polliwog

Is this the arm that also has the Katie Sellergren clock, or the other one?

In addition to the eagle cam, here's Raven Cam. No chicks yet, but they should appear any day. I work in Wellesley Square and heard an odd "squonk" a few weeks ago. I looked up and saw what seemed to be a raven perched on one of the buildings, but they don't usually live around here.

Gotta love how many snotty comments about tattoos come from people who easily spend as much time/effort/money on other forms of "body modification."

You can add me to the list of people who would be happy to get a monmon cat... (I don't know anyone in the SF bay area and am in no position to travel solely to get tattooed, though. Maybe as a 30th birthday present to myself?)

One I like from Josh Mcalear at Redemption

Thank you so much for sharing this. I also liked this short essay from the same website. A well-written thing that I intend to pass on to a number of people in my life who are baffled by my interest in getting tattooed.

Maybe because it's easier to watch moles for precancerous changes when they're not covered by a tattoo. (edit: duh, @Orangutango just said the same thing) Part of my inner arm rose went over a raised mole, pretty solid grey/black. The mole won.

Thanks! It's nothing a touch-up can't fix, if needed.

I just took a 15-hour train ride with a fresh, weepy leg tattoo and I think it messed things up, mainly because I couldn't wash it and get the plasma off. It's now heavily scabbed and looks like it's lost some color where the scabs are falling off. I would recommend not doing what I just did. ::cries:: Just wash it if you need to and it'll probably be fine.

^ Love those. Quilts and Color comes to the MFA in Boston next week. A lot of what excites me most in art can be found in stuff like textile design, so I'm really psyched about this. Need more tattoos that look like quilts.

I only have 3 tattoos but so far all 3 of them are linked by people knowing each other. I didn't plan that!

I thought I wouldn't get my legs tattooed as recently as maybe a month ago - now I'm hoping I can get an appointment with Chad K. to do my other calf whenever he's back in New England. I hope this isn't creepy, but knowing that two artists are also friends somehow makes me happier to have their work side by side on me. I don't know what it is, exactly - maybe the idea that there's somehow a conversation involved.

You have some of my favorite arms on here.

Well I'm embarrassed that I should have been able to figure that out for myself, but thanks!

Seth Wood's been getting pretty creative with these.

I had a question about the gallery that I can't find an answer to. Is it appropriate to upload a tattooer's photo (from Instagram and the like) to the gallery if it's on your body & photo credit is given?

Just wanted to jump in and say thanks to all the tattooers who post here. As someone who was quite clueless when I signed up here and still has a lot to learn, I feel a degree of responsibility for the change in nature of this forum and really appreciate that a lot of the original members are still active here.

Plentiful whiskey, strong coffee and lots of ibuprofen all taken together make a probably stupid but very effective painkiller, as I found out yesterday. Not going to repeat that for days though. With this tattoo I'm getting a lot more colorful plasma weeping than with my arm tattoos, sorta like @Tesseracts picture of her dripping tattoo from a couple weeks ago. This mostly happens after I put the usual Aquaphor on it. It's hard to figure out whether I want to keep it moisturized and discourage scabs, or let it dry out and get scabbier but have the scabs stop the weeping...

Spoke too soon.

So far my experience of healing a lower leg tattoo (most of the back of my calf) is that it feels fine 95 percent of the time and so painful that I need to stop what I'm doing to grimace/swear the other 5 percent. It's not as bad as I was fearing from this thread, though! Really glad I'm taking the train home and not flying.

The results of yesterday's visit to Greg Christian. I've been walking around Cleveland eating ridiculous, inexplicable food today and goddamn, does healing this thing suck. I can recommend eating a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with meatloaf after getting tattooed, though...

Way too lazy to deal with piercings. Every time I go to wear earrings I wind up re-piercing my ears (ouch) because of weeks/months of wearing nothing.

I didn't - is it on his website or Instagram? Looking for it now...

For me it's partly this and partly reconciling what I think I "should" look like (based on how I've always looked) with what I want. The changing self-image is almost a bigger deal than how it looks to others. I related to your earlier post about going below the elbow being a heavy decision - for me it's kinda like, OK, I'm really claiming this now. Thanks for the advice, everyone. These round flowers look especially beautiful to me on a forearm like this, which is what prompted all this navel gazing.

I'm actually thinking more about clothing choices and whether going a few inches below my elbow's really going to matter more than stopping at half an inch above it. It's not an issue at my current job, though I plan on covering anyway since I work in a pretty conservative place and think some of my customers might care, even if my employer doesn't. If I'm being honest with myself, I'm probably looking for someone here with sleeves to tell me to go for it :rolleyes: