Another Year, Another Max (Wild Things at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade)

Last month at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, I spotted a guy with a really cool Where the Wild Things Are tattoo.

I remembered meeting a guy 2 years earlier at the same parade, but I knew that this tattoo was better than the one I had featured two years ago.

When I asked the guy about it and he said his name was Max, I knew I had erred. It was the same guy, same tattoo, only with more detail.

This was the tattoo in 2012:

So when I sat down to write this post, and I pulled the old photo off of the 2012 post, I had a realization. Look at the tattoo I photographed last month:

Guess what, folks. Not the same tattoo. Two years apart, I run into two guys named Max at the Mermaid Parade, each with Maurice Sendak tattoos depicting the characters from Where the Wild Things Are. What are the odds? 2014 Max had more in his tattoo:

The artist for this newer (frankly better) Where the Wild Things Are tattoo is Luke LoPorto from Timmy Tattoo in Huntington, New York.

So, the moral of the story is, if you meet a guy named Max, and he has a Where the Wild Things Are tattoo, don't assume you've met him before. He may be a different Max.

Thanks to the 2014 Max (and the 2012 Max, as well) for sharing his awesome tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

UPDATE: Several weeks after this posted, artist Luke LoPorto shared the finished product. See it here.

This entry is ©2014 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Max at the Mermaid Parade - Where the Wild Things Are

It may be December, but I've been spreading out all the tattoos I spotted at last June's Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, and I'm sharing the last in the 2012 series, which also happens to be the last piece I photographed on that wonderful day at the beginning of the summer.

When I saw this guy's tattoo, I just had to stop and ask him about it:

Appropriately, the owner of this tattoo is Max, which is also the name of the boy at the center of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, the book upon which this tattoo is based. Mr. Sendak, a Brooklyn native, passed away earlier this year, in May.

Max explained why he got this tattoo:

"I'd been thinking about getting inked for a long time, like for a good five years and no idea stuck for more than six months. And I have, actually, an original printing of the book from 1963. I grew up with a stuffed Max in my crib and it's always been a part of my life. And one day I was just flipping through and for no particular reason came across this image and locked my finger on it: That's going on me. And I let the thought sit for a little while and a little while later got it, that was three or four years ago and never looked back ... The most exciting part of it, oddly enough for a tattoo, was showing it to my mom because in the book the illustration stops right here [at inside of arm] ... I showed her just this inside and just from recognizing the style, she jumped up in her seat and started clapping and yelled out 'Oh I hope it's that I think it is!' It's a very rare mother-tattoo story."

Max had this done by Alex Dawes who works at Skin Deep Tattoo in Lahaina, Maui.

Thanks to Max for sharing this great tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2012 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.