Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)

Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)

Friday, November 18, 2011

Tatts Ahoy!

I like looking at people's tattoos. It's a way of vicariously living out my wild streak, because let's face it, were I a slightly different person, leading a slightly different life, I'd be inked, baby. Prolly some great wizard, or a barbarian with a sword, fighting a dragon. Something really good like that.

Anyways, occasionally I am impressed by people's tatts, but mostly I'm just baffled. People make strange choices about what they would like to have permanently branded on their bodies.

The other day I saw a girl in her early 20's with a dolly tattooed on her arm, a really big one. All well and good, except that it was a zombie dolly with green decaying skin and red eye balls. Fabbo for your edgy early 20's, but what if she has kids down the track? They are going to be traumatised daily by Mummy's terrifying death dolly. they'll be more scarred for life than she is. Another girl I saw was more thoughtful. She had a big Snow White scene on her arm, all Disney and lovely, with cute lil' watery eyed dwarfs fawning about the place. Her future daughters say thank you.

The train was crowded this morning, and I stood right behind this other lady, about three inches from her back. At the top of her neck was some name tattooed in running writing. It was lovely and all, I'm sure, but even from three inches the writing was completely indecipherable. It looked like it had been done with a Magnadoodle- basically just a black, bleedy blob of ink. Nice. But sadly her back lacked that great feature of the Magnadoodle which allows you to delete said black bleedy blob.

This same lady also had a little treble clef tattooed behind her ear. I've seen a fair few peeps with one of those bad boys. I guess it's a bit of a homage to music. "Hey, guess what world, I like music a real lot". Good for you. But this to me has always seemed a bit broad and overly general. No offence, but most people like music a lot. Could you not be a bit more specific about your fondness? It would be like a sailor, rather than having "Mum" tattooed in a love heart on his briny forearm, just getting "Mothers" instead. It doesn't really matter which Mum, I just quite like mothers in general, you know.

There is no other real point to this post. But please continue to get strange tattoos so that I can keep pondering your strange logic when I'm bored on the train.

5 comments:

Karen said...

I just showed my husband this post. He said he saw a guy in the supermarket with a few bars of music tattooed around his wrist. So he asked this guy what the song was, thinking it must be some particularly special tune for him.
Nope. The reply he got was "oh, just some notes...I don't know what they are..."
An improvement on the treble clef perhaps but if I was going to get a tattoo of a musical variety, I'd pick notes from a song that I really really liked. And knew I would like for a long time...

RodeoClown said...

I thought about getting a tat, but then someone pointed out that you don't put a bumper sticker on a Ferrari.

Can't argue with that logic ;)

Anonymous said...

Why a slightly different person/life? Get inked! (Only if E likes the wizard/barbarian idea, though.)

Ben McLaughlin said...

Karen- props to your husband for inquiring. I support that. I reckon random notes is even worse than the treble clef.

Rodeo- I like a bit of healthy self esteem, nice one.

Belle- Wow, encouragement towards a wizard tatt! Thanks for the empowerment.

Anonymous said...

Hey, whatever floats your boat.

I reckon you could convince your kids to eat their vegies every night if you had something like this to back you up (no pun intended):
http://www.galleryoftattoosnow.com/AndyEngelMEMBERS/images/gallery/medium/wizard-back-tattoo.jpg