Remembering Beth, One Year Later

A year ago today, our family was shocked to learn that our cousin Beth had passed unexpectedly over night.

Although she was my wife Melanie's cousin, Beth's personality and caring nature had endeared her to me and to m y children, as well. But that was who Beth was, she drew you in. She cared. She was family.

Beth and I bonded over tattoos and she first appeared on Tattoosday in 2011 in this post that featured a Yankees logo shaded with the stars and stripes.

Last year I had taken a photo of her most recent tattoo, but didn't post it when she was still alive. But when I did post it at the end of the year, I was able to follow it the next day with my wife Melanie's lovely tribute tattoo for her here.

My younger daughter, Shayna, was a kindred spirit with Beth, as their love of the New York Yankees was a common thread that they shared.

Shayna turned eighteen earlier this year and did not wait long to get her first tattoo.

She chose to take the opportunity to honor Beth by replicating the tattoo we all knew and loved on the same spot that Beth had hers. Shayna's new tattoo is below, with Beth's below that:

Shayna's tattoo was inked by Alex McWatt from Three Kings Tattoo in the East Village.

Shayna sat like a champ, as they say, and I know that Beth would have been proud of her and tickled to see her honoring her this way.

She was taken from us too soon. We have the memories, but Melanie and Shayna also have the tattoos that serve as tributes for our cousin who lit up the room with her smile and brought everyone together.

We miss you Beth!

This entry is �2017 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

We Are TEN!

Ten years ago today, Tattoosday was born out of BillyBlog.

A decade and 2078 posts later, we are approaching 4 million page views and still puttering along.

Alex McWatt at Three Kings helped me ring in my 50th year on earth, and 10th year of Tattoosday with this custom-designed eagle with a New York City theme.

Stay tuned as we celebrate our tenth year with lots of fun stuff, including visits from some old friends.

Thanks to you, our loyal readers and contributors, who have been so kind to us over the last decade!

This entry is �2017 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Melanie's Jacaranda-monium

Anyone familiar with the jacaranda tree knows how beautiful they can be. It is this time of year in Southern California, in the months of May and June, when they explode into bursts of purple blossoms that are simply breathtaking.

It only seemed fitting that my wife Melanie, who loves jacarandas, feature them in her next tattoo, and this was the end result:

Here's a closer look:

Melanie elaborated a little more on what inspired her to fill her arm with jacarandas:

"First of all, I love purple. And when I got the purple flower tattooed on my ankle, I realized purple looks really good on my skin.

Also, they remind me of our time in California where we met, the college campus where I met my husband, and so many of my friends, and Pasadena, the only place I really liked living in California.

It was on my list, there were two or three other ideas I really wanted. I knew I wanted this one.

Since I've gotten this, talking to people who were familiar with jacarandas from South Africa, which we only discovered was a place they grew while researching them. This makes me want to go there and visit."

One of the sources for inspiration was this street in Pasadena, Del Mar Boulevard:

This lovely tattoo was done by the incomparable Alex McWatt (@alexthreekings) at Three Kings Tattoo (@threekingstattoo) in Manhattan.

He met with Melanie to discuss the concept and just ran with it, turning this:

into the explosion of purple on Melanie's arm, with the finest attention to details:

Thanks to Alex at Three Kings for another great tattoo, and to Melanie for sharing her jacarandas with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is �2017 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Revisiting My Friday the 13th Tattoo from 2012....

Well, it's Friday the 13th, and I'm travelling today, but I though it would be cool to go back five years, to 2012, and revisit the time I got one of my Friday the 13th tattoos:

People familiar with Tattoosday have seen my Friday the 13th tattoo posts. [As of 2012], Melanie has two and I have one, and I remember watching enviously when she got her first (here), but it was her birthday, so it didn't make sense for me to get one then.

Someone commented on the site back then that I should check out Three Kings Tattoo in Brooklyn, that we wouldn't have to have to wait all day like at Dare Devil, but when the next opportunity came along, we were already looking at Hand of Glory, which was a little closer to home. 

This past January, we missed our chance and as our turned out, HOG was packed and a late arrival would have been for naught.

But there are three Friday the Thirteenths this year, and in April, I called Three Kings. "Sorry," I was told, "we're not doing it this month." Well, I thought, there's always July.

However, it didn't look good for July. My company is closing and as head of Human Resources, I have been coordinating and overseeing layoffs. We had twenty separations scheduled for Friday the Thirteenth.

I didn't want to wait until next May, so I reached out to Alex Mcwatt at Three Kings to see if maybe they could squeeze me in. Not really following the first-come first-served rule, but I thought having showed his work on Tattoosday before (here, here, and here) and showcasing a lot of work from  the other amazingly talented artists at the shop (a full history here), he might consider it. The worst he could do was say no, right?

Alex promptly replied, but he had an unexpected response. My heart sank when he told me they were no longer doing the event. However, he did say he would tattoo me with a piece of old flash if I wanted, just without the Friday the Thirteenth mayhem.

