Pugilist

Hi and thanks Phil! Are you from here? My partner is from Vancouver (ish) so we've spent a lot of time there and I really like it! We're headed there around Labour Day, in fact. Re: Montreal shops, I have the same recollection of the 3-shop era, especially when they were all within a block or so of each other (now all three shops are still on Ontario, but much more spread out--I think only Iris is still in its original location). When I was a teenager you would definitely just go down to that strip and get tattooed wherever had availability first. I've never gotten any work at either of those three, but I held many hands in them back in the day (I remember my sister got her first tattoo at Iris, which was not a super fun experience)! Artistique is still one of the more popular street shops in town; I haven't been in since my teenage years, but I actually live pretty close to it so am friendly with their tattooers because I walk by them with my dog on a daily basis and they are big dog lovers (as most tattooers seem to be? Sign of a good people). I myself have gotten tattooed at a crappy-ish shop that I won't name (although the tattooer did a good job and has since moved on to better things) and at POL Tattoo, which is a great little exuberant place. My mister has gotten work done at Tattoomania (who organize the convention) and PSC, where he'll also be starting a big piece in the next year. All three shops are fantastic and very friendly. There are definitely hundreds of shitty, shitty shops in Montreal, but the good ones are pretty awesome places. And thanks for the boxing tip! I am nowhere near the kind of shape I'd want to be in if I were to give it another try anytime soon, but I will keep that place in mind for when I get there! Looked it up--they clearly work with some really good people, which makes it seem super intimidating, which is probably as it should be. :)

I think in office work, yeah, these days it's often not that places have "policies" per se, but rather that having visible tattoos can inform people's unfair impressions of you and hold you back. I am an academic, and universities pretty much never have dress codes or anything like that, but culturally they can be a bit stiff. It depends on the department (more progressive departments like Fine Arts or Literature or whatever are way more likely to have visibly tattooed profs), but my department is pretty conservative and I am very, very young in comparison to most of my colleagues. So I am careful to cover up while on campus, because I am already a young-looking woman and have trouble getting taken seriously as a "professor" to begin with. I tend to dress more formally than my colleagues, and I don't show any tattoos. This is absolutely one of the reasons why I am being careful about how far down my arms I go in the near future (also I am avoiding anything below the knee right now, so that I can comfortably wear dresses and skirts). Again, it's not about not being "allowed", it's about people, without realizing, forming shitty and unfair impressions of me because of them. On the other side of the coin, I often joke but not really that sleeves would be a great tenure gift to myself. :) I think a lot of the office anxiety stuff is, like Therinx said, stuff you need to worry about early in your career; once you have established yourself it is probably easier to push the envelope.

Honestly, it was sponsored by a liquor company clearly wanting to look hip and modern or whatever, so it's about what you expect--something "new" that is only "new" because no one else cared to do something like this because...who cares? Hope the sponsorship means that at least the artist and client got handsomely paid, which is the only reason to do something this silly.

Just topping this to say that I love this convention and both my dude and I are really looking forward to it, although we are both still hemming and hawing about whether or not we're going to get anything done there, as I have a back in progress and he has a sleeve on the way, so we feel like we should be sensible. But it's got a really great vibe, very friendly and down to earth, and it's in a beautiful space. Like the loser that I am, one of the things I'm most looking forward to is book browsing.

I have an Amund Dietzel piece too! I will never get over his drawings; so beautiful. It bums me out that people dismiss flash, especially as the same people are usually hung up on getting really "meaningful" tattoos; to me, it is pretty damn meaningful to get something classic that connects me to dozens/hundreds/thousands of other people from different generations, backgrounds, walks of life, etc. A few months ago, my husband got a piece of old flash from an old timer here in Montreal, and when he was done, he told us that he was pretty sure this was the second time he'd ever done this design, and the first time was in 1968 (if I'm remembering correctly), but he did the colours differently. How cool is that? (That said, I also remember drinking the "custom only" koolaid in the 90s, and I think what is being described in that article is mostly just folks who don't know any better repeating what they've heard they should want. The "no flash" thing is really unthinking. I think that's a great blog post and awesome of him to have had this great dialogue with the customers in question and helped them seen the appeal of flash and really changed their minds about it.)

Hey, thanks. I am not a boxer myself (I wish!), just a pretty huge boxing enthusiast (especially boxing history). I have tried it myself but gave up pretty quickly after a few sessions due to attempting to train with a team far beyond my own not-very-athletic abilities, which resulted in me not being able to lift my arms above my head for about a week. That said, at some point I would love to try it again. And re: the supposed "tattoos", yeah, I hope it's alright if I work my way up to posting some of them; I still feel a bit shy about putting my skin all the way out there on the interwebz. But you guys post some beautiful work so I hope to contribute some soon too.

Holy shit. This is what I want to look like when I grow up.

Hi all. I have been lurking here for a long, long time, and decided to finally bite the bullet and join. I am based in Montreal (best city!), and while I got my first tattoo about nine years ago now, I was until recently not someone who thought she would ever get more than a couple in her lifetime. Somehow, though, during the past year or so both my husband and I recently got bit with the tattoo bug HARD, and so the rate of acquisition has started accelerating considerably. We have been absorbing as much as we can about tattoo history and culture, and we have been getting tattooed both locally and doing some travel. I am in a fairly straight-laced profession by day that involves my sometimes working with fairly conservative communities, so my own work is still largely confined to my back and my ribs, but I am looking at starting on my thighs and upper arms within the year or so. I have too many ideas that I am still fleshing out, so I feel like this will be a fun place to look at cool tattoos and get some awesome inspiration. With the exception of my partner, with whom I geek out about this shit constantly, I know very few people in real life who are really into tattoos, so I am looking forward to participating here and learning from all of you.