sophistre

April 15th, back in the saddle with Greg after I had to cancel my last appointment due to illness. Then, on May 4th, Dan Gilsdorf. :O

I got a GoPro to take with me on my mountaineering adventure, so of course the first thing I did is attach it to the dog...

The underside of my arm, the closer to the armpit the worse it felt.

Of the very limited experience I have being tattooed (just one arm)...this is true for me, too. Everybody said elbow would be the worst, but the upper inside of my arm, near my armpit...sweet jesus. That is the first time I have ever had to take a five minute break during a tattoo. There are people who get their whole armpits tattooed. That is fucking crazy. They are on some next level, or something.

Also, the bottom of the elbow ditch, where the arm starts to curve around to the elbow. Nope nope nope.

@HettyKet, that's your arm! I remember seeing that a looong time ago when I first started lurking, and being pretty smitten with it...and then I forgot whose arm it was. I would never have thought I'd like themed collections, but I guess I do, because I love this one, and there's an arm on somebody around here with a bunch of...uh, hmmm. Are they oni faces? They're masks of some kind, I think. ...argh, my memory is like swiss cheese. Anyway, I love that one too.

I would send that to the shop and ask the tattooer. I would be surprised if it was a problem, given how superficial they look, but the guy or gal doing the work would know best.

@sophistre I really love Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron and classics like Lovecraft and MR James (hell, my first tattoo, before I learned that tattoos don't have to be full of obvious and overt meaning, is of the Necronomicon) so I figure that Campbell is in my general field of interest.

Oooh, very cool! We share some tastes in fiction, then! Campbell's is an interesting voice. It's not as bleak or subtle as Ligotti, and it isn't as poetic as Barron. Calling him a contemporary horror author feels like stretching things to me...he's been writing for over fifty years.

I'm having trouble remembering where I started with him, but I do know that I started with his short fiction, which I remember preferring to his longer works. It might have been Dark Companions, or possibly Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell. I suspect it was probably the latter, but I dunno. I'll have to go back through and read some to refresh my memory.

His prose is solid, but what impressed me most about him, when I was blitzing through his stuff, is that he's able to capture the unreliable reality of a descent into madness and paranoia better than anyone else I have ever read. I suppose The Face That Must Die is probably the standout example, though it is a novel. Campbell's mother was schizophrenic and suffered from paranoid delusions. The intimacy with which he depicts characters who slowly lose touch with reality is really something; it lures you along with them gradually enough that you follow the leaps of strange logic that the character makes, and all of it makes total sense...only it's a false kind of sense. Still, it makes the lapse of sanity seem understandable. You get how they got there. I prefer Barron and Ligotti and Ballingrud for the most part because I love lyrical writing, but Campbell is an old master for sure.

Thanks! Mostly funny dead English people. I don't want read to more of this, though, but when faced with an overwhelming number of choices that's what I tend to revert to. Sometimes I read mysteries or nature writing. For my job there's a pressure to keep up with new mainstreamish literary fiction, which it's possible to begin to resent. Trying to say that without sounding dismissive - oy...

If I may ask, what's your profession that involves reading lots of weird fic and horror? Because that sounds pretty cool.

I had to laugh, because 'funny dead English people' is probably actually a huge genre of its own. Not a narrow field, haha. Er, something modern and in that general direction...Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell, maybe?

As for my jerb, well...I'm writing a book. Trying. I call it a profession because I'm doing it every day to the exclusion of all else, but it feels a bit cart-before-the-horse until somebody buys the thing from me. Still, though! A good reason to wallow in genre fiction.

edit: I almost forgot to ask -- what about you? I think I might lose my mind if I had a mandatory reading list that I didn't create myself.

Me too!! Until Kraken came out it was far and away my favorite. It's the one I had him sign when I went to see him read from Embassytown.

I could do book recommendations all day long. What genres do you like? I read just about anything. Weird fic and horror for professional reasons though. I just finished Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, which was interesting. Not fast-paced, but a great set of character/relationship studies set against a mysterious/unexplained environmental mystery.

