Tattoo flash
Tattoo Flash
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Tattoo Instruction | No Comments
Tattoo flash refers to tattoo designs that hang on the walls of a tattoo parlor and are available for potential tattoo customers to choose from for tattooing. Such displays of tattoo designs originated from traditional Western tattooing styles and the way flash is drawn is highly systematic.
For example, flash found in tattoo parlors within the same neighborhood often differ only in slight subtle ways and the designs mainly involve pinups images of women, military insignia, ships, fierce animals, knives, and skulls.
Sheets of tattoo flash were first put up for sale by a certain “Lew the Jew” Alberts, a wallpaper designer and tattooist in the early 1900s. Before the availability of tattoo flash, a tattooist who would like to reproduce another tattooist´s design has to copy that design off of a customer´s body.
The brilliant Alberts spotted the business opportunity and started producing tattoo flash that any tattooist could buy and quickly set up a tattoo parlor. Once a flash sheet is acquired by a tattooist, he can simply copy it entirely or make slight alterations, and then use it as his own. Because of such flagrant but legal copying and reproduction, it was quite difficult to identify the original creator of the flash.
Nonetheless, the introduction of tattoo flash gave rise to a win-win situation as the tattooist improved the possibility of sealing a deal by rapidly offering different design choices to customers. In turn the customers can save on valuable time and money. However, even if a tattooist had multiple sheets of flash, the number of choices was still rather limited.
As a result the use of tattoo flash, certain designs or variations of these designs subsequently became classics, worn by a majority of tattooed people in a particular social group. Fads can certainly change over time but certain classic tattoo designs such as the rose remain wildly popular today.
Currently tattooists who offer tattoo flash will use a piece of translucent rice paper to transfer a design to the customer´s body. First, the rice paper is placed over the sheet of flash. Then, the design is directly traced on the paper thereby producing a stencil. Finally, the tattooist will apply a little carbon powder onto the stencil and transfer the design onto the body before actual tattooing.
In the 1980s a wave of change came about when tattoo parlors began to move towards contemporary tattoos or custom designs. Until then, most tattoo parlors had flash covering most walls, the front windows and often the ceiling as well. For those who enjoy the intricate flash designs, you can easily buy a “pork chop sheet” or a sheet of cheap flash designs for a dollar or so.
Article from www.americanchronicle.com
Printable Tattoo Designs
Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | Tattoo Instruction | No Comments
Awesome Tattoo design site
Why “Printable Tattoo Designs”
To get a very cool, meaningful and regretless tattoo design is the first important thing before getting a tattoo.
Tattoo is a lifelong mark in body and getting a tattoo can be very painful. It is not wisedome to get a tattoo without thinking it over. Getting a tattoo in impulse can result in a lot of trouble. It is very difficult to remove a tattoo and the procedure is more painful than getting a tattoo, removal is more expensive too.
Think twice and research more before getting a tattoo is a must to do thing. When you get a satisfied idea and it looks you will not regret in 10 years at the least, then you can get it in your body.
Where to get ideas? Different kinds of tattoo galleries are good resources. Here comes printable tattoo designs. These online tattoo galleries provide tattoo design ideas, advices and printable tattoo designs.
Professional Printable Tattoo Designs
Tattoo parlors’ “artists” are professional at some tattoo designs, but few are professional in different of types of tattoo designs. As we know, getting a tattoo is a very big thing for us, so we’d better get more info from encyclopedia. Tattoo galleries are encyclopedias. Most of galleries have more professional designs than a single tattoo parlor. You can get the best designs of different types of tattoo.
Where to Printable Tattoo Designs
Here we get a lot of tattoo galleries link at the right of the webpage, you can go and check them. Review of Best Tattoo Design Websites also gives much info to you.
The Most Impressive Tattoo I Have Ever Seen
Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Tattoo Blog, Tattoo Designs | 1 Comment
As a tattoo fans, I have seen a lot of tattoo designs. Some designs are horrible, some are awesome, some are beautiful, some are thoughtful, some are meaningful etc. All are impressive. But I’d like to say the following is the most impressive one which shocked me from head to toe.
San Francisco Chronicle: Text Tattoos Gaining Popularity
Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | Tattoo Blog | 2 Comments
Text Tattoo
(Sunday, September 7, 2008 Heidi Benson):
A poet with a laptop walks into a bar.
He orders a beer and begins scrolling Web sites of “literary tattoos.”
He sees a man’s back entirely inscribed with the first page of “Fight Club.” The tattoo looks fresh, red and painful. He sees a woman holding aside her hair to show the nape of her neck, where this line by e.e. cummings - “be of love a little more careful than of anything” - appears on her freckled flesh. Then, with a sharp shock, he stops scrolling. He has come upon his own words, inked on skin.
Many living writers might have just this experience, including Bay Area poet Robert Hass, the UC Berkeley professor of English, winner of this year’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and former poet laureate of the United States.
