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Tattoos

Yoose wer robbed!

Mine cost me a bottle of Whiskey. I got nervous when the guy with the needle opened the bottle and pulled out an old Singer sowing machine motor, but hey, ya pays ya money...
 
I figure I'm paying someone to scar me for life. I'd better make sure they're good. And you gets what you pays for.

The bloke I've got lined up for my next lot does amazing black ink work. It looks exactly like pencil drawings. The detail and shading is incredible.
 
I've always fancied the scales of justice accross my back, but I guess its a bit big considering I don't have any!
 
Police leader: We need more officers with tattoos - they break the ice with the public
By Christopher Leake
Last updated at 10:00 PM on 23rd July 2011

A police leader has called for officers to sport their tattoos at work – claiming it could be an ‘icebreaker’ when dealing with the public.
All 43 police forces in England and Wales ban their officers from having rude, lewd, discriminatory, violent or intimidating tattoos that could cause offence to colleagues or the public. Even innocuous tattoos are expected to be covered from public view and body and facial piercings are banned.

But Ian Pointon, chairman of the Police Federation in Kent, has slammed the official rules, saying the Kent force needs to ‘get over’ its problem with tattoos and allow officers to show off their body art.
‘It comes down to personal taste and a generational gap in attitudes,’ he said.
‘There have been no complaints from the public about officers’ tattoos. They can actually be a good way to start a line of communication with the public. It can be a bit of an icebreaker. We have got to get over this generation thing. The days of tattoos being stigmatised should be over.’

Mr Pointon’s suggestion has not gone down well with his bosses at Kent police headquarters in Maidstone.
Assistant Chief Constable Allyn Thomas said the force asked that tattoos remained hidden.
‘There is an expectation that officers and staff maintain a standard of appearance and dress considered professional, smart and approachable while on duty,’ he said.

A Kent Police spokeswoman added: ‘We do not think it would be appropriate to directly address Ian Pointon’s comments.
'The policy at Kent Police is that some tattoos could potentially offend members of the public or colleagues, or could bring discredit to the police service.
‘Staff with tattoos that detract from displaying a professional image may be asked to cover them.’

Until recently, the Metropolitan Police issued civilian staff and Community Support Officers with a list of acceptable and unacceptable tattoos for new recruits – with tattoos depicting violence of any kind among those banned, as well as ones of naked women or men, skulls, witches and guns.
But Scotland Yard said last night that its latest rules on tattoos were now ‘less prescriptive’ for both civilian and police staff.
A Yard spokeswoman said: ‘Tattoos on the face or visible above the collar are not permitted. To retain a professional image, where feasible, all other tattoos must be covered.
‘Anyone who has a tattoo that could be construed as being offensive to any religion or belief, or is in any way discriminatory, violent or intimidating, will not be accepted to join the Metropolitan Police Service.
‘An existing member of staff who gets themselves tattooed in this way may become subject to disciplinary proceedings.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1T0nDm2iz
 
Don't know how I'd react to a policeman with a spiderweb tattooed on his face or a dotted line around his throat with "cut here" written above it. Or both.
 
I'm not sure I'd trust a policeman with facial tattoos...
 
Among the people shown on the TV news today hanging around Amy Winehouse's home, I saw a bloke with an impressively-detailed tattoo of her on his calf. It didn't look new so he must be a devoted fan. Bet it hurt.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I'm not sure I'd trust a policeman with facial tattoos...
Click to expand...

I like tattoos, haven't got any meself but that's just down to being lazy / scared / poor / unsure what to have, but MrsCarlos has some impressive roses tattooed on each shoulder (I may well have posted pics before?) and I know a few tattoo artists......

But I don't think I'd trust anyone with tattoos on their face! Dunno why.
 
Because they're plainly an idiot? :lol:
 
I don't have a problem with tattoos at all myself, and have even considered having one or two done.
However, facial tattoos - they are definitely a sign of 'nutterness'.
 
I never watched and hated the idea of 'Bumfights' that I think appeard on MTV. They apparently persuaded a tramp to have the word 'bumfight' tattoed accross his forehead.
 
'Bumfight'. That conjures up some strange pictures for me.
 
It was a horrible concept thought up by a horrible little juvenile. It basically sought amusement by paying two homeless men to fight each other.

But bumfight could bring up some unpleasant images!
 
The chap two doors down looks like a Maori.

He is ok, but then he isnt a copper.
 
