Ink Nerds I Have Known: Ezra
High Roller by Heather O'Shaughnessey
My good pal Ezra’s awesomely nerdy flaming 8- and 12-sided dice (showing “7” and “11,” no less) were inked by Heather O’Shaughnessey at Trader Bob’s Tattoo Shop in St. Louis, MO (she’s also responsible for my Red Squares).
This tattoo inspired me to do a post with as many images of D&D dice as I could find, but it turns out I’m not the first in the blogosphere to have that idea. Here are a couple of really great collections, with surprisingly little overlap:
- “Aaawwwww YEAH! D20 Tattoos!” by Reis O’Brien on Geek Orthodox.
- “Roll a d20 for awesome tattoos” by Alice on Fun Vampires (nice favicon!).
So flaming D&D dice are not as uncommon as I would have thought. The tattoos with slogans (a la “High Roller”) are the best, however, including “Roll 4 Damage, Bitch,” “That’s How I Roll,” and “Leave No Die Behind.” (Evidently there’s a lot of love for 12-siders out in the tattooed gamer community… Who knew?)
Here are a couple more that Reis and Alice (both of whom sport D20 tattoos) somehow missed:
The first, found in BMEzine’s “Dice” keyword gallery, gets bonus tattoo points for working on two levels: nerdy gamer tattoo and cosmic art piece, but loses nerd points for disguising a nerdy gamer tattoo as a cosmic art piece. Cere‘s tattoo was done by John Clue at Super 88 Tattoo in Massapequa, NY.
The second (below), found in Devil Dinosaur’s Geek Tattoos flickr group, gets bonus nerd points for including the non-standard 30-sided die; double-TRIPLE bonus nerd points for including three 6-sided dice (for rolling ability scores the old-fashioned way) and two 10-siders (percentile dice, for generating numbers from 1 to 100)! No information about artist or collector, except that the latter attended Ohayocon ’08.
Extra-mondo nerd points to anyone who spots what’s wrong with this picture….
Ink Nerd 
The d4 would read “2” and “4” simultaneously if rolled on the top-facing side.
August 18, 2008 at 2:04 am
You, sir, are correct! But that’s actually not the error I was thinking of… Let’s see now, how many bonus points are in a mondo-nerd point? I’ll tally up scores at the end.
So, Jamietoon, I didn’t know your website was up and running! Looks great! I can’t wait to see it when it’s a little more fleshed out. More flesh, please!
In the meantime, I’m adding you to the blogroll under “Tattoo Artists and Shops” (although you also qualify for at least 2 other categories…).
August 18, 2008 at 7:51 am
The 4-sider (pyramid) has an 8 on it. What is that, some kind of Formula DE die?
I always have disliked the pyramidal 4-sider because of how hard it is to pick up. But then I learned that some thoughtful soul made octahedral dice (8 sides) that go from 1 to 4 twice, “four-siders” with 8 sides, easy to pick up. You can find them in dice stores on EBay.
August 18, 2008 at 9:14 am
Ding ding! That is the error I was referring to (there also seems to be a “7” on that die. Evidently, it’s pretty common for tattoos of dice to fudge which numbers are show on each face in the interest of readable longevity and space constrictions, but adding a 7 and and 8 to a 4-sider is just silly.
Ezra, while I was doing some research to make sure there wasn’t some variant on a 4-sider that did indeed include numbers up to 8, I came across these “barrel dice,” manufactured by a company called Crystal Caste:
http://crystalcaste.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=CC&Product_Code=06010&Category_Code=CD
But I think I would prefer the doubled digits on an 8-sider, as you suggest.
August 18, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Be careful with those doubled-digit dice, I once missed numerous to-hit rolls because I was using an un-crayoned old fashioned 1 to 10 twenty-sider.
August 30, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I just bought a set of black with silver numbered dice for a Cthulhu game. They are pretty sweet. Not everyone who played had their own dice, so I had to share. Boo.
September 25, 2008 at 8:22 am
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It’s not really wrong, per se, but if you’re gonna have a pair of d10s to represent rolling %iles, one of them could have been the tens 00-90 or 10-00. I saw the 8 on the d4 but figured it to be due to pic quality. I completely missed the importance of misreading the 7 as a 1 which would have shown two “ones” on a side. Nice eye for spotting the rolling problem represented by the 2 & 4.
March 6, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Thanks!
March 21, 2009 at 11:06 am
Great post. I’m going to link to it on my web site about everything dice (including tattoos).
February 24, 2010 at 10:35 am
Interesting tattoo, not one I’ve seen before. I’m going to feature this one on my site as well
August 2, 2012 at 5:22 pm