I probably wouldn’t get a tatoo, if I’m feeling rebellious, I would go for a piercing. But if I changed my mind and did decide to get one, I would probably get a flower, most likely on my hip where you could only see it if I was wearing a bathing suit or on my lower back.
I probably wouldn’t get a tatoo, if I’m feeling rebellious, I would go for a piercing. But if I changed my mind and did decide to get one, I would probably get a flower, most likely on my hip where you could only see it if I was wearing a bathing suit or on my lower back.
The entire constellation Orion, down to the smallest 6th-magnitude stars.
On my tongue.
Interesting, Squish 
I’ve been thinking about getting Xev’s navel tat… someday. Already, I have a dragonfly on my hip. I like it. It’s easily covered up. Someday it’ll look like a blue smear down my buttcheek… but by then I won’t have any business showing it off anyway. Heh.
Really, for those of you with unmarked skin-- think before you ink. I’m too far gone already.
I’m planning mine right now. It will go on my hip. I’m still searching for the right design at the moment. It is going to be my reward for reaching a number of my goals.
I got me some ink
I have an imperial fire dragon wrapped around my right wrist at the moment, my first tat at 16 Its 10 years old now, and still looking great, I am careful to not expose it too much to the sun etc, and the colours havn’t faded a bit. Dragons have for some reason always been a really strong symbol for me… Don’t actually know why.
On my right bicep I have some nice, but dopey bit of flash, that I picked off the wall in a fit of ink-lust. Stupidly enough I got flash for my second tatoo :smack: I am going to have a cover-up done on it (a cover-up is when you tattoo over an unwanted tattoo, hiding its pattern and colours in the new one). It’s a nice tat and all, but its got nothing to do with me.
I am torn between wanting to get a full piece of work, and continuing in this very western trend of “tagging” myself with random work. I know that two of the pieces I have planned in are another dragon, just blackwork this time at the base of my neck.
I also have planned a bumblebee somewhere, as a reminder. You know the old UL, a bumblebee is not supposed to be able to fly, but it does anyhow? I like that…
Well I am in the boat where a tattoo just rings too much of permanent marking, identifiable feature… in any case my latest idea for a tattoo is to get “shorty” tattooed along the back of my neck. Being 6’5" that puts it right in view of other people when I wear T-shirts, yet would be blocked by collared shirts so I could do business without it detracting from my “air.”
Doh, forgot the rest of my post!
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Don’t pick from the wall or a book. Sure look there for inspiration if needed, but then talk with your artist about how you can personalise the image. If you have an idea for an image, sketch it down, your artist should be able to make it into a proper drawing for you.
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Don’t settle for something you are not pleased with. If your artist isn’t willing to put in the work on you being pleased with what you get done, or your aren’t willing to pay for it (if thats what you artist prefers, mine only charges for the inking time) then wait. Don’t ink it until you are 100% satisfied.
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Don’t go to the tattoo parlour drunk. Apart from the impaired judgement involved having alcohol in your bloodstream has a anti-clotting effect on the blood and you will bleed like a pig during the tattooing process
Tattooing generally doesn’t hurt much, the part that hurts more is the outlining process, but the filling hurts a lot less. I would compare the sensation to dragging a pin across your skin while pressing slightly. After a few moments you numb up, and your endorphins kick in, and then its just a pleasant buzzing sensation. Getting inked on fat and muscle hurts a lot less than on or near bone, so tatting your feet will genreally hurt more than tatting your bicep(ymmv). -
Avoid “chinese characters” like the plague. This unless you have a close personal friend who will verify what you are getting done. Most of the characters available mean multiple things. My MrsIteki has a hobby of working out friends names for them in chinese characters. First you work out which characters represent the sounds in the name, and then choose which of the characters have meanings that make nice combinations. So the one western name can be “spelt” either as say, “enduring harmony” or “rabbit puke”. I have seen the rabbit-puke combo with my own eyes
Suffice to say she chose a more pleasant combo for that persons name. I am guessing your average tattoo artist isn’t sufficiantly trained to pluck characters correctly. The prime example of “gobshites with chinese char tats” is a number of dykes in Sweden who I have seen happily doing a chinese char version of the “interlinked women-symbols”… They have taken the symbol for women, and put two of them together in a nice little pattern. If you take the character for women, and put two together, it doesn’t translate as sapphic, it translates as “strife, fight, argument”. Well done girls…
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That would be cool. I like Xev: one of the few women in TV who is stunningly gorgeous but so darned nice that you can’t resent her. 
They really are addictive, aren’t they?
Several posters here have given great advice, I think. I highly recommend that, if you can, you have your design drawn on and live with it for a week before you decide that you can live with it permanently. When my brother-in-law was young and stupid, he got a large wing with a small swastika at the ‘hub’ tattooed on his forearm. :smack: He was embarrassed over the swastika for years and finally went to have it inked over. He’s not at all racist, it was just something ‘rebellious’ at the time.
