How do I not find out about these things sooner?
Flickr member g.rohs pointed out the similarities between my new(ish) tattoo and the cover of seminal drone-doom band Earth‘s new(ish) album, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, featuring awesome artwork by Arik Roper.
Browsing Arik’s work led me to a movie poster for Tony Stone’s film, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America:
OMG! Must… watch! As YouTube member jasonkollias comments,
This trailer makes me want to stand on top of a mountain and hurl thunderbolts at everything in sight. I want to rip the eyes from my own head and fight a bear. I want to burn a village while weeping and tear a giant wooden cross apart with my bare hands. I will name my son “severed ways” and he will kill me while I sleep.
Blogroll!
The most fun tattoo blog I’ve discovered lately is Electric Plog, from illustrator / comic book artist / tattoo artist / skateboard designer / photographer Electric Pick of Conspiracy Inc. Tattoo in Copenhagen, Denmark. I think I need to make a tattoo pilgrimage to northern Europe; they’ve got some great stuff goin’ on over there…
I first learned about Electric Pick from 96khz’s awesome Batman tattoo in Devil Dinosaur’s Geek Tattoos flickr group! Thanks 96khz! Thanks Devil Dinosaur!
Not only are ‘Pick’s original custom pieces beautiful to behold, he’s a prolific blogger and a funny guy! And he ends every sentence with some number of exclamation points!!!
It seems that most of his artwork involves sexy pin-ups in a variety of themes and settings, futuristic cityscapes, robots (the good kind and the evil kind), and international espionage (for some reason, the spies are always in cute little animal costume/disguises). He also has a strange obsession with trams!
I’m also kinda hooked on the blog of Electric Pick’s partner in crime at Conspiracy Inc., Uncle Allan, and that of Allan’s wife, Princess Inferno. I know it’s weirdly voyeuristic to follow the life and times of a group of Danish friends, but it’s fun! Like reality TV, but better, because there are no commercials and everyone involved isn’t awful. Besides, you have to be a little bit of an exhibitionist to blog about yourself in the first place, right?
Other recent (not-necessarily tattoo-related) blog subscriptions include:
- the soon after now: An art-nerd blog by my former French teacher, EastVillKit, who also happens to be a music nerd and a comix nerd. He is both insightful and unpretentious in his descriptions of art and life; a rare combination in my experience.
- Hooper’s Electric: Check out Thomas Hooper’s beautiful work; I especially like his big circular patterned blackwork pieces, of perfect radial symmetry and mesmerizing intricacy. Bonus points for working right here in Brooklyn (at least some of the time)! Double bonus points cuz I saw a guy with an impressive tattoo on the subway platform, and then recognized the piece (and the guy) on Hooper’s blog!
- Measure for Measure: Roseanne Cash, Suzanne Vega, Andrew Bird, and Darrell Brown describe their songwriting (and recording!) process, along with anecdotes from their careers, in this excellent New York Times blog.
What are you reading lately?
What’s New?
Let’s see…
Ink Nerd had a huge spike in unique visits last weekend, coinciding with opening weekend of The Incredible Hulk. Lots of people have Hulk tattoos on their minds, I guess… I found this one by Christiano at In the Shadows Tattoo (in Porto Alegre, Brasil) on flickr (there’s also another one in Devil Dinosaur’s Geek Tattoos group)! I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I really want to, despite the lackluster reviews. It’s such a great character; why is it so hard to make a good movie? Oh, well, maybe Ink Nerd will get another spike when it comes out on DVD!- I started a new job; it’s more of a corporate environment (not very punk rock, I’ve decided), so I haven’t felt comfortable baring my ink at work (also not punk rock). I haven’t seen ANY exposed tattoos on other employees, so I’m going to play it cool for now. Occasionally, my squares poke out from a rolled-up cuff, but I don’t think anyone has noticed. If they have, they probably think it’s a band-aid or something (I get that a lot… don’t ask me).
- I saw an excellent dinosaur tattoo on a fellow straphanger this morning, but he was chatting up a young lady the whole time, so I didn’t want to butt in and ask him to be Random Encounters Part Deux. It was a small, colorful (green with purple markings, or vice versa) theropod, maybe an Ornithomimus, or perhaps a Dromiceiomimus. Very cool, from what I saw, stretching from mid-bicep down past the elbow. I would have liked to get a photo (or at least a better view), but alas, it was not to be. I’ll just have to keep my eyes open around the neighborhood so I can stalk him. I love it when I see dinosaur tattoos out in the world (especially of interesting species); they’re surprisingly few and far between on the web!
- I’ve been trying to create a flattened out picture of my Triceratops tattoo using David Allen‘s Photoshop CS3 auto-align/blend trick, but I can’t get it to work right. I think I need to get someone else to take photos from different angles that don’t suck. If I ever figure it out, I’ll post the result here.
Young American Bodies get tattooed
WARNING: This video contains graphic scenes of *almost* attractive people having sex. Don’t watch it at work, or if your kids (or parents) are around, or if you have something better to do.
Today (yesterday?), in Young American Bodies Episode 30 (on IFC.com), Natalie (played by Nikita Word) gets a new tattoo! We’ve seen that she already has several, but it’s kinda neat (or gimmicky, see below) that they incorporated getting her latest piece into the show. Afterwards, we see her and Ben (played by creator/director Joe Swanberg) drawing silly tattoos on each other with markers as part of their foreplay. I hope some time has elapsed between the two scenes, because coloring in a freshly inked tattoo (with Sharpies, no less!) seems like a really bad idea.
The large floral rose tattoo was done by Brian Clutter of Insight Studios Metamorph Tattoo Studios in Chicago, who gets a few seconds of camera time as he works on Natalie/Nikita’s upper arm.
Do you guys watch this show? I can’t figure out if it’s genius or if it’s totally boring (or both). (more…)
New additions to the “Dinosaur Tattoos” flickr group!
So, as I mentioned earlier, I started a flickr group and began to invite people to join. While there hasn’t been a massive flood of unsolicited submissions, the group is slowly but surely becoming respectable. Here are a couple of highlights:
Some of you may recognize this tattoo (and this person!) from an earlier post (or from the source), and I gotta say, I am just tickled to have a photo of Cerah and her (now completed, I think) triceratops tattoo in my flickr group! There’s another shot in CurtisJoeWalker’s photostream, and several more in the bmeink galleries. Thanks for joining, CurtisJoeWalker!
(Tattoo by Mark Lankin at Funhouse Tattoo in Vancouver, BC.)
rekanize gets bonus ink-nerd points for ingenuity—he didn’t have a camera on hand, so he just scanned his dino ink! Double-TRIPLE ink-nerd bonus points because it’s not only a cool dinosaur tattoo, it’s a reference to an excellent webcomic called, appropriately, Dinosaur Comics. I’m totally hooked on qwantz.com; I wish its creator, Ryan North, would publish a Garfield-style book of these comics. It would be especially bizarre because the illustrations would be exactly the same on every page (well, almost)!!! More about qwantz.com here. More webcomic tattoos here (If anyone wants to buy me a present, I really want this t-shirt , size L). Thanks, rekanize! (Tattoo by CW, owner of Royal Street Tattoo in Mobile, AL.)
There are lots more really great dinosaur tattoos in the group, and hopefully there will be even more soon!
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