I am someone who'd NEVER have a tattoo.

Then I hit 40. *blush*

I was lucky, though. There was absolutely no doubt about what I wanted, and no chance it would go out of fashion as the original has been around for 3000 years.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxley/2964244303/

I'm in a quandary now. Tattoos are habit forming and I'd love another but can't think of a suitable subject. I'd go for the Nazca spider but I fear it'd look like a toddler's doodle. And one of his back legs looks rubbish. Ah well.
 
Thanks, uair01 - "it is probably an omen to say your days are numbered".

There's meaning, there's tempting fate and there's simply asking the gods for a terminal kicking.

On a vaguely related note I always wondered if anyone had a 666 tattoo inspired by The Omen films. And if so, whether they had bad luck. Or indeed rose to high office in the US.
 
Eminent scientists and their tattoos
From DNA to dinosaurs, scientists have a surprising and secret penchant for tattoos – of a particularly cerebral nature
Carl Zimmer The Observer, Sunday 27 November 2011

I happen to be friends with Professor Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School. I call him Bob. In the summer of 2007, Bob and his wife Eliza and their two boys, Jasper and Theo, came to a pool party for the birthday of my nephew Blake, and the esteemed neurobiologist splashed around in the water for hours. It was then that I noticed something on Bob's arm. He had a tattoo.

The tattoo, I could see, was that most famous molecule, the twisting ladder of DNA. There was a logic to the choice, since Bob studies the DNA of fruit flies, observing how mutations to certain genes alter how their nerves develop and how they behave.

When I complimented Bob on his ink, he let me know that the DNA in the picture was not just any DNA. It had a message. DNA stores information for making proteins in units called nucleotide bases. There are four different bases: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). It takes three consecutive bases to encode a single amino acid, the building block of protein. There are 20 different kinds of amino acids in humans, each abbreviated with a letter. Bob took advantage of the fact that E is the abbreviation for the amino acid glutamate. He explained to me that his tattoo spelled out the initials of his wife, Eliza Emond Edelsberg.

[...]

It was, I granted him, a pure expression of geek love. And it occurred to me that Bob was not the first scientist I had encountered sporting a tattoo. I make a living writing about science, and so I spend a fair amount of time with scientists lurking in laboratories, on research vessels, or out in bogs. I recalled a visit to the University of Chicago, where I had met a developmental biologist named Marcus Davis. Davis was working as a post-doctoral researcher there, learning the genetic instructions for fins stored in the DNA of fishes. Like a number of other biologists, he wants to understand how new structures evolve – how, for example, a fish fin became our own hands and feet.

It was a warm day in Chicago when I visited, and Davis was wearing short sleeves. Running up one arm was the picture of an ancient fish, eusthenopteron, with fleshy lobes for fins, straddling the transition that would take our ancestors out of the water and onto dry land.

I wondered if I had been missing something interesting about the scientists I spent so much time with, or if I was just mistaking two tattoos for a trend. So I posted the question on my blog at Discover Magazine, The Loom. I immediately received a comment from a scientist who said that he knew an old geneticist with a DNA tattoo as well. Then a physicist wrote in. "A former student got a tattoo of a cartoon atom on the back of one of his legs," he recalled. "He told me that the first day after he got it, he went to rugby practice, and was showing it to someone when one of the seniors on the team (also a physics major) walked by. The senior looked at it, said 'Oh, please. The Bohr model?' and walked off." 8)

The next message I received had a picture attached to it. Two psychology graduate students decided to express their love by getting his-and-hers Necker Cubes, a classic optical illusion. More messages came in the days that followed, with tattoos of equations, fossils and galaxies. I posted the pictures as fast as I could, but more kept coming in. Some of the tattoos were gorgeous; some were old and grungy. And most of them came with stories – such as the one about a neuron on a woman's foot. It was the kind of neuron destroyed by Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Her father had died of the disease, and his death had forged her career as a neuroscientist.

Without intending it, I became a curator of tattoos, a scholar of science ink. I found myself giving people advice about how best to photograph a tattoo. Rule one: don't take a picture right after you get the tattoo. Shiny, puffy skin does not please the eye. Tattoo enthusiast magazines called to interview me. All in all, it was a strange experience; I have no tattoos of my own and no intention of getting any. But the open question I posed brought a river of new pleasures.
Some people have watched this growing obsession of mine and scoffed. They see tattoos as nothing but mistakes of youth, fated to sag, or to be scorched off with a laser beam.

