Brianna's Sleeve of Shapes

I met Brianna earlier this month across from Federal Hall in the Financial District. I generally don't like to take pictures of sleeves, because it's hard to do them full justice, but sometimes they are so interesting, I can't resist.

I love the design of this tattoo. Brianna explained that she has always been fascinated by shapes and geometry, and the hexagram in the top photo features a segment of spine, which is a nod to the fact that she has dealt with spinal issues since she was a child.

She credited this work to Lacey Burnett at Twisted Anchor Tattoo (@twistedanchortattoo) in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Thanks to Brianna for sharing her cool sleeve 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.

Ryan Black's Sleeve Recalls the Rockaways (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Our next tattooed poet, Ryan Black, has some amazing work on his arms:

Ryan tells us that the tattoo that dominates his arm

"references a 1952 film titled This Is Cinerama, which opens with a shot from the front of The Atom Smasher, a wooden roller coaster at Rockaways' Playland in South Queens. I grew up taking the A train to Rockaway Beach every summer in the late 80s/early 90s, a different time in the history of New York City. Rockaways' Playland was abandoned by then, and my friends and I would race through the shuttered park. I thought the opening of This Is Cinerama would make a graphically interesting tattoo. The artist is Tommy Helm (@tommyhelmart), who runs Empire State Studio (@empirestatestudio) [in Amityville, NY]. I've known Tommy for about 15 years."

Ryan also sent us the following poem, "This Is Cinerama," which, he explained "works with the same source material." The tattoo predates the poem, which first appeared in Ploughshares.

This Is Cinerama


Because the foot fractures, because the body turns soft. Because
            the mind says six miles nine miles twelve miles, and I haven�t run
in weeks. Because another relationship is ended, I take two Advil,

            and go to the movies. A retrospective; the sixtieth anniversary print
of This Is Cinerama, Lowell Thomas�s love note to technology
            and travel. It opens with Thomas, in black and white, behind a desk

littered with paper, lecturing on a history of representation. Cave
            drawings, Egyptian murals, the Renaissance on the verge of motion.
Then motion: Kircher�s magic lantern and the zoetrope, Mathew Brady,

            father of photojournalism, bringing his studio to the battlefields
of the American Civil War. By the time Edison enters the narrative,
            Lowell Thomas has turned reverent. The Black Maria, the penny arcade.

Valentino and Banky. Then, Ladies and gentlemen, he intones, sounding
            every bit the showman he�d become, This Is Cinerama, and the curtain
opens, revealing a louvered screen curved in ratio to the retina.

            It�s 1952. Rockaway Beach. To demonstrate the full scope of their vision,
the filmmakers have rigged their tri-lens camera to the front car
            of the Atom Smasher, the wooden roller coaster at Rockaways� Playland.

I walked its ruins as a boy; a housing complex, now. A shopping center.
           But, tonight, its motored gears clack and catch as we climb the lift hill
to a pan vista of the Atlantic shoreline, then drop like a bucket

           into the first banked turn. The audience howls; they throw their arms
into the air. The images are dizzying. The man beside me records
          the sequence on his cell phone. But the tone shifts by a long dissolve,

and we�re taken to Milan, to La Scala and the Temple of Vulcan.
          It�s the first-act finale of Verdi�s tragic opera, the grand set piece where
Radam�s and Aida will later be entombed. The camera�s static, mournful.

         Culture, thought Thomas. Spectacle and sound. And from there,
the scale just grows: Niagara Falls, �A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,�
         sung by the Long Island Choral Society. Spectacle and sound. The tour

of Europe, the Basilica San Marco, monuments to fallen empire,
         though somewhere between the Sch�nbrunn Palace and Zaragoza�s
Plaza de Toros, I lose interest, my mind wanders. I think of you.

        Of your mother�s dying. How I heard it from a friend, who spoke plainly,
as if discerning the weather. We�d been out of touch, you and I,
        for more than a year, but I wanted to find you, then. To go to you.

To say something to a life without her. I wished I�d been there when
        you learned; a stranger to your grief. I was still a boy when my father
died. Foreign to me, now, that loss was absolute, unadorned. And so,

        it was manageable. I cried in spasms until I slept. A vexed relationship
persists, I think. Nothing cools. When the movie ends, I sit slumped
        in my seat until the lights come back, until an usher eyes me from 

across the theater. I want to show someone how they got it wrong.
        You missed the point; you got it wrong. But I�ve been telling stories,
again. I�ve been talking to myself. The truth is: I haven�t been

         to the doctor. My foot swells, but I haven�t seen a doctor. The truth is:
the film was screened last summer, at the Cinerama Dome in L.A.
        And because the sun in California is the sun in California, because

New York is out of sorts. Because another relationship is ended,
        I can think of nowhere else, no one else but you. We walked North Beach,
talking about adaptations, about Flushing Meadows, La Flor Bakery,

        about your mother, who was gone, and, what more, I can�t remember.
We said goodbye at Fourth and King, and the waning light made your face
        look younger. And knowing. Later, I followed the basin to AT&T Park,

bought a ticket from a scalper, in the left-field bleachers. There was no
        moment of her going, nothing to call back or contend. You can�t spend
what you ain�t got, the song goes. Can�t lose what you never had. I tried

        calling in the seventh, but you didn�t answer. The Giants tied it in the ninth,
then won it on a walk-off.