I was, as you might imagine, completely stoked. I got why they decided to stop doing the event. most likely why Hand of Glory also skipped this month as well. Its a great deal if you want a cheap tattoo experience, but who can blame artists for tiring quickly of people wanting cheap experiences? Especially when many of the people getting these novelty items were not always loyal customers, but merely bargain hunters who would only show up once or twice a year to zip in, zip out, and that was that. I totally got it.

It just so happened we were in the neighborhood last Sunday, so Melanie and I stopped in to meet Alex and nail down the details. We confirmed I'd come in on Friday, after a brutal day of work, and I'd pick something off the walls. I had also invited Alex to draw up something new, if he wanted, and that I would be very open and receptive to it, as long as it didn't "gross out my daughters or piss off my wife".

I had once been told by someone I once interviewed that he liked to go into a shop, ask an artist what they were drawing, and ask for that to be tattooed on them, if he dug the art. The concept is, an artist will be much more excited about doing something new and fresh than doing something they modified or have done before. The more enthusiastic the artist is about the design, I believe, the more care and passion they'll put into their work. That's not to say they'll do a poor job on an old piece, but they'll be happier doing something more interesting, and that can only positively impact the final product.

So, I arrived on schedule Friday and Alex showed me something new he has drawn up, a profile of a knight in armor. Way cool. I love the image and I immediately started relating to it. My name, "William," has etymological roots in Europe and derives from Wilhelm, which is a compound of will (or desire) and helm (protection).

I had also been doing some work earlier in the week, looking at my family ancestry on my mother's side. I descend from Englishmen on one branch of the family tree and the Scottish clan Graham on another branch. The design, which he had only recently drawn up resonated with me. When I told Alex this, he nodded and said, "it was in the ether".

From his perspective, when they had been toying with the idea of doing more Friday the 13th flash, Alex said he had been considering drawing from Masonic and the Knights Templar. There's a lot of 13 imagery in those deep mysterious traditions, and back in 1307, there was even an infamous event when a French king had many of the knights arrested on Friday, October 13. See the 13's in the date? I am oversimplifying here, but these arrests led to a wave of anti-templar frenzy in Europe and in the Catholic Church. Many of these knights were tortured and executed, and that initial date of Friday the 13th has often been cited as one of the earliest example of the superstition surrounding the unlucky thirteenth day.

But, I digress. Let's cut to the chase. Alex did a phenomenal job:

This is just above my right ankle, on the outer side of my leg. The lines and shading are brilliant. The photo above was taken by Alex on my Samsung Galaxy IIs, so it is still a little bloody, but you can see what a great job he did. 

Thanks again, from the bottom of my heart, to Alex McWatt, for making this an awesome Friday the Thirteenth to remember!

This entry is �2012, 2017 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

A Sugar Skull for Beth

Yesterday we shared our late cousin Beth's tattoo (here).

After her funeral, my wife Melanie was talking with her tattoo artist Thomas "Thomi Hawk" Hickey, and she knew she wanted a new tattoo paying tribute to her cousin.

Although she would have loved to have something from Thomi, it was logistically challenging, as we do not have a car and Thomi works out of New Jersey. The idea for a tribute evolved to include several ideas and, eventually, Melanie knew what she wanted. The question was, who would be the best artist for the job?

In the end, the answer was simple, and we headed back to Three Kings Tattoo in the East Village to meet with Alex McWatt, the artist who did Melanie's previous tattoo,

She consulted with him first to come up with a basic concept and talk about the elements she wanted incorporated into the piece, and then a few weeks later, she was back in the shop, with that old familiar sound of a tattoo machine buzzing in her ear.

Alex McWatt in Action

And when she first saw it, she was pleased:

This is the tattoo, as it was first completed:

And a healed version, from a different angle:

Melanie wanted a Sugar Skull to honor Beth. Beth's favorite holiday was Halloween, and the sugar skull is associated with the Mexican celebration of D�a de los Muertos, which coincides with Halloween,and All Saints' Day in early November, when people gather together to remember, honor and celebrate friends and family members who have died.

Because we are Jewish, Alex replaced the cross often found in sugar skulls with a Star of David. The paw print in the middle of the star is an homage to Beth and her wrist tattoo, shared yesterday, which Alex used as a reference to add to the design.

Melanie also asked for the spider, perched on top of the rose, also as a nod to Beth and her love of Halloween. One of Beth's sisters told us that, when they went to Beth's house after the funeral, there were a lot of spiders around the house, and that they had never noticed spiders there before.

Melanie loves her new tattoo and wears it proudly as a fitting tribute to Beth.

Thanks to Alex at Three Kings, who we cannot praise enough, for his fine work.

We miss you Beth, but Melanie's sugar skull makes us smile and think of you. We know you'd love it too.

This entry is �2016 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.