But tattoos are etched deep in our species. In 1991, two hikers climbing the Austrian Alps discovered the freeze-dried body of a 5,300-year-old hunter, who came to be known as Ötzi. His skin was exquisitely preserved, including a series of hatch-marks on his back and a cross pattern on his knee. A team of Austrian researchers determined that the tattoos had been made with ashes from a fireplace, which someone had sprinkled into small incisions in Ötzi's skin.

Tattoos are preserved on other mummies from ancient civilisations, from the Scythians of central Asia to the Chiribaya of Peru. If, through some miracle of preservation, archaeologists find older human skin, I could easily imagine their finding even older tattoos. After all, two hallmarks of Homo sapiens are decoration and self-identification.

Most scientists keep their tattoos to themselves. Some say they'll wait until they get tenure before rolling up their sleeves at work. But science tattoos are often obscure not just in location but in their very nature. At the sight of an equation, few people will call out, "Nice Euler's Identity!" Many scientists are also teachers, but these tattoos are not dermal pedagogy. Scientists get tattoos in order to mark themselves with an aspect of the world that has marked them deeply within.

It is not simply the thing in the tattoo itself that matters. Archaeopteryx is, in itself, just an old bird. But it is part of the transition dinosaurs made from the Earth to the sky; it is an example of how new forms evolve from old, of how we are so lucky to live in an era where we can recognise fossils not as harmonic formations taken on by rocks themselves, but the flattened and preserved impressions of creatures that lived millions of years ago. These tattoos are a tribal marking: they display a membership with the universe itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... ign-zimmer
 
What were you inking? Teenager proudly shows off tattoo of London mayor Boris Johnson... and it cost £180
By Kerry Mcqueeney
PUBLISHED: 14:47, 25 April 2012 | UPDATED: 15:03, 25 April 2012

It's not uncommon for teenagers to do impulsive things they regret later on in life. Embarrassing drunken behaviour or getting the name of an early girlfriend tattooed on their arm.
But 19-year-old Lewis Jolly may have more misgivings than most about his choice of design for a tattoo.
For the chef has the face of Tory London mayor Boris Johnson inked on to his thigh - and, what's more, he was sober when he had it done.

The 19-year-old, from Adlington, near Chorley, shocked pals with the design after he was wowed by the politician on television.
Lewis, who works at the Spinners Arms in Cowling, said: 'I have been wanting to do this for about a year.
'I don’t really know why I did it but I just like him because he is a funny guy.
'He brings a smile to everyone’s face and the great thing is that he does not take things too seriously. That is how you should live your life.

'It cost me £180 but I think it looks amazing and I really like him. People keep saying to me that I will regret it when I am older but I don’t think I will and I just have to wait and see.'

The tattoo was done by Jay Abbott of Psycho Monkey in Market Street, Adlington, who has had some of Chorley’s best-known celebrities visiting his shop including boxer Michael Jennings, Emmerdale actor Joe Gilgun and X Factor singer JonJo Kerr.

He said: 'When Lewis came in a few months ago he mentioned he was contemplating it and I told him that I wanted to do it.
'I was buzzing just about the idea and I get a lot of requests for movie icons or family members. But it is one of the strangest that I have ever done.
'I thought that it was different to the run-of-the-mill stuff and it would be challenging because he is so recognisable, so you have to make it right.'
It took three hours to do the work and Johnson himself has expressed his approval, quipping: 'I’m honoured by the artistic gesture.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1tQE12G4H
 
It's a fantastic business and so very Conservative. You frig someone up completely and charge them. A few years later, you charge them again to remove the damage. What's not to love about this business model?

We should soon have the good ship f'wit afloat with all the crew flexing their muscles like a vision of half-erased Stilton.

And everyone they carry laughing at them. :p
 
:shock: I have several tattoo's & I do want more, but I'll never understand why some people have them on their faces. The skinhead one on the above link was really nasty :nooo:
 
Another storm in the teacup of local news:

HIV sufferer's anger at Helston tattoo refusal
7:00am Wednesday 15th August 2012

A Porkellis woman living with HIV has hit out after saying she was refused a tattoo by a Helston studio.
Veritee Reed-Hall’s allegations have been strongly denied by the owners of Hell’s Gate, who have insisted the decision was actually to protect her.

