Tattoo

This is a fascinating if slightly creepy read about a woman who is collecting tattoos…and not by just taking photos or tattooing herself.

Angel doesn’t know for sure where her collection came from but suspects include the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris, because of the French military badges on some inkings and the language of the lettered tattoos. The doctor who sold them to the 19th-century collector Henry Wellcome said they were the skins of “sailors, soldiers and criminals”. Angel adds: “But look at the collection – there’s no way one person collected and preserved all these objects. There’s too much variation in the skill and technique.”

So how do you harvest a tattoo? These days you’d use a dermatome, a gadget invented in the 1930s that slices off a fine layer of the epidermis and is now used for skin grafts. In the 19th century, you had to use a scalpel and care; many of the Wellcome specimens are of different thicknesses or marked with slashes, or have scalloped edges from being stretched and pinned during preservation. Some are thick and soft like leather; others are scratchy and stiff like card; some are translucent when you hold them to the light. “I know they’re not my skin,” says Angel, running a gloved finger over the bumps of hair follicles under faded black ink. “But that’s how I think of them: my skin.”  Read more »

Words fail me…this makes David’s hurty heel look mild.

At times it’s hard the believe the total absence of limits that stupid people appear to operate under:

A northern Indiana man who had the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan campaign logo tattooed onto his face “to make politics fun” says it’s time for it to come off.

Eric Hartsburg of Michigan City, says he plans to have the red-and-blue “R” removed from its prominent place next to his right eye.

He says a Republican supporter paid him US$15,000 (NZ$18,312) to get the tattoo and keep it until at least the election was over.

Weeks after President Barack Obama defeated the former Massachusetts governor in the November 6 election, Hartsburg says “now to me it represents not a losing campaign, but a sore losing campaign.”

Hartsburg says he reached out to the Romney campaign about the tattoo, but feels snubbed that no campaign staffer ever contacted him.

Surely they could have said he was Maori…not likely to be anything else with this description:

Police said the offender was described as a man of about 40-years-old with a tall, muscular build, low voice, dark brown eyes and dark skin.

He was bald with a thin dark moustache, a scratch on the left side of his face and a tattoo on his upper left arm resembling a taniwha, police said.

Really, they are…stupid. Take those who got tattooed for companies that are long since bust…

Dot-com “skinvertising” — a term somebody came up with when it was still a thing — was a media sensation in the mid-2000s. In 2003, the first advertising space of this kind was sold on the back of the head of an Illinois man named Jim Nelson. A Web hosting company then known as CI Host paid $7,000 for the space. Nelson signed a contract stating that he would keep the tattoo for at least five years.

Invariably, the only businesses crazy enough to pay for these things were dotcoms. Blue-chip companies didn’t want to be associated with such base stunts and the controversy engendered by purchasing human flesh to sell products. Eventually, reporters, news consumers, and people willing to buy or sell skin ads tired of these “news of the weird” tattoo stories, and the trend died out by the late 2000s. So did most of the dot-coms. But many of the tattoos are still around.

ᔥ Sydney Morning Herald

I like tattoos but Holley Mangold does have a point:

She is hoping to continue her dream ride all the way to the podium in London, although she isn’t one of the pre-event favourites. One thing that isn’t on the to-do list is to join the army of athletes getting inked up with Olympic tattoos.

“Tattoos on fat girls look really nasty,” Mangold told the NYT. “You really don’t want me to get the rings tramp-stamped on my butt.”

ᔥ NZ Herald

I have a tattoo…but it is on my shoulder and almost never sees the light of day. Others have what I call job killers…visible tattoos on hands and the face. Maori unemployment is already woeful without the added job killing effect of tattoos..confimring to me once again that quite simply people are stupid:

A Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi doctoral student claims 40 per cent of Maori women have or are thinking of getting a ta moko, but men have largely usurped the cultural practices around getting tattooed.

Mei Winitana’s thesis involved combing through the results of 129 online surveys where she asked participants about their views of Maori women and ta moko (which relates to tattoos on the body) or moko kauae, which is on the lips and chin.

She also interviewed 15 women who lived here or in Australia, and a group who had lived across the Tasman and returned.

One theme that emerged strongly was that there was confusion around the tikanga of getting a moko.

Nice video, but shows why a tattoo on your stomach isn’t really a good idea:

A woman is auctioning the skin of her ass for a tattoo on Trademe:

A Lower Hutt woman says she has no nerves about a stranger paying to pick what she gets tattooed on her bottom.

The Trade Me auction “YOUR tattoo on my Bum!!”, listed by Tina Beznec, says the winner can get anything tattooed on her posterior for posterity.

“You might think I am crazy for doing this! But yes, the winner of the auction gets ANYTHING they like tattooed on my bum!”

The 9 x 9 centimetre spot on either cheek could be used for a marriage proposal, business promotion or just “awesomeness”, she said.

Twenty per cent of the winning bid would go to a charity of the bidder’s choice and Tina would keep the rest.

“I deserve it, I have been made redundant twice over the past year,” she said in the listing.

The auction, which runs until Friday, January 20, has already received more than 30,000 views.

No wonder Mallard isn’t taking the hint to quit, with easy, skanky, hotties like this available on his door step for tapping.

Perhaps the The Whale Army should buy the rights to tattoo her tushy and we could put “Trev’s Bitch” on her arse.

If only tattoos were this painless to get.