else

Maybe I'm just sensitive to stuff, but it seems a bit presumptuous... shouldn't it be phrased in the form of a question? Something like "Hi, blah, blah, blah... I would like to use this forum to interview you guys on your opinions of your tattoos. Is that ok?"

I've been thinking about this lately. Squid pants are my number one priority, but after that, if I still have money I might want a chest piece. It's too bad "the girls" are in the way!
I think women are more often going for flowers and whatnot because it's much harder to fit imagery in the available space. Battle Royale? Nope. Not enough room. Pharaoh's horses? No way to cram them in between the collar bones and the headlights.
Mostly I like being female... You have to admit we're more fun to look at than dudes... But in this respect I think men have an advantage.

I got out of the hotel and into a house today! And fired up my spinning wheel for the first time in over a year.
(But dang! I'm so bored and lost in this big ol' empty house with no tv and no internet except for my phone). I might do a lot of spinning. And knitting. And reading. And whatever else I can think of.

I got out of the hotel and into a house today! And fired up my spinning wheel for the first time in over a year.
(But dang! I'm so bored and lost in this big ol' empty house with no tv and no internet except for my phone). I might do a lot of spinning. And knitting. And reading. And whatever else I can think of.

Viagra? :p

Yeah. Having browsed a few other tattoo forums I think that this one is by far the best. The smartest, most thoughtful, and most generous people are here... a lot of those other ones are pretty awful by comparison.
And I think @Lochlan alluded to this on your first thread, but I would question the veracity/validity of any information you got from people who were willing to share with you without having some kind of relationship first. Is "the full GFE" really the same as having a girlfriend?

Yeah. Having browsed a few other tattoo forums I think that this one is by far the best. The smartest, most thoughtful, and most generous people are here... a lot of those other ones are pretty awful by comparison.
And I think @Lochlan alluded to this on your first thread, but I would question the veracity/validity of any information you got from people who were willing to share with you without having some kind of relationship first. Is "the full GFE" really the same as having a girlfriend?

As an academic who does interview-based research, and who spends a lot of time teaching people how to do qualitative research, I have to agree with many of the concerns raised in the last thread, and question the logic of trying to do this online in this rushed way. I did my own masters in the UK and I know masters courses are short there and make it difficult to engage in sustained, profound research.As this seems to be the case for you, that doesn't mean you can just do the same research project, but accelerated. It means you need to think about what you can accomplish with the time/restrictions you have, and what knowledge you can genuinely generate from that. Thinking you can ask fairly complex questions and answer them through message board focus groups is like the opposite of rigour. You need to find a research question that can be answered in the time and with the resources you have.. At my university, we strongly encourage our students to do literature based masters projects as it is unfair to both researcher and potential subjects to take on something so ambitious is so little time.
Message board research feels lazy. The only time I have seen it done effectively has been when that's the subject of the actual research- I.e. how social media is used in x community. IT CANNOT BE A REPLACEMENT FOR DEEP QUALITATIVE RESEARCH just because you don't have time. Focus groups are great for gathering easier-to-access info--you want to talk about identity? Meaning? Gender? You need to sit down with people. If you have read all of this research literature, then you know that qualitative research is about building trust, relationships, etc. And that there is no research without it.
I am a total self-hating academic so I get why so many folks in the tattoo world are so skeptical of researchers. We can be a really tonedeaf bunch. Many researchers take without giving back. But I just want to be clear that as someone who is very much embedded into this world, the above would not be ok with me, either. In fact, much of my career has been spent trying to push people to rethink what it means to work with people, similar to the stuff @Lochlan has been talking about.
And to the OP: I get that as an MA student this may be some of your first attempts at doing original research, and so this strong reaction may be really painful. I encourage you to listen to it carefully; I have learned some of my own important lessons about how I present myself, why I do what I do, what I hope to gain from my work, and what I'm asking of other people, in these kinds of tense encounters. I encourage you to think about what the goal of this project is beyond it being interesting to you (you want others to share personal moments of their lives with you? That's not enough.) and think especially about what useful, respectful, rigorous research can actually be done with the time and resources you have. If a message board conversation is all that you are able to do right now, it's not enough to credibly try to answer the questions you are asking with the depth that they, and we, deserve. Research with people takes time.
I empathized with how painful such a strong reaction like this must be for you, especially as your supervisors clearly signed off on this plan and no one appeared to realize the problems with it, but I have to say that this:
Pretty much removed any good will I felt for you. The above is basically a threat. If you do, indeed, believe in "ethics", then such a nasty statement would never have appeared in your message. Whether or not our posts are publicly available, threatening us that you could use them if you wanted to, but you're just too nice not to, is a dirty, dirty thing to say. Think about what ethical means.