Mrs Reed-Hall said she had wanted her first tattoo, at the age of 59, to feature an entwined red and pink ribbon – red for HIV awareness and pink for breast cancer, to which she has lost friends and family members in the past.

She said she felt angry and “humiliated” at being refused by Hell’s Gate. Mrs Reed-Hall, who contracted HIV from her husband after he became infected while in Brazil, said: “It really makes my blood boil. I know the reason is they’re worried about their other customers. People are so ignorant.
“I think it’s total discrimination and I’m so angry. My real anger is anybody who thinks I would risk someone else – what do they think of people with HIV? “We don’t want anybody to get this. We’re living with the stigma and everything it entails.”

Mrs Reed-Hall said she had spoken in depth with her consultant, who assured her that provided disposa[ble] needles, lines and universal protection were used there would be no risk.

Studios in Falmouth and Penzance had already said they would carry out the procedure, but as it was to be her first tattoo she was nervous and would have preferred to be closer to home in case she had a bad reaction.

Jane Morse of Hell’s Gate told the Packet that far from being concerned about an infection being transferred – with their equipment single use and surgically sterilised – the reason for refusal was the shop had always had a policy not to tattoo anyone that could potentially have a lowered immune system. In addition to anyone with HIV, the list included cancer patients, women who were pregnant or breastfeeding, sufferers of epilepsy or diabetes and anyone with hepatitis or who had undergone a surgical procedure in the previous 12 months.
These conditions could potentially put them at greater risk of infection, with a tattoo effectively being an open wound.
“A tattoo could possibly be detrimental to them. We want our customers to go away with the best possible outcome,” said Mrs Morse. While Mrs Reed-Hall had told the shop she was not immunocompromised, Mrs Morse said she could not prove this.

“It was not because we felt we were at risk tattooing her. It’s because we want the best outcome for our customers,” she added. “It isn’t stigmatising somebody with HIV.”

Mrs Moore [sic] said her husband had built up the small family business from nothing and was upset by Mrs Reed-Hall’s claims, adding: “We want to try and do the best by people.”

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/98 ... al/?ref=mr
 
The tattooist is absolutely correct, and it sounds like they have high standards that they stick to.
That's a great advert for them, right there.
 
Interesting article:

The rise of the Maori tribal tattoo
By Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
University of Waikato, New Zealand

Moko - the art of tattoo - has always been part of the Maori world in New Zealand. It is about beauty, and belonging. And it is much more than skin deep.

When the first European explorers came into the Pacific, they were stunned by the patterning they saw on the faces and bodies of the island peoples, from Rapanui in the east, to Hawaii in the north, the westward islands of Samoa and Tonga and in the temperate south of Aotearoa - the Maori word for New Zealand.

Their languages, myths, values were similar. Tatu, or tatau, was the word used for the adornment of the skin by pricking or cutting and then applying colour. The 18th Century mariners carried the word and the tattoo itself to the northern hemisphere.

In ancient times, male facial moko was considered a mark of adulthood and achievement, as much as an active and flattering adornment. Usually the faces of men were marked from forehead to throat, creating a mask-like effect which enhanced the bone structure, softened or strengthened the features, and confirmed the virility of the warrior or the wisdom of the shaman/orator.

Each line attests to the man's courage - taking moko is a painful and exacting process, and the Maori technique particularly so.
Unlike the other Pacific peoples who used comb-like instruments that tapped the ink into the skin, the Maori used scalpel-sharp chisels, which cut and scarred, gouging a raised pattern on the cheeks, forehead, eyelids, and chin.

No two facial moko are ever alike. It is usually gendered - a woman's facial adornment is restricted to a panel from the central forehead (rarely done today), nostrils and below to the rich darkening of the upper and lower lips, and a design on the chin continuing into the throat.

The most common choice is the chin pattern, or kauae, which persisted throughout the colonial period, and which I saw and admired as a child growing up in the 1950s. Maori women have always had facial tattoos. Despite missionary disgust, settler vilification, rude stares and comments from strangers, they have sustained the tradition.

Why? Because it is a particular aesthetic. It defines and flatters the face, it draws attention to the eyes and lips, and a particularly skilled artist can correct flawed features and offer an illusion of beauty. And the illusion is beneath the skin, in the ink, forever

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19628418
 
You can still see the best Maori facial tattoos when you go to a game of the NZ "All Blacks" Rugby team.

Their fans still love them.

bb9982fb-e5a0-4721-92f8-b847be1e5fddHiRes.JPG
 
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