This guy is my new hero.

I’m trying to find interesting symbols that mean ‘nothing’.

Not devoid of meaning; no, i want symbols that represent nothing.

Null, zip, zilch. Not zero, which is a numeric value; but the concept of nothing.

It’s hard to google for ‘nothing’ though.

Anyone know of any such symbols? I keep thinking Buddhist traditions must have some powerful symbols for it; i just can’t seem to lay hands on them.

…and yes, I am working on a tattoo concept. Because when am I not?

My boss, Jeff – well, my boss’s boss’s boss now, but nevermind – my boss just walked up to me and gave me an action item.

“Get a backpiece,” he said.

The backpiece. I tried to find this on wikipedia and couldn’t (I should go add a page for it). Best I could do was a page at BMEZine. They state it simply enough as ‘a large format tattoo substantially covering the area of the back from the nape of the neck to the buttocks, typically of a unified design theme or concept.’

That’s not the whole story though. Because for those of us who are largely covered, or plan or hope to be largely covered, the back is the showpiece, the feature. It’s The Tattoo.

The body is a strange canvas. It’s curved and elastic, it ages, it changes. It moves. This makes it a difficult surface upon which to paint a masterpiece. It’s both what makes tattooing so alive, so beautiful, and what makes the tattooists’ job interesting and difficult.

How often – monthly, weekly, daily – are they confronted with a request for a tattoo that simply won’t work in the chosen spot? Tattoos that are too big, or are the wrong shape; things that will break up or distort due to the skin’s motion. Things that don’t line up with the bone structure or muscles. How often does a customer come in with a design for a band that may work on a football player’s heavily muscled arms but which won’t fit on a bony bicep; which may work on a giant Samoan calf but won’t fit on a slender runner’s tapered leg.

The body isn’t symmetrical; arms and legs are not cylindrical.

Thus the tattooed, and the tattooist, try to fit what is desired, envisioned, requested, onto a space that isn’t the same as the artist’s canvas, the computer screen, the sketch-pad. We must wrap the last supper so that Bartholomew is next to Simon; we must turn the Aztec calendar from a disk to a curve, like a swordsman’s shield. And as artists, tattooists must also be 3-D modelers, turning a flat-rendered design into something that wraps and winds and lives in three dimensions.

But there’s one place that isn’t so much like this.

The back.

Read more “Tattoo Action Items from the Boss Man”

Wow.

From SFGate:

A nurse measures one of the many insult tattoos inscribed on a woman’s body by her former boyfriend in Changchun, China. Zhou Jingzhi used a sewing needle dipped in ink to forcibly tattoo the woman and two lovers he was holding hostage. He has reportedly been sentenced to death for the deed.

The whole story, what little I can find of it, is here.

Ya know, I’m big on the marking. That may not be news. I’ve got lots of fantasies about marking a lover, by ink or fire or blade. I’ve even shared certain fantasies of forcible marking with those who love the more, say, non-consent flavor of fantasy. You know – the movie Tattoo, which I recall as being lame but which I love in concept.

But what I don’t get? Insults. That one’s just a head-scrtatcher. The ugly scratchings.

I wish I could see more of this, though. I want to see all the marks and thier meaning. I’m perversely fascinated by the entire episode.

I need to get tattooed.

I’m having a complete ink-junkie moment. I don’t even care what I get right now, I just need to get tattooed.

I’m having a very strong urge to blow off work and just go. I don’t have any plan for where to go or what to get. Oakland, Santa Cruz, maybe one of the local shops I know by repute but haven’t been tattooed at.

I don’t care. I just need to get ink.

*sigh*

I’m having one of those ‘I desperately need to get tattooed’ fits. I dunno if this connects to teh mood I woke up yesterday (long past, pretty much purged by writing it, though thanks all for the offers of gifts, distractions and sexual favors), or if it’s just time.

But I’ve suddenly got tattoo images drifting through my head and am suddenly making plans rather than just visualizing possibilities.

It got worse yesterday evening; I walked over to a friday beer bash at work to see new products, and ran into an old friend who now works at my company (coincidentally the host of the halloween party where this photo was taken) who was telling me about a sacred heart tattoo he’s set to get today from my pal Klem. And I could suddenly hear the machines, feel the needles.

And my head’s ready to boil over.

I started last week I guess, with the sudden inspiration about the Samurai no Kokoroe phrase (though I don’t find that calling to me the way it did a week ago). But no – it started eariler, with a plan to get tattooed while I was in Anaheim. That didn’t pan out due to the usual ‘I forget how disneyland exhausts me’ problem, but I’d gotten revved to feel the needle.

But in the last week it’s gotten worse. I’ve talked to a couple friends about planned tattoos, and a couple older ideas have bubbled back up. I’m picturing some polynesian things on my right arm and hand, a celtic thing I want Pat Fish to do (the current idea is something related to Manannan mac Lir). There’s the Dead Men Tell No Tales idea that Jack Rudy in Anaheim was gonna do but I may have someone up here do it. And I’ve been picturing a tattoo based on the old symbols for argumentation, the closed fist (logic) and open hand (persuasion, rhetoric). I started to picture them as skeletal hands, and it started to make sense if I can just figure out where to put them.

That’s on top of queue of tattoos I already have planned; the Life on the Ocean Waves backpiece (Anyone wanna go into that tattoo shop in SD for me and see if they can snap a picture of the flash?), the Pirate Wench deal, the Hulalupe. I need to finish my right arm. I want to get the pig ‘n chicken on my feet (an old sailors anti-drowning charm). I want a FTW tattoo.

I just have that feeling – that need. That jones. I need to get tattooed.

     I don’t even feel it
     But lord how I need it