Pugilist

Seriously the Nan Goldin yelp review is one of my all-time favourites. We quote it at each other sometimes. Saved Tattoo - Williamsburg - North Side - Brooklyn, NY

@else - it's amazing! You must be so stoked. @chrisnoluck - also amazing! Who is doing it?

Now I'm afraid to disrespect @Graeme, which I do pretty much on a daily basis, lest @Dan S come after me. ;)

Yesssssssssss

OMG "chicks don't get their palms tattooed" almost made me guffaw at work. I have all the usual tattoo nightmares like being late for appointments, and I often have ones where the tattoo ends up being much bigger than expected--like I asked for something on my upper arms, and before I realize what's happening, they've tattooed something that goes all the way down to my fingers. But my best tattoo nightmare came right before I started my backpiece. I had a dream about seeing the design for the first time, and actually, a lot of it was not that far off from what the design ended up being. Except that in between all the normal stuff, right in the very middle of my back, my tattooer put a tribal mask portrait of her face. I was unsure but she totally talked me into how cool it would look. It did not. I was happy to make my tattooer laugh when I recounted this to her at our actual appointment.

@Lochlan - thanks for your reply. Like I said, I am totally stumped when I try to think about how to solve this problem too, which is why I threw it out there -I feel like some other posters might have some good ideas! @oldfartart I totally get what you're saying, but that's kind of a point - it's not a bad thing if it takes a little while to get to your ten posts. It's not a bad thing to say nothing if you have nothing to contribute, rather than searching for things to say just for the sake of saying them (although I feel like it would be easy to get to one's ten posts just commenting on how rad everyone's work is! Don't need to be a pro to appreciate!) The point of this kind of policy is to force people to listen before they speak. LST wants to see itself as a community, i.e. as a place where people exchange ideas and get to know one another and learn from each other, and so people signing up because they have a specific question they want to ask about THEIR tattoos and not respecting that they are expected to participate, meaningfully, first, sucks. If we all just used the board to ask our questions, no matter how good, without engaging with others in more sustained ways, then this place would be really self-serving, noisy and not a community at all. I am a big fan, in general, of slowing down in life. Everything about western culture right now is based on speed - we want things now, we get things now, we hate to wait. It alters how we relate to each other and while sometimes the speed with which we function is really amazing, it can also have its downsides. And so I really appreciate that the administrators of this board have been thoughtful about how to try and slow people down a bit, and hope we can come up with functional ways to make that work even better.

Hi guys. Just topping this thread to raise a concern about the 10-post n00b thing. I love the policy and the logic of how it's set up, but I feel like recently there has been an influx of people who sign up and then basically spam the board with posts to get to their 10-post count so that they can start whatever weird thread they signed up to start. It didn't bug me when this happened occasionally, but it seems to be happening more and more often such that the noise caused by these throwaway posts is really aggravating. I have no idea how to fix this, as I think the policies already in place are fantastic, but I just wanted to ask if it's driving anyone else nuts too, and if so, if you have any ideas re: how to get people to actually post ten REAL posts and not just abuse that policy to get out of their n00b status faster?

How come I don't get any comments from girls about my sick ink?

This sucks and I'm glad he was caught. What I always tell my students re: plagiarism is that just as the Internet makes it so easy to just grab someone else's work these days, it also makes it so much easier to catch people. And yet folks still try to get away with it.

It was not at all my intention to call anyone out; we are all (ok mostly) fairly thoughtful adults here, and neither I nor anyone else can be the great arbiter of what info is appropriate to share or not. We all have to make these calls ourselves, as my point was that it can indeed be a fine line. And it can also be easy to forget just how public this board is, because one of its great strengths is that it feels fairly intimate and like we're talking amongst friends. So no wrist slaps intended. Now back to business, which for me includes hoping that this yucky cold is gone by the time I sit down for the next session on my back in less than two weeks!

I agree that it's worthwhile being mindful of the fine line between discussing a tattooer's work and a tattooer's life in this public of a forum.