On the Web site Contrariwise.org, this line from Hass’ poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” appears in blue script on a young woman’s arm: “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
San Francisco is a creative crucible for tattooing, piercing and other body art. It was North Beach visionary V. Vale, of RE/Search Publications, who named the trend in his 1989 book, “Modern Primitives,” which the editors of the avant-garde North Beach publishing house called “an anthropological inquiry into a contemporary social enigma - the increasingly popular revival of ancient human decoration practices.”
Since then, tattoos have emerged from the underground. In fact, they’re mainstream. The styles are ever-evolving and, in recent years, “script” or text tattoos have gained in popularity.
“I’ve noticed more and more people with a bit of Dickinson or Kafka or Nietzsche somewhere on their bodies,” said San Francisco poet Kim Addonizio. “It’s natural that writers and literary readers would be drawn to commemorating some bit of language that has moved or changed them - or that maps a direction they want to go.”
She co-edited the 2002 book “Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos,” a collection of work by Ray Bradbury, Sylvia Plath, Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, William T. Vollmann and others. (The title refers to a tiny star on Parker’s arm.)
Message art form
Internationally known San Francisco tattoo artist and historian Lyle Tuttle attests to the popularity of “script or written-word” tattoos. It makes sense. “Tattooing is a message art form,” said Tuttle, who once inked a 135-line poem on a chest. “Tattoos are exterior decorations for interior feeling.”
A case in point is Beth Loster, 24, a San Francisco writer and waitress who was a student at UC Berkeley when she met a young man who said, “Hey, we have tattoos in the same font.”
The text of her tattoo - “clad in the panoply of love” - came from “Science & Health” by Mary Baker Eddy. “I like the way the written word looks on the body,” she said. “And that phrase made me feel safe.” His tattoo, also in a “typewriter” typeface, was in Latin. (She can’t recall the translation.)
The text of Loster’s next tattoo was written by that young man, who had become her boyfriend. Before leaving for South America, where he was going to study, he left a note on her refrigerator that began, “this is on account of my loving you forever.” That phrase - in the form of a tattoo - offered her comfort when he was killed in a car accident in Brazil.
“After he passed away, I got it for him,” Loster said. The typeface is from one of the vintage manual typewriters she collects: “I typed it up and brought it in.”
Several years have passed, and she is asked about it nearly every day. “I talk about his death more than I would normally,” she said. “But that’s good. It reminds me that something good happened and something bad happened and, somehow, it’s all OK.”
Acknowledging personal history is also the motivation behind the tattoos of Jon Woo, 29, manager of a sports shoe shop in San Francisco.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, he got his first tattoo - of his last name, in Chinese, on his left shoulder - when he was 17.
“At the time, tattoos weren’t as widely accepted,” he said. “I’ve watched the progression as tattoos have gone from taboo-esque to mainstream.”
The one that sparks the most comment is a line on his arm, “As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re going to be dizzy and we’re going to make mistakes,” by comic and author Mel Brooks.
“I have tripped and fallen and picked myself up so many times,” Woo said, explaining the tattoo’s significance. “I wanted to get it somewhere where I could see it and others could see it.”
“It’s a statement to everybody, about my life, about everybody’s life. People respect it,” he added. “They read it and say, ‘That’s so true,’ and it is.”
Michaela Healy, 22, a cook in San Francisco, has been fascinated with tattoos since she was 10 years old, growing up in Encinitas, in San Diego County. That’s when her older sister brought over a friend who had a tattoo of a huge tiki god on his shoulder. “I saw him the day he got it,” she said.
Teenage tattoo
Before her 18th birthday, she got her own first tattoo - the name of her favorite band, the ska band No Doubt - on her upper back.
Since then, she’s gotten others, but the one that stands out artistically is a color rendering of the cover of her favorite comic serial, “Strangers in Paradise,” with art by Terry Moore.
“The cover tells the whole story of the book,” Healy said. “Sex, drugs, government conspiracy, struggling with sexuality, mercenaries, assassins and, ultimately, love.”
She doesn’t mind being asked about her tattoos, which happens often. “That’s OK,” she said. “It’s half the reason I have them. This is the art that I’ve chosen to put out there.”
Illustrations from beloved books can have emotional power beyond words, as Ken Samuels, 44, a San Francisco bookseller, will attest.
On both arms, he has tattoos of illustrations from his favorite children’s books, including Max from “Where the Wild Things Are,” Harold from “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” Peter from “The Snowy Day,” Thelonious Monk from “Mysterious Thelonious” and Ferdinand the Bull.
“These books made me love reading,” he said. “I loved the characters’ persistence and creativity in the face of difficulties and their ultimately successful journeys home.”
Samuels didn’t get his first tattoo until he was in his mid-30s. “I became reacquainted with these books when my nephews were little boys,” he said, “and I got the tattoos in tribute to them and their future journeys into the world.”
Whether they inscribe themselves with words or illustrations, a good portion of San Francisco artists, book lovers and wordsmiths are likely to continue to find personal expression in tattoos.
Poet Addonizio - who has five tattoos, but no text yet - is discerning. She is taking her time.
“As soon as I find the right words,” she said, “they’ll be inked somewhere on my skin.”
