with the eye popping through? Oh and put green octopus tentacles at the ends of the bones." Really?? How could anybody think of this? Or how about this one. "Please give me a brown rose with the outside petals looking like a sunflower and the inner ones black like a bowl of hearts with white outlines." It's beautiful but how does one muster the creativity to ask for something so unique? I didn't even know what this was until I looked at it for 10 minutes. How does someone describe this to an artist? Or do they? Okay, I want a tiger that's a stand-up comedian with a flower on its chest and a foot standing on a skull. Put a fish swimming up the cord into the microphone. I'm not criticizing these tattoos. I honestly would like to know how one goes about acquiring such strange tattoos. I could never think this stuff up myself but it would be so cool to have something weird like this.

Didn't an entire book of this stuff just get released a few days ago, titled "born weird"?

Really like both of these @dirbab and @hollyjoybee. A whole two weeks to wait for my next (then likely not any for a while), gah! I need a better paid job...

14 yo me could do a lot with this, but instead I'll say beautiful tattoo!

This is from a newly digitalised 16th century book of costumes - medieval tattooed folk

Exactly - - - Updated - - - I would get used to telling people that, or better yet get a t shirt that says " I'm a hipster not a racist" that being said it kind of made me laugh when I first saw it.

I have a strange talent for turning just about anything someone says into something dirty. I am apparently forever 14.

next week i'm gettin my "lasered" arm covered! took the picture on the right, 2 days ago. finally it's over after 1 1/2 years of lasering!

Thank you for bringing this up! Reading that Robert Ryan interview in TCM really affirmed some personal superstitions about tattoos for me. I don't like to tattoo symbols of evil, as far as my own comfort zone goes. Simply speaking, a symbol is a distilled image intended to invoke a very specific idea/memory/feeling/desire. Because of this immediate association, symbols are very powerful visual tools. Brand logos are an accessible and modern example of how a symbol can instantaneously trigger a reaction in a person. Alphabets are also a good example. I think the reason why most clients have a hard time understanding this is because it is a very ideologically superstitious practice on my behalf, and also because the idea of a tattooed symbol of evil having real-life repercussions seems magical at best. If symbol X triggers reaction a, b, or c in nearly anyone who looks at it, and all of which are negative reactions/feelings, I don't want to be the means by which that negativity is brought into the world. That's really all that it comes down to I guess. (on a side note, I think that there is a huge difference between the power of symbols and the power of illustrations.)

Hey guys, Dietzel re-paint I did last night, not had any time for anything recently so was nice to get something done!

I've often wondered the same thing. My guess, as others have suggested above , is that it's just a matter of giving your tattoo artist freedom and maybe specifically asking for something different. For my ROA back piece, I requested that it not be a simple old-timey one, but didn't ask specifically for UFOs or any of the other craziness I happily ended up with.

I am getting tattooed at a fast rate! I'm not really in pain as much as just itchy and my immune system is well and truly ready for a reboot! My tattoo artist isn't sure if/when he's going to be returning and i really want the majority of my left arm to be done by him hence the regularity of the appointments! Being tattooed is also something i've repressed for a long time.. it feels like a relief to finally be allowed to do what i want with my body :)

Thought I would share this awesome sheet Tristan Bentley from Ocean Ink had recently posted on his instagram page.

I've talked about this some before... A few years ago I found out that I have a neurodegenerative disease that will eventually land me in a wheelchair. I really don't know how fast or slow it will go. There's not any treatment for it, nothing to do for it but treat symptoms and wait for the inevitable. I got super depressed about it for a long time. I absolutely HATED my legs. Despised them for having this disease, for failing me, for "dooming" me to be disabled someday. Sometime last summer I started to have persistent dreams that I was getting my legs tattooed. I ignored them as well as I could for awhile, and then started putting some serious thought into going for it. I started looking around the interwebs to see what was out there... And then I came here :) Since I started getting my legs tattooed my feelings about them have changed completely. I don't hate them at all anymore. In fact, I might even love them!!! I definitely love the tattoos, and to a great degree all those positive feelings have bled over onto the legs themselves. And... I'm finding that my perspective about the disease as a whole is beginning to shift some too... I'm coming around to the idea that I need to view it less as a curse, not "being doomed", and more of just "a change"... I'm definitely not all the way there yet, but it's something that never would have been possible in the state of mind I was in when I hated my legs guts for having this thing in the first place. - - - Updated - - - And I have to add... I want to thank all y'all here at LST for being here, for giving such great input and advice, for showing off such great work all the time!! God forbid, what if I'd gotten crappy leg tattoos?!?! I doubt it would have had the same positive impact that it's had...

