AverageJer

Pretty bad article. It seems like he is going out of his way to create a conflict between people who have tattoos and people who don't. There are way too many people here in Minneapolis with tattoos and without tattoos to divide along those lines. I still prefer to create the divide lines more like "people who are assholes vs people who are not assholes" and this writer makes it pretty clear which side of that cultural divide he resides on.

Every now and then I come across an inane article with new and amusing statements about the same old stereotypes; an article that could be worthy of a chuckle or an eye-roll, but certainly not its own thread.
Why do we really get tattoos? A theory. [subtitled] How common are tattoos? Too common.
Then after trashing tattoos for various inane and unsupported reasons, he attempts to cool-ify himself by sporting an Ed Hardy T-shirt and then bitching that he's being dissed by fashion insiders for wearing it.
Accordion?
O_o?

It's a really effing great tattoo!

I'm gonna submit the smallest tattoo to win the monthly contest (ok, not really, that back, gahhhh)!
RAT HEADS GET NOTHIN' BUT CHEESE Y'ALL, done by Cody Miller at Blackheart. Photo pilfered from his Instagram.

Thrown me sides & a leg in, not me back yet I think.
Anyway, back tattooed by CP, Brisbane Australia.
Cheers.

It's a really effing great tattoo!

Thanks, guys! And a particular thanks to the folks who encouraged me to grab this appointment! I got lucky with the win because everything this month is great.
Laughing at "little" though - I'm 5'2" so there's not a lot of tattooing space!

Holy shit, what an incredible month this has been! Big thanks to everyone who submitted.
The winner of July is @polliwog for this fantastic tattoo by the great Chad Koeplinger. Congrats!!

Please PM @steve1461686340 with your shirt info (size and male or female) along with your address.
New contest will be up shortly!

I did! Kind of. I made it to Three Tides in Tokyo where I had a wonder experience all around and ended up with a nice little dragon head by Ganji.
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I came into this thread with lofty ideas of dropping a last minute tiebreaker...and then liked every single one.

I did! Kind of. I made it to Three Tides in Tokyo where I had a wonder experience all around and ended up with a nice little dragon head by Ganji.
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I did! Kind of. I made it to Three Tides in Tokyo where I had a wonder experience all around and ended up with a nice little dragon head by Ganji.
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I did! Kind of. I made it to Three Tides in Tokyo where I had a wonder experience all around and ended up with a nice little dragon head by Ganji.
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Can we get your niece on here to give people advice about what tattoos to get? These are all killer.

My 10 year old niece was telling me her ideas for future tattoos... And they kind of kicked ass!
She wants a dragon on her right arm, with vines & leaves wrapped around it. Then, she wants a wolf fighting a snake on her left arm. On her back she wants a hippocamp (horse/fish hybrid). She's thinking maybe a griffin on her thigh. I was like, "Damn! I might want some of those, too!" Wonder what she'll be thinking in 8+ years...

My daughter is five so I have some time before this becomes an issue but considering how much time she has already spent inside our local tattoo shop I will clearly need a strategy when the time comes. I'm thinking that if she wants a tattoo as soon as she turns 18 I will pay her to wait. But I will pay her in money towards whatever tattoo she ultimately decides on. The longer she waits the more money she will have to spend on getting an awesome tattoo. Of course this could backfire and she could end up with a full back piece of an infinity sign exploding into a flock of birds. Life is full of risks I suppose.

Don't listen to other people. (Haha = that includes ME!!!)
Go with your gut.

Hello and welcome! Either way is going to be meaningful to you. I would say go with the younger portrait because that seems to be more what you want. I'm not super crazy about having her drawn as an angel because I think that a regular realistic portrait without embellishment would be stronger, but ultimately, it comes down to what you want and what you and your artist decide will work best. Who are you thinking about going to for this tattoo?

My daughter is five so I have some time before this becomes an issue but considering how much time she has already spent inside our local tattoo shop I will clearly need a strategy when the time comes. I'm thinking that if she wants a tattoo as soon as she turns 18 I will pay her to wait. But I will pay her in money towards whatever tattoo she ultimately decides on. The longer she waits the more money she will have to spend on getting an awesome tattoo. Of course this could backfire and she could end up with a full back piece of an infinity sign exploding into a flock of birds. Life is full of risks I suppose.

My daughter is five so I have some time before this becomes an issue but considering how much time she has already spent inside our local tattoo shop I will clearly need a strategy when the time comes. I'm thinking that if she wants a tattoo as soon as she turns 18 I will pay her to wait. But I will pay her in money towards whatever tattoo she ultimately decides on. The longer she waits the more money she will have to spend on getting an awesome tattoo. Of course this could backfire and she could end up with a full back piece of an infinity sign exploding into a flock of birds. Life is full of risks I suppose.

I did! Kind of. I made it to Three Tides in Tokyo where I had a wonder experience all around and ended up with a nice little dragon head by Ganji.
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The was eggxactly the joke I was hoping to hear.

26 years of negglect

my sociology teacher gave each student an egg. The idea was that we were to care for the egg over a week, in order to simulate the idea of caring for a real infant.
I found my egg the other day.
He is 26 years old.
I suspect mine is the only one to survive this long.

I've been thinking about this. Personally, while I like instagram and the access to so many pictures of great tattoos, word of mouth recommendations are key for me, and I think a tattooer would have to be doing something really special for me to want to get tattooed by them solely on the basis of their instagram account. I also realise that I've been getting tattooed for long enough, regularly enough, and geographically broadly enough that the pool of tattooers who I've either seen tattoos from, or heard good things about, or had the chance to meet at a shop or a convention is pretty large, and that this isn't everybody's situation.
I think what I like least about instagram is that the volume and nature of it makes tattoos kind of disposable. I think it's pretty much useless for large tattoos because you can't get any meaningful sense of a back or a sleeve on a tiny picture. You can't capture the detail of a large tattoo on a picture that fits on a phone screen, and you can't really get an idea of how the tattoo fits and flows with the body. Small tattoos seem more suited to instagram in this way. The volume though...like what does it mean when you can see dozens (if not more!) really great tattoos every day? Do we get a better appreciation for the tattoos, or is it just that we glance at them for a couple of seconds, hit "like" or not, and then scroll down to the next one? There have been so many times that I've seen something really cool on instagram and I'll think of it days or weeks later and I can't remember who did it and I can't find it again. Whereas there are tattoos in tattoo magazines I have that I remember even though I maybe haven't looked through the magazine in a couple of years.
So basically, instagram is a really great tool in a lot of ways, but like everything with the internet, it tells us a lot less than it maybe appears at first.