Graeme

Will Sheldon at Saved is great too. Good things always going on at that shop.

My library even has that Ed Hardy dragon design book.

My Bloody Valentine - m b v I don't know if I've really listened to anything else that was released in 2013. For a good part of the year I was pinching pennies to pay for tattoos and that made my budget for buying music basically nothing. Maybe I'll try to come up with a list of the records I was most into regardless of release date.

Hello and welcome to LST! Do you have any idea of what you want and who you want to do it? Any plans to travel for it?

Hello and welcome to LST. You should take the advice of your tattooist. That's the sort of tattoo that looks cute on pictures on the internet but it will in no way hold up.

Greg Whitehead, Scapegoat Tattoo, Portland OR All pinched from his instagram. @cltattooing humility is a great thing, but from what I've seen, you're killing it too and should be included here. That Pharoah's Horses you posted in the tattoo of the month contest this month is a great tattoo period, not just great for a young tattooer.

I'm sure any shop that uses gimmicky newspaper ads to get tattooers is putting out top notch tattoos.

What are you getting? I love his tattoos. I've heard that Providence Tattoo is a beautiful shop too.

@Brock Varty I'm going to second what @CultExciter says about Fallout 3. It's an incredible game. I don't have the Game of the Year edition, just the regular one without the expansions and there's more than enough depth in the game by itself that it's worth playing through a few times because the vastness of the world and things to explore seems almost limitless. Skyrim is about the same, but with swords and magic.

I haven't ever seen them live, and if tickets weren't starting at around $75 for seats up in the rafters (and also if I wasn't saving my money for a backpiece), I would be all over it. Maybe. Fenriz said in an interview once that for him, and I'm paraphrasing here and probably getting it entirely wrong, music is a relationship between him and his speakers or headphones and isn't about the live experience of music, and I kind of feel that way about Sabbath. Is seeing them in an arena with thousands of other people what Sabbath is to me? I would kind of rather watch my bootleg Sabbath live in Paris 1970 DVD. I wouldn't be saying this if tickets weren't what I feel to be unreasonably expensive.

Artist credits would be nice on these.

I am really on the fence about getting tickets to see them when they play here. On the one hand it is BLACK SABBATH but on the other hand it will be 2014. I wish I had a fuckin' time machine.

I wouldn't consider him traditional Japanese, but for big, bold, powerful Japanese, Kiku at Invisible NYC absolutely kills it. I was at Saved once and there was a woman there with a Kiku Kannon backpiece and the thing was knock-you-on-your-ass bold and powerful. And you see a tattoo like that and you know it's going to look great forever.

Maybe you had to be there, but I really suspect not.

I saw a dude in my neighbourhood wearing those a couple of days ago. He was inside a bar painting a window. My neighbourhood is full of weirdos but even still that seemed super odd. I didn't know that people had those other than as a joke.

Doesn't @chrisnoluck have a frog similar to that one? It's such an awesome design and that's a great story. Tattoos are the coolest thing in the world.

That is disgusting and makes me sick to my stomach. I'm not sure who is stupider, you or your friend.

Read the FAQ. This isn't the place to learn how to tattoo, if you're really interested in learning ask your tattooer the next time you're getting tattooed.

I don't make any special efforts to keep them covered around my parents, no. My parents live on the other side of the country from me and I see them once, sometimes twice, a year, so it's not a huge issue. My in-laws, on the other hand, don't know that me or my wife have tattoos, and they will not react nicely when they find out that we do, and so we both keep them hidden from them at all times. We live in the same city as them and see them often enough so the situation is getting pretty absurd. For example, this summer we were walking back from the store after grocery shopping and my wife spotted my mother-in-law standing at the corner of our street from a half a block away. She'd stopped by to drop off some vegetables from her garden and was waiting around to see if we would show up. I was wearing a short sleeved shirt. So we turned around, went down another street, waited around a corner until we were sure that she had left, and then returned home. Is this better at this point than having a huge fight, dealing with it, and eventually moving on? I kind of don't think so, but it makes for funnier stories.

Awesome! That sinking ship rules!

My mom's reactions to my tattoos have gotten worse as I've gotten more. She was never crazy about me getting tattooed to begin with but when it was one or two she could pass it off as, I don't know, a passing phase or a temporary moment of bad judgement or something like that. I didn't stop at one or two though. My parents were staying with me and my wife during the most recent Montreal tattoo convention and they'd spent a few days in NYC and got back a couple of hours earlier than expected...just as I'd finished washing a new tattoo on my shin. And yeah it was a day old and still really fresh and my leg was all kinds of swollen and she saw that and nearly burst into tears and tried to make me say that that would be the last one and all that, which I wouldn't do. And at this point I don't even know what difference it would make if I stopped now because unless I tattoo my hands, neck, or face--which I don't plan on doing--I can't really get them in any more visible spots than I already have. My dad isn't crazy about the tattoos either, but he's kept quiet about it and has said that it isn't his body and so it isn't his decision. For better or for worse, I've been fairly open with my parents about my tattoos. I told them that I was getting my forearms done before I did them because I didn't want them to be surprised by it. I called my parents after I got my first one, again because I didn't want to surprise them. I should add that I wouldn't say that this has put stress on our relationship. My parents still love me no matter what, they know that I more or less have my shit together, and probably most importantly, that I'm an adult and I can make my own decisions even if they wouldn't make those decisions themselves (I think it was my cousin who said once that you raise your kids to be independent but then you get hurt when you realise that they actually are), but the tattoos still do really bother and upset my mom. This stuff is hard. Good luck.

@matcwlwelch Amazing!

Those Trevino skull beads are my favourite. I love those. When I was trying to figure out how far down my arms I was comfortable going, and what I would later get to extend the sleeve, something along those lines definitely came to mind. Then I realised that if I was already thinking of extending a 3/4-ish sleeve before I'd even started it that I should just suck up my hesitations and get it all the way to the wrist to begin with. The skull beads still totally rule though.

Welcome! Who are you getting tattooed by?

Amazing! I doubt I will ever do my hands but if I was going to do them I would want him to do them.