@Graeme and I have been known to comment to each other that sometimes we feel bad for skinnies because they have less tattooin' space.

Stop babying that pimple!

Whoa that dragon looks like he's got a helluva wang.

I have known a lot of women with tattoos dating non-tattooed men! I was one of them, but then a year and a half ago my husband finally decided to get his first tattoo, and we all know the end of that story... :) PS your yiddishism made me chuckle, @else

Love that cat!!!

@VCarter that is huge and amazing! I cannot imagine how intimidating it is to take one's first steps as a doctor. My dad is in the hospital right now, so we have been encountering a lot of young doctors in the past couple of days, and I will say this: I think if you focus on listening to your patients and treating them with empathy, you will be ok. People just want to feel cared for.

Hahaha it is even worse driving in downtown Montreal in a driver's ed car, because people get really aggro about not getting stuck behind you and do crazy things. That said, I could still never drive in NY! When we go down @Graeme has to do that part. Part of the motivation for finally getting my license, though, was definitely to help him out with road trip driving as we have, you know, been making a lot of trips to New York lately, for some reason... :) (If I may take this thread on even more of a tangent than it's already on - our last trip to New York, I was so happy to help with the driving and I was feeling pretty smug as we sailed through upstate New York until... I GOT STOPPED FOR SPEEDING! One month after getting my license! I was so embarrassed, until, I shit you not, I got out of a speeding ticket with the excuse that I am from Canada, and I don't understand miles. This worked! It was a proud moment. All that to say that I am maybe not so much help on the drive down.)

I got my learner's permit at 17, dropped out of driving school because I hated it, and then only went back to finally learn properly and get my license last summer, at the ripe old age of 31. This is what happens when you live in a place with great public transit--I have lots of friends who did the same.

Hahaha so last summer I took driving lessons, as I had never gotten my license, and at the start of my FIRST LESSON, when I was nervous as hell, the instructor noticed that I had tattoos (all my tattoos are very concealable--he just saw a tiny bit of my back peeking out of my t-shirt). He proceeded to TAKE HIS SHIRT OFF (I am alone in a car with this complete stranger) to show me his (but not before checking that no one was around so that, and I quote, he didn't "look like a pervert"). He was also really into prying about my ethnicity (Jewish), so while I was driving a car through downtown Montreal (which is a scary city to drive in) for the first time in FIFTEEN YEARS and just trying not to kill anyone, he started questioning me about how my parents felt about my tattoos, whether or not I was a good and practicing Jewish girl, etc. Dude. I switched to other instructors for my subsequent lessons.

Hahaha is this a thing?

So I got tattooed two weeks ago and am due for another session on my back at the end of the month, so I have really not been in "need" of new work lately, but a local shop had a fundraiser yesterday for a family affected by domestic violence, and I could not resist stopping in to get something for a good cause. I got this tiny but awesome little flower that magically fit perfectly between the two larger pieces on my thigh, like it was fate! Done by the fabulous Eilo at MTL Tattoo here in Montreal. I love it. (Please pay no attention to my torch, which is still healing and majorly flaky!)

I was supposed to be waiting until the end of the month for my next session on my back, but I accidentally got tattooed today. Whoooooooops.

"To keep in practice" hahahahaha

One more thing, and then I'll shut up about this, but this: Is a genuinely very good explanation of what you would contribute to academic knowledge about tattoo culture. Great. It is of course important to be able to explain a research topic's place within the wider literature. What it is NOT, however, is an explanation of what you would contribute to tattoo culture itself. Many academic confuse these two--they think that by contributing academic knowledge they are "giving back" to the people they research inherently. That's bullshit. When in the other thread, people posted about academics taking and not giving back, this is what they meant. When you embark on this kind of research where you hope to have people share pretty intimate parts of their lives, you have to think about what you will be able to give them, and not accept this fallacy that the world somehow gives two shits about the academic "contribution" your making. It is MUCH HARDER WORK to make sure you're making both an academic and a social contribution, but it's also, the only truly ethical way to proceed.