What a nosey douchebag! Are you guys both adults? Sounds like a 5 year old tattling on someone in the sandbox. As for me and superstition, I used to be a Muslim and of course when I converted to Islam my tattoos were all sins. The ones I got before I converted could be excused but any future ones were sins. Also there was a stigma about getting living creatures because there are some super traditional hadith verses about it being an insult to God to draw a living creature because only God can live life. Humans can only make imitations and cannot give life. So after I converted I was very guilty about my tattoos (though I still got them) and would not get living things. Also I would pray everyday for forgiveness for my ink. No offense to the religious here but goddamn the organized religions really have a way of making people think they're s*** bags who need forgiveness. I would wake up every morning and ask God to forgive me for being me. Glad I'm past that and can get tattoos with reckless abandon.

I believe that was me @Dan S @Delicious To the extent of my knowledge i am the only woman in my whole extended family apart from one cousin (who has a tiny trible symbol on her chest) that is tattooed... That includes men. I started to get the usual grief when i began getting tattooed.. a few colour realism butterflies, a little script that was all seen as acceptable however when i began getting larger tattoos people began to pipe up with their opinions. are you joining the circus? are you going to be a pirate? you are going to look so butch? what are you going to do when this early midlife crisis is over? you look like a lesbian! you WERE such a girly girl and now... etc etc. There comes a point in life when you have to make the choice between expressing yourself how YOU choose to because frankly other people might not be around for nearly as long as your tattoos will be. I've always had hella low self confidence but now when i look in the mirror and catch a glimpse of my tattoos i smile. They make ME happy on MY body. Other people will get over it. Sorry for digressing from the point of the thread. I have had a length discussion about native american indian tattoos at my local shop today and i've realised i am 'supersticious' enough to feel the need to have my indian girlhead and cheif wearing the correct headdress... that's as far as it goes for me though. Tattoos are things i perceive to be beautiful that i want to wear on my body.. n thats about the size of it :)

Dennis at @ProvidenceTattoo

Not sure if this is what you meant but this is who I thought of: sam rulz

this makes me feel slightly more at ease... i'll be having the elbow ditch tattooed next week and i hope i feel the same as you!

@David Flores Awesome!!!

GRRM is the best! I'm currently halfway through A Clash of Kings (started the series like 187276375338 months ago... Lol) and the writing is breathtaking.

The Morissey painting looks very tattooable, but from what I read, the artist who painted it is not a tattooer. I'd suggest taking it to a tattooer and getting his or her professional opinion on how they'd tweak it.

I've heard not filling the eyes in until the end is a way to motivate flaky clients into returning for future appointments.

slightly intimidated by the talent in this thread but none the less here are a few of my more recent ones

Had a go at a Battle Royale as a gift for a tattooer i'm hopefully getting some more work from next month, he is a real cool guy and opened my eyes to traditional tattooing and painting etc when I first met him. I hope he likes it, I know some people might have seen this on instagram already.

This is the first commission I've ever done. She wanted a skeleton in a lime green Dodge Super Bee, this is what I came up with and I'm pretty stoked on it. 16x20 pen and liquid acrylic on cold press Arches board.

Trevino told me another story when he tattooed me in 1993. A guy came in and said, "Do a Mickey Mouse on me, any way you want." So of course, Chris's eyes light up, and he says, "Any way I want?" Then he grinned at me and said, "Mickey was holding his cock, which was green and as big as he was. There was a big drop of purple cum drippin' off the end, and Mickey's tongue was out and his eyes were rollin' back." I just looked at him and said, "Really?!" "Yeah. He came back a few years later and I covered it up."