Ryan and the Aristocants

I met Ryan back in July outside of Penn Station. He had a bunch of tattoos. I interviewed him and took some pictures. He was with friends.

I'd love to dub this an orphan post, but all the required elements are here. It just didn't sit right with me.

After blogging about tattoos for more than five years, I have pretty good instincts about people. I can tell when they're interested in the project and I can tell when they're not, usually within the first ten or fifteen seconds of my starting up a conversation with them.

With apologies to Ryan if I misread him, but I felt like he really wasn't very interested in talking to me. But to give him credit, he did. This is one of the reasons that this piece didn't show up until almost five months after the fact.

That said, let's proceed.

Ryan shared this tattoo:

Note that it's hard to see from the shot that this heart has wings that roll back around the arm:

Ryan explained that he once was in a band called the Aristocants. Perhaps it is because they have added an "n" to Aristocats, but I am unable to find anything about them online.

What I gathered from Ryan about this tattoo was this: He was in a band called the Aristocants from 2002-2006. In the band with him were bass and guitar players Chad and Brandon who designed the logo on which the tattoo is based. ("They drew it up together ... mixed and matched and collaborated.")  Ryan took the design to another friend, Chris Hudgins, who worked at a shop in Nevada called House of Pain. The rest is history.

I am unable to find anything on the artist, the shop and, as previously mentioned, the band.

Thanks to Ryan for sharing this interesting 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.

Checking Out Patti's New Sleeve

Last year we got a pleasant surprise from a reader named Patti, who shared a stunning floral sleeve, which we posted in September.

One of the problems with interviewing people with sleeves is that it is hard to document the great work, especially when I've met them on the street. Even a collage of sleeve segments doesn't always do justice to the amazing workmanship and detail that goes into the hours of creating a sleeve.

Fortunately for me, and by extension, you the readers of Tattoosday, Patti has stayed in touch, and she just sent me the link to a YouTube video chronicling her new peacock sleeve. Check it out:

 

Patti's amazing work was done by Ben Reigle (who also composed the music in the clip) at Blueprint Gallery in Hadley, Massachusetts.

Thanks to Patti for keeping me posted on her new sleeve!

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.

Jon's Molten Flesh Tear

Well, we seem to be taking care of a lot of our orphan posts earlier in the month than later, as I expected. Our next piece is from Jon, who I met in Herald Square back in June. He was visiting New York from England, and his travelling companion, Marjo, shared her tattoo with us back in July here.

Jon let me snap a photo of his leg, which is a take on one of those torn flesh motifs:

Note you can see Marjo in the background, rocking a pretty cool leg piece.

I don't have much more to say about Jon's tattoo, which I dubbed "Molten Flesh Tear," other than he credited to an artist named Mick J at Blue Dragon Tattoo in Brighton, England. I did find the following reference pictures on Mick J's MySpace page:

Thanks to Jon for sharing 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.

Jason's Chicago Tattoos

Here's another set of photos in our Orphans category.

Back in August, as my company was closing down, our new parent company had a few guys from Chicago visit our digs, looking for assets to transfer to their office in the Chicago area.

They spent several days in Manhattan and we interacted during the day as we all went about our work.

On one particularly warm day (it was August in New York City, after all), one of the guys, Jason, was wearing a tank top, and I spotted some ink on his arm. He consented to my taking pictures for the site, and was supposed to get back to me to discuss further and properly credit the artists involved. As the saying goes, I never heard from him again.

First off, he had the Chicago skyline tattooed on his upper arm:

The script at the bottom says "South Side," referring to the area of the city where he was from.

Like many Chicagoans, Jason is a huge sports fan, thus the collage of his allegiances on his biceps:

For the unitiated, those are logos, from left to right, of the Chicago White Sox (baseball), The Bears (football), the Bulls (basketball), and the Blackhawks (hockey).

He credited the work to Firehouse Tattoos in Chicago. As I mentioned earlier, I was unable to get the name(s) of any artist(s) affiliated with the work, nor was I able to get any additional comments or back story from Jason.

Thanks to Jason for sharing these tattoos with us here on Tattoosday. It's nice sharing a bit of the Windy City here on our Big Apple blog!

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.

Michelle's Mermaid Under Manhattan

Here's another orphan post from earlier this year. I snapped this mermaid tattoo on Michelle back in August:

I spotted Michelle in the passageway under the south end of the 2/3 platform at 34th Street.

It was rush hour and Michelle handed me her card so I could follow up and get more details on her tattoo.

Alas, Michelle did not respond to my inquiries, so all we are left with is this cool picture.

Thanks to Michelle, wherever you are, for sharing this mermaid 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.

Kate's Owl in Penn Station

As I indicated yesterday, we're showcasing some of our "orphans" - posts that were just not quite perfect. Today we have another one, this one having been separated from its original group.

Back in October, we wrote about Kate's amazing portraits by Tommy Montoya here.

When I spotted her in Penn Station, however, it was this owl on the back of her thigh that caught my attention:

So why wasn't this in the original post?

Kate originally attributed the owl to an artist named Sailor. However, she wasn't able to give me further details about the artist, so I didn't include it in the original.Unfortunately, googling "tattoos by Sailor" results in  a lot of naval tattoos, but not much indicating who may have done this piece.

Thanks anyway to Kate for sharing this 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.

Shannon's Gramophone

Well, it's December 1st and, at the end of every year, I have a handful of posts that do not live up to my normally rigorous standards of blogworthy quality. I call them "orphans". Whether it is due to missing information, or an unresponsive contributor, I have found that, rather than holding the posts in perpetual purgatory, it is much more therapeutic to release them all at the end of the year.

Throughout the month I'll be attempting to clear my 2012 inventory, and I will be mixing in these orphans with some regular posts.

The first of the 2012 orphans is this tattoo, which belongs to Shannon:

I met Shannon and her husband, Zachary, back in April. Zachary's ink appeared on Tattoosday here. Zachary and Shannon told me that this tattoo was done by an artist in Chicago.

They were going to e-mail me the artist's name and I asked again after posting Zachary's tattoo, but I never heard back. Still a pretty cool tattoo, despite my not being able to properly attribute it to the artist.

Thanks to Shannon for sharing with us 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.