If anyone found a reliable place to draw blood from me, I’d mark it with an X. Each phlebotomist seems to eventually find a different place, though.
The most gorgeous and memorable tattoo I’ve ever seen was a tree. It was on a barista, and i guess it must have been on her back, because otherwise i probably couldn’t have seen so much of it in public. It grew over her whole torso. It may have had roots, too, covered by clothing.
I have seen a few with roots, though I think not as a tattoo; but I don’t think I’ve seen one with roots obviously feeding on the dead.
I would like my body to feed a tree after my death. That’s up to my kids, of course.
At the risk of witnessing, the idea of the body returning to the earth and the ecosystem is central to Jewish funerary customs and traditions. I remember we once had a poster who started a thread on how they wanted the body of a loved one perfectly preserved as long as possible. The idea horrified me.
That seems perfectly reasonable. The atoms that consitute me at the moment aren’t any different from any others; they will go on being part of other things long after I am gone.
And now they are apprenticing after just a few weeks in a shop with a mentor, amazed the artists with their art they fast tracked onto skin and doing flash freebies guess I gotta take a number get in line!
Rethinking that first tat. 
If I went crazy? Pornographic depictions of popular cartoon characters engaged in rape and sexual abuse.
Dunno if you are serious, but that doesn’t sound like you are, and we’re trying to cut back on rape jokes around here. And … if you really want to celebrate rape, keep an eye on the rules about facilitating illegal activities.
Thank you, please keep up the good work.
My sister and niece got matching tattoos of a dung beetle pushing a ball of shit in front of it as a memorial to my other sister who passed away and who used the symbol to represent perseverance even in dealing with shitty situations.
Me, being exactly the sort of person this board attracts, pointed out that dung beetles actually roll their dung balls backwards. But I feel bad about it.
Your late sister sounds like a wonderful person.
She was. Cancer is a bastard thing.
I’m currently debating whether to get a variant of the same tattoo but with the ball on the other side of the beetle.
Something nerdy but graphic, probably. Like the diagram for the proof of the Pythagorean theorem, or Stevinus’ epitaph, or a graph of the Benford probabilities or something.
And I might get it in fluorescent tattoo ink that inly shows up under UV light. (Although I understand that these are still not recognized as safe)
I have no intention of getting a tattoo, so I would get nothing.
“Post No Bills”
Dan
The Dunkin cup.
Deep Throat in ASCII
(just to get my money’s worth of work from the tatoo artist)
If I had to I would either get a tattoo of a Draisienne, a velocipede or a high-wheeler (evolutionary steps pre-modern bicycles), or a Tony Iommi SG with the inlay crosses (one of the guitars used by Black Sabbath’s guitarist (I have an black Epiphone version of one)).