One of my favorite books of all time might have to be Kraken, by China Mieville. It's brimming full of cool ideas. I'm mad with envy that I didn't write it myself. I feel that way about his prose most of the time, though.

Other favorites in weird fic/horror: Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters was my favorite short story collection last year; it's creepy and absolutely beautiful), Brian Evenson, Ramsey Campbell. Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' is an amazing book. Sophisticated. Uh...pretty much any anthology by the Vandermeers or Ellen Datlow, honestly.

RE: Quantum physics -- Lisa Randall writes a lot of cool laymen's books too. Warped Passages is the one I read a while back, but she's got some others too.

My favorite 'fun' non-fic writer is probably Mary Roach. Her books are seriously fascinating (and very funny) -- they usually focus on exploring the place where scientific research overlaps with uncomfortable aspects of humanity...like death, or the afterlife, or sex, or food, or what's involved in sending people into space.

This tattoo is only 'fresh' in the long-term view of things, because it's healed but less than a year old. And I SCRATCHED IT today. D:

It's just two very thin cuts (I think maybe the cat did it? I can't for the life of me remember cutting myself) but I saw them earlier this afternoon and made SUCH A FACE. Why! Why on one of my tattoos! I am thinking ahead to when I have more and making even more ugly faces, because god knows I am a clumsy derp sometimes. My poor tattoos.

I am training to climb Mt. Rainier at the end of August. It's a three day climb.

It's kicking my ass! It is also severely cutting into my forum-browsing and tattoo-getting time, the latter of which is probably the saddest thing.

This is very timely. The other day I was shopping for athletic clothing, and the owner of the shop -- this tiny, very polished older woman, probably in her early sixties -- asked me about my tattoos. Turns out her husband 'studies' them and travels all over to get tattooed. We got to talking about my tattooer and I mentioned that he was in Brighton recently, and she absolutely lit up. 'Oh, those huge tattoo conventions are just amazing!'

I haven't even been to one. I don't even know. I wouldn't have expected any of that from her in a million years, and I find that so freakin' cool.

@SeeSea: Thank you very much!

My dog is a huge nerd. Her name is Zelda. She steals seats.

My cats are pretty silly too. They are Maine Coons named Ares and Mars .Ares is the little one, at 15 lbs; Mars weighs in at ~30.

Together, they turn my house into a zoo.

Can't wait to see'em, @Tornado6.

who's tattooing your arm up there in the PNW?

Thank you! Greggletron/Greg Whitehead, at Scapegoat, will be doing the whole arm. (He's talking about relocating overseas sometime this year, so I've been trying to get in there pretty regularly.)

I'd just love to have Alice Carrier do it. She's not doing multi-session work on travelers and PDX is just so far from here.

Her florals really are very lovely.

Thanks, @Pugilist! :o

And yes, I'd love to see more. Seeing casual/unposed shots of people with tattoos never gets old.

@graybones: Talking about the sleeve, Greg and I both said we really wanted to take the negative spaces into consideration too, since I find it so striking when it's done well. I'm glad you think so too! I was amazed taking pictures of it at just how much space I still have left, too.

@CShaw: Awww, thank you!! This is the first time I've taken pictures of it (or tried to), so it was my first time seeing it from a different angle, too. It felt weird, haha.

My arm isn't done, and I've only really started on one, but I can actually contribute! So I shall. :) Taking pictures of my own arm is hard, and I suck at it. There are individual pictures of these in my gallery, though, anyway!

I was really late in coming to an appreciation of traditional designs (aside from traditional Japanese, which I have always loved). What sold me on traditional sleeves was the interesting way in which individual pieces become more than the sum of each individual tattoo...it becomes this collective aesthetic that I find so fascinating, in addition to being a very cool collection of individual images.

I mention this because I have similar feelings about 'masculine' and 'feminine' aesthetics. (I'm also one of those people who thinks a man or woman can wear whatever the hell they want and still be masculine and feminine if they want to be, but that's a discussion of a slightly different variety. For the purposes of this post, I'm just using the generally accepted definitions of those words.) I think whether something reads as 'masculine' or 'feminine' in the traditional sense depends mostly on general presentation. There are tons of pictures out there of women wearing tough, aggressive traditional work, but they dress or present themselves in a way that's still super-girly and feminine. I think this look is amazing.