Regarding ‘whole body design’ versus ‘tagging’ (good term, Iteki)… that’s something I’ve turned over and over in my mind. I think multiple designs should have something in common, so you don’t look like the side of a boxcar, but everything I want is significant to me and they don’t have much ‘common ground.’ Something to ponder, that.
ronincyberpunk, a lot of people have an aversion to being marked for life–that was my mother’s main reaction to tattooing (“Branding yourself! Like a cow!”). In my case, I’m 42 (got my BrunnenG tat for my birthday) and I figure by my age it doesn’t much matter. Besides, I’m weird, I’ve always been weird, and this is pretty much accepted by the people who know me. My b/f’s parents are Pentecostal and not only do they like my ever-changing hair colors (currently deep blue-violet), when they saw the tattoo they just chuckled.
AFAIK, most tattooists won’t do you when you’ve been drinking, because of the bleeding factor; also, a great many won’t even consider tattooing your face. The artist who did mine had done only one facial tattoo before and the subject had had such a difficult time coping with the process that he was reluctant to do me–and was pleasantly surprised when I just sat there like a sack of flour.
A final warning: once you have a tattoo, you will want to talk endlessly about tattoos!
I have one tattoo, a round celtic knot about 2" in diameter on the back of my neck. It’s high, not low, so that when I wear my hair up (which is most of the time, in the summer) it’s clearly visible above my shirt.
I probably won’t get a tattoo until they invent animated ones (i.e. never in my lifetime), but if I did, it would probably be a tattoo duplicate of my wedding ring; some days I seem to have swollen fingers and can’t put the ring on, but with a tattoo, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I knew a guy with a tatoo of a woman on his bicep, and she would move when… ok, you get it.
When I was younger, I liked the idea of a full back tatoo of the sun, but I couldn’t justify the cost of having it done. Recently, I briefly considered getting a raised crescent-shaped scar on a shoulder but lost interest before I even looked into it. I don’t even know if a scar could be built up like that.
Scarification is a currently practiced body modification. Not nearly as popular as tattooing, but the basic principle involved is making a fairly deep cut in the pattern/place you want the adornment, then irritating the wound so that raised scar tissue forms. I don’t know all that much about it, but I think it’s a rather iffy proposition in that you have to irritate the wound enough to form sufficient scar tissue while at the same time keeping it from getting infected.
The only time I was ever tempted was when I had to serve out some time in Monterey (Just send my mail, to the Monterey Jail) County, California. It was a long and boring time in stir, and the local tat guy was in demand.
Had my buddy not talked me out of it, I would’ve gone for our jail-house artiste’s only graphic rendering. He’d do names and the like, but all that he’d attempt graphically was the Zig-Zag man.
In later years I became the corporado that I couldn’t even envision at that point.
TV time, a good friend of mine has that very same Micronesian tattoo of three dolphins on his right calf. They look more like symmetrical arrows than dolphins, if that helps explain it. (He’s a big-time surfer). If you want, I can send you a picture of it or find out where he got the art.
About a year ago I was seriously thinking about getting a tattoo - something small and abstract on my left shoulder blade. I told myself that if I were still interested in a year, I’d do it. Now I’m not so interested, partly because I don’t like the idea of not being able to donate blood for 6 months, and partly because I’ve had kind of a shitty year self-esteem wise. Now that things are going better for me (and I can’t donate blood for a while due to mild anemia anyway), I may start thinking about it again.
i once saw a guy in starbucks who had a small, dark blue star on his wrist. i thought it looked great on him, very sexy, so maybe i would do that. my wrist is one place that i don’t think will become unsightly as i get older (like my stomach, thigh, butt), on the one hand, but then on the other hand, my wrists are exposed to the sun a lot.
but i don’t know why i’m acting so worried about it, since i’ll never get one. my dad has hepatitis c from needles, and my best friend’s dad recently died from complications from hepatitis c, so the risk just doesn’t seem worth it to me. i know most places are clean and yadda yadda, but it’s a horrible thing to get, so i plan on staying away from needles unless it’s in a hospital.
RSA in Perl. Left inside forearm. That way, my body would be a repository of information the government may, one day, wish to censor completely (as opposed to now, where they just have export controls).
I’m all unmarked, I wanted a tatt back when no one had them, & now I’m enjoying the idea of being an old unmarked woman when I get all wrinkley. I do enjoy making fake tatts, I got in trouble at one job I had, some thought it was real & were pissed to find out it was fake. One guy I worked with had a crocodile on his forehead. I always imagine what’s it’s like in a job interview with one on your face.
If I were to get a real one, it’d be Felix the Cat in the pose where he’s holding his tummy laughing, that image always makes me smile. I’d put it somewhere on my front covered by my underwear.
I had a very interesting experience, a waitress took me in an empty dining room while I was having breakfast & dropped her pants to show me her 1st tatt she’d just gotten, it was right at the bottom of her spine. A Celtic circle thingy. I have a better than most customer/wait person relationship with this woman, but was still tongue-tied. I drove to see the friend I was meeting, I wasn’t going to tell her this story, she’s kinda uptight, turns out, a woman she barely knows, about 19years old, dropped her pants at my friend’s desk at work to show the tatt on her hip because my friend had a pic of a cat that was really similar to the tatt. Same day, about the same time, about 60 miles apart. I wonder now, how many times a day this happens.
I’d never get one. But if my mind changed, I’d have to decide between getting a small frog (I love frogs) or a barcode. Not sure where–somewhere unobtrusive. Though a barcode on the back of my neck would be funny.