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kottke.org posts about tattoos

Postmastectomy Tattooing Helps Women with Breast Cancer Heal

Postmastectomy Tattoos

Postmastectomy Tattoos

David Allen is a tattoo artist who does postmastectomy tattooing. He works with women who survive breast cancer to design and implement tattoos that cover scarring from mastectomies, transforming what might be seen as a destructive disfigurement into something creative and beautiful. Here’s Allen writing for The Journal of the American Medical Association (abstract):

I am a tattoo artist who works with women after they’ve had mastectomies to transform their sense of disfigurement and loss of control into feelings of beauty and agency. On a good day, I can heal with my art.

The women with breast cancer with whom I work share a feeling that they’ve been acted upon — by cancer, the health industrial complex and its agents, the sequelae of their treatments. Their physical and psychological points of reference are destabilized, having changed so quickly. A successful tattooing experience establishes a new point of reference, a marker that’s intimately theirs that replaces their sense of rupture and damage with an act of creation and, in my work, images of natural life.

Allen even does “solidarity tattoos” for his clients’ partners and friends. You can see more of his postmastectomy work on Instagram.


Green Screen Tattoos

In order to create the illusion of motion, tattoo artists are creating tattoos with large green areas to use them as green screens for custom motion graphics. Watch the first five seconds of this video and you’ll get the gist:

(via @tedgioia)


How Prison Tattoos Are Made

Prison Tattoos.jpeg

People are fascinated by prison tattoos. (I include myself in “people.”) This post at Mental Floss tries to spell out their meanings. The Economist’s Wade Zhou has crunched their numbers. And for The Marshall Project, Joseph Darius Jaafari digs into their technologies and economies: how they are made and how they circulate.

In Reddit threads and YouTube videos, former inmates describe the painstaking task of making tattoo machines and colored ink. Prisoners take apart beard trimmers or CD players to get at the tiny motor, which they can adapt to make the tattoo needle go up and down quickly enough. (Tattoo artists who use beard trimmers can quickly put the shaver back on and trick guards searching for contraband.)

The needle itself is often made from a metal guitar string split in two by holding it over an open flame until it snaps in half, creating a fine point. The springs inside gel pens can also flatten into needles.

One former prisoner who now runs a tattoo shop said he used to make black ink by trapping soot in a milk carton placed over a burning pile of plastic razors or Bible pages. He would mix the leftover ash and soot with a bit of alcohol (for hygienic purposes). To get color, some inmates use liquid India ink that family members buy from arts and crafts stores.

Why Bible pages, I wonder? Is it an availability thing or a ritual thing? Or both?


How to read a Russian criminal’s tattoos

Arkady Bronnikov is an expert when it comes to translating the tattoos of criminals in Russia. To date, he’s collected over 20,000 tattoos, and he’s compiled a “jail slang” dictionary with over 10,000 terms.

The Siberian Times reports:

“Some general rules: crosses often depict the thief’s level of authority. Thiefs are the ones ruling in jails, not murderers.

“Tattoos with knives mean those jailed for hooliganism. Tattoos with beasts - lions, wolves, tigers - mean those jailed for violent robberies. Spiders and syringes indicate drug users.

“The church is another frequent symbol, the number of domes means the number of jail terms, just like rings. Often they have to add extra domes, even though they do not look right for the design.

“There is a lot of text in tattoos. For example, ‘Damn those who decided to improve a man with the help of jail’ or ‘Jail is not a school and prosecutor is not a teacher.’”

russian-tattoos.jpg


The Force is with your ink

Marisa Kakoulas at Needles and Sins has a cool post on “Star Wars” tribute tattoos.

The one you see here is by A.D. Pancho.

star-wars-tattoo.jpg


Life lessons from a tattooer

batman-tattoo.jpg

Leslie Rice (whose work you see here) is a second-generation tattoo artist who’s been tattooing for twenty years, and here’s the number one thing he’s learned: “Women are tougher than men.”

“Women and men have a very different approach to traumatic things like getting tattoos. Women are far more willing to accept it and go with the flow, whereas men will try and fight it, so you end up in this horrible situation where men end up vomiting and passing out and falling on the floor, and the women don’t tend to do that.”

(via Needles and Sins)


The boy with the lightning tattoo

People who are struck by lightning are sometimes left with tattoo-like markings called Lichtenberg figures or lightning flowers. This guy was out tending to his garden when he was struck and left tattooed, Potter-like.

Lightning tattoo

(via neatorama)


Fluorescing tattoo for tracking body chemicals

Using a modified iPhone and a fluorescing nanoparticle tattoo, researchers at Northeastern University have found a way to monitor chemicals in the blood without drawing blood.

The team begins by injecting a solution containing carefully chosen nanoparticles into the skin. This leaves no visible mark, but the nanoparticles will fluoresce when exposed to a target molecule, such as sodium or glucose. A modified iPhone then tracks changes in the level of fluorescence, which indicates the amount of sodium or glucose present. Clark presented this work at the BioMethods Boston conference at Harvard Medical School last week.

The tattoos were originally designed as a way around the finger-prick bloodletting that is the standard technique for measuring glucose levels in those with diabetes. But Clark says they could be used to track many things besides glucose and sodium, offering a simpler, less painful, and more accurate way for many people to track many important biomarkers.


Designy kids tattoos

Tattly is selling “designy, cool, typographic” temporary tattoos from designers including Frank Chimero, Jessica Hische, and Chris Glass.

Tattly

More about Tattly at Swissmiss:

After applying many bad-clip-art tattoos on my daughter Ella, I decided to stop complaining and take matters into my own hands. I was ready to put designy, cool, typographic tattoos on my daughter, or myself for that matter. The idea for Tattly was born.


Math and science-themed tattoos

Math and science-themed tattoos. More info here. (via random foo)


Tattoos for blind people can be made

Tattoos for blind people can be made by placing implants under the skin to create embossed text on the skin.

Update: Somewhat related is braille graffiti. (thx, jake)


Infrared photography of some NBA players. In

Infrared photography of some NBA players. In the photos, the uniforms are almost completely white and tattoos “pop” quite a bit, particularly on some of the more darker skinned players. (via th)


Barcode tattoos + mobile phones with cameras = business

Barcode tattoos + mobile phones with cameras = business card (or, say, a list of your sexual preferences) on your arm.


Tattoo copyrights and lawsuits

Tattoo copyrights and lawsuits. David Beckham is being threatened with a lawsuit by his tattooist should he and his wife “go ahead with a promotional campaign highlighting their body art”.


I made a decision a

I made a decision a couple days ago. I’m going to stop using all lowercase text in my writing (except for here because the style has already been established and I don’t care to change it).

Why change? It’s getting old, and it is harder for people to read. I’ll still use it occasionally, when it is warranted, but for the most part, I’ll be using capital letters again, just like most of you.

So, if you receive a piece of personal correspondence from me that’s written in lowercase, feel free to kick my ass.


Things have been happening

Things have been happening. No, let me rephrase that: Things™ have been happening. That’s why I’ve been less than punctual in updating this journal, and to a lesser extent, this Web site. Here’s what’s been going on:

The first Thing™ is that I quit my job. Finally. I worked at Imation Internet Studio/Imaginet for almost two years…and it was fun…for a while. Then, I figured out that it just wasn’t the place for me…in almost every way one can imagine. So I quit. I’m going to take two or three weeks off to walk the earth and then figure out what I’m going to do next: freelance Web design or sign on with another (better) Web shop here in Minneapolis. Decisions, decisions.

As for the second Thing™….no comment.