Of course, there'll always be people out there who just find tattoos in general 'unfeminine' or whatever, buuut. That's really more about them, imo.

It seems to me like there'll probably always be both, now that both types exist. There are people who will always be more comfortable on one side of that fence than the other...people who feel uneasy about upscale interiors and courtesy salon fruit-infused water, and people who are intimidated as hell by tattoo shops full of tough guys, or who've managed to make mental divides for themselves over different kinds of tattoos, who may be interested in getting a tattoo 'but not that kind' of tattoo. For some people, that's probably part of the experience they're shopping for, in both directions -- the salon feeling, or the classic grit.

This is additional speculation on my part, totally based on my own anecdotal observations, but there also seem to be weird overlaps between people who don't like the idea of getting something from flash and want something 'custom' instead, and people who want the upscale experience (and people who got their tattoo concept off of Pinterest, which is totally ironic).

I read here all the time about how there's been a huge upswing in the number of tattoo shops out there -- shops that come and go with excess apprentices and artists that don't last long, people trying to reinvent the wheel, this whole glut of shops in any given place -- and I suppose catering to this demographic probably provides them with a whole lot of business. Trends seeking trends, or something. But, if I had to wager a guess, I'd say that the street-shop mentality you guys were talking about -- artists with a style who can still turn out solid walk-in work, who are willing to do that, who are dedicated to the craft/labor of tattooing as well as the art of it -- will probably always be more successful in the long-term. Places like that will endure. And maybe there are lots of high-end salon-style shops that employ this ethic, too; hell if I know. I think it's probably the at the heart of what's most important, beyond interior design.

...I listened a lot of lectures growing up about artists who forget that art is not just art, but also a business. Haha.

I think @AverageJer posted a picture of a Sailor Jerry fish he got a couple days ago? I hadn't been on here recently and wound up getting a similar tattoo on Saturday. It's from Rollo flash tweaked by Josh Arment at the Aloha Monkey.

I absolutely that fish, and I am jealous. I am still waiting to get one! (My first tattoo was originally scheduled to be a mermaid or a fish, and we've just never gotten back around to it.) What a fun one.

This thread has been amazing lately. Those backs. I'm speechless.

...swapped to zombies run 5k in the meantime as that's a bit more fun to listen to

It always tickles me to see references to this app in the wild. I am actually a character in that series. (Season 1, anyway.) I am Runner Six. It uses my name and everything, heh. Crazy that I still haven't finished it, but I stress-fractured my tibia a while back and never went back to running. Nice work sticking with it! It's so rewarding to see actual progress. I'd love to do it again.

I signed up for a 'train to climb' thing for the coming year, though. I can't imagine climbing Mt. Rainier at this point, but that's exactly what I signed a program commitment to do come the end of August. The training program begins in March. I am starting my 'train to begin the train to climb training program' training early, just in case. :p

Neurosis and GYBE are <3.

I haven't been to a live show in a long time (since leaving Boston actually, as it happens), but I do remember being at the Middle East downstairs trying to watch a Mono/Pelican show, and no matter where I stood I seemed to be standing right next to some drunk, shouting freshman co-ed who didn't care about any of the delicate bits in the music. I'm not gonna pretend regular shows are a sure thing, but all-ages shows can bite me.

There's definitely something to be said for the vinyl experience.

I'm jealous.

That is very high praise, indeed.

I feel like you and @else get some sort of Lifetime Achievement award for Doing It Right. Much respect to you for diving in headfirst.

Ha! The award is having tattoos I really like to look at. :) Thanks for saying so. I am grateful to resources like LST for helping me learn about good tattoos.

@sophistre looking really good! Will Greg be doing the rest of your arm also?

He is doing the whole arm, yes! We're almost finished, too. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to get a picture of everything together.

Upper inside of the arm tonight. Feels like burning. With Greg Whitehead, as usual! A fun panther-leopard with a Tibetan shell.

Starting to close in on it with this arm. Room for two modest/smallish pieces and then just filler after that. Crazy.