Yeah. Having browsed a few other tattoo forums I think that this one is by far the best. The smartest, most thoughtful, and most generous people are here... a lot of those other ones are pretty awful by comparison.
And I think @Lochlan alluded to this on your first thread, but I would question the veracity/validity of any information you got from people who were willing to share with you without having some kind of relationship first. Is "the full GFE" really the same as having a girlfriend?

This is so far off course we aren't even on the grid anymore. The search party is about 1,000 miles away.

Make sure and post a photo. When I get down to San Francisco Rassier is my top pick. I just booked an appointment with Steve Byrne for the first week of February.

Viagra? :p

That would be me. Was gonna go for something completely different, but got to looking at la Senorita y el Tigre, and decided it had to match...kinda. Found the skeleton, sans clothes, on the net, and Nick sized the cat from the tiger to the panther. Pretty much hit what I wanted on the head.

I <3 Finland and Finnish people.
His Facebook is still up, just looked at his photos there. I love the polar bear he did in '09.

Thanks man!
Yeah, it was just under 3.5 hours-my boy can put down some ink! I am seriously in awe whenever I get work from him...never feels hurried, never hustles, just lays it in straight and steady. Broke once for about 10 betwixt lining and shading, and once for 5 at the very tail end when I was getting a bit raggedy, he laid some lidocaine on it to finish the last ten minutes or so.
I'll post it, but y'know, fucking January is a write off! So damn many seriously kool tattoos this month I just gotta wiat till February!!!

@Dan S:
That.
Fucking.
Rules.
Seriously one of the coolest tattoos I've seen in a while (and I look at a lot of tattoos!). Congrats! And man, Nick busted that out in 3.5 hours? So fast, although I know it felt slow to you.

@SailorClaire has figured out the fastest way to get the mods' attention! Even faster than spam. This should go in the study.

Back to the subject of ribcage tattooing...
I've got probably 70+ hours of work on me, so I'm no cherry. That said, I laid-down for just under three and a half hours with Nick Colella yesterday, and I tell you what, it did not feel nice. It was tolerable...but you'd best to have a high pain threshhold!

@SailorClaire Matt Lodder beat you to it by a few years. My opinion of this subject aside, I presume you've read The Post Modified Body?
I skimmed your proposal and read the first questions. I must say, I'm not impressed. You won't get any further insight or information than a Daily Mail article or any of the tattoo books you can buy in HMV.
Here's my opinion: When it comes to tattoos (and probably other areas of life), anything online is very far from the reality of the situation. Speak to real people in the real world and get a more honest view of what you're writing about.
I don't know why I keep saying this to academics, they rarely listen...

Did you read the comic by any chance.
Totally unrelated to walking dead, but X-Files has ruined my life again.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to stuff, but it seems a bit presumptuous... shouldn't it be phrased in the form of a question? Something like "Hi, blah, blah, blah... I would like to use this forum to interview you guys on your opinions of your tattoos. Is that ok?"

Maybe I'm just sensitive to stuff, but it seems a bit presumptuous... shouldn't it be phrased in the form of a question? Something like "Hi, blah, blah, blah... I would like to use this forum to interview you guys on your opinions of your tattoos. Is that ok?"

Maybe I'm just sensitive to stuff, but it seems a bit presumptuous... shouldn't it be phrased in the form of a question? Something like "Hi, blah, blah, blah... I would like to use this forum to interview you guys on your opinions of your tattoos. Is that ok?"

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My first session on this arm.
Done. January 3rd 2013
By. Ryan Dearringer
At. Fallen Empire

A while back, when the compulsion to get my legs tattooed became impossible to ignore anymore, his was one of the first tattoo blogs I came across. I was so impressed with what I saw there that it made me re-think everything I had believed about what a tattoo was. I knew I wanted tattoos as good as what he was doing... and so I started googling stuff like "how to get a really good tattoo" and ended up here. His work completely changed my impression of what is even possible with tattooing.
I owe him a beer probably! Who knows what kind of work I'd be getting if I hadn't found him and thus found you guys. I might've ended up with a marilyn monroe blow-up doll or something!