~ ~ ~

Ryan Black is he author of Death of a Nativist, winner of the 2016 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Linda Gregerson. He was a finalist for the 2016 Alice James Award and the 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. He has published previously in AGNI, The Journal, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, The Millay Colony for the Arts, PLAYA, and the Queens Council on the Arts. He is the Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Queens College/CUNY and lives in Jackson Heights.

Thanks to Ryan for sharing his cool tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is �2017 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.

Curtis Harrell and His Sleeves (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's first (yes, we have two!) Tattooed Poet is Curtis Harrell:

Curtis tells us about his work:

"Strange as it may seem, none of my tattoos, except, of course, the names of my wife and daughters, have particular significance to me. From the beginning I wanted sleeves, and the majority of the tattoos were chosen to fill particular spaces. Most of the tattoos you see in the photo were collected within a couple of years in a few different shops in southern California and Greg�s Tattoos in Little Rock, AR. I guess the significance for me, really, is that I have been sleeved for decades. I wore a lot of ink before it was as popular as it is now. So now, when I see other people with sleeves, I am proud of the patina mine have gathered. I hope my poem explains it better than this."

The Last Tattoo Poem

Forty years ago

I began

To fill my arms with beasts.

I saved my pay

For Charlie, the Hell�s Angel,

On the corner of Victory

And Van Nuys, his needle

Driving my dreams

Underneath my skin,

The eagle, tiger,

Peacock and rose, the dragon

Breathing fire,

The reaper staring down

All of my days.

Charlie scribed the armor

I wore in the rumbling saddle

Of my Harley iron

In the valley of L.A.

***

But time gnaws

Everything, flesh and steel.

The days have dulled

The eagle�s sharpened eye,

The peacock�s talon,

The tiger�s fang and claw,

The rose�s thorn.

The dragon�s flame has withered.

I have burned

Through a thousand skins.

Millions of minutes

Have worn me thin; I�ve been

Weathered by love

And death and countless afternoons

When nothing happened.

***

What persists is the core

Of the self-inflicted scar.

The reason why

I volunteered for pain.

Every stare

Confirms these marks

Are more than skin

Deep. Take, for instance,

The scripture scripted

Over my heart,

Chapter and verse,

The gospel faded

Back into tongues.

~ ~ ~

Curtis Harrell writes and teaches in northwest Arkansas where he also busks with the banjo and leads tours through a cave in the summer. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1985 and has recently had poetry and plays published in The Cave Region Review, The Healing Muse, and riprap journal, where one of his poems was nominated for inclusion in the Pushcart Anthology. His work and writing are informed by the scent of maple being hand-sanded with 200 grit paper, the way last light dapples the sassafras leaves as they crimson in the October dusk, and the loping note of straight pipes on an ironhead Sportster motor. He believes �Foggy Mountain Breakdown,� the crack of a junebug off his Ray-Bans at 70 mph, and the final couplet of a sonnet are all the same thing.

Thanks to Curtis Harrell for sharing his tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!

This entry is �2017 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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.

Sarah and her Snow White Sleeve

I met Sarah on the F train, last month, en route from Manhattan to Brooklyn. When we both got off at Borough Hall to transfer to our respective trains, we chatted a bit and she consented to me snapping a few photos. Check out her sleeve:

That's Snow White, of course, "the first story I was obsessed with," Sarah told me, noting that her first Halloween costume, hand-sewn by her mother, was also that of the fairy tale character.

The details in the sleeve are really amazing. I particularly love the raven:

Sarah credited the work to artist Matt Buck (@he_draws), who started the line work when he was still at Sacred Tattoo (@sacredtattoonyc), in Manhattan. He finished it up at his current shop, No Idols Tattoo (@noidolsnyc).

Thanks to Sarah for sharing her cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

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.

Sean's Stunning Sleeve

Earlier this month, I met Sean outside of a store on Broadway in lower Manhattan.

I generally don't like to post full sleeves on Tattoosday because it is, in my opinion, really hard to do them proper justice.

Once in a while, however, the work is exceptional, and I can't help but try and capture some segments of the sleeve.

I mean, look how great this is:

Sean explained that segments of the sleeve are in memory of a neighbor who was a mother figure for him when growing up. She succumbed to complications from lupus, and the clock and roman numerals link to the date of her death.

We didn't have time to discuss all the elements of this sleeve, but he did credit the work to Tazz (@Tazz_Tatts) who works out of Aztec Ink (@aztecinkbrooklyn) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We've featured work by Tazz at least once before, like this piece which appeared in 2011.

Thanks to Sean for sharing his cool sleeve with us here on Tattoosday!

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.

Some Amazing Black and Grey on Joel's Arm

Last week I met Joel on Broadway, downtown near Bowling Green. His arms were fully tattooed, with a panoply of black and grey work. He was kind enough to share this small section with us:

We talked about the two elements above in great detail.

First is the portrait on his forearm, which Joel explained:

"The tattoo artist is out of Miami, Javier Betancourt (@JavierBetancourt) ... he was doing a week-long stay at Three Kings [in Brooklyn] ... my wife ... found him on Instagram ... I had this idea for something much more subtle, actually, it was just sort of going to be hinting that it was her, it was going to be more Sailor Jerry, or it was going to be a silhouette ... But then we saw his work and - it was the first time I'd seen somebody do [something] like a stylized caricature ... it's very statuesque, as opposed to, like, when you see people get portraits, it's like they're trying too hard to mimic the photograph, whereas he would just take certain accents from the photograph to make the image..."

Needless to say, Joel and his wife were very pleased with the end result.

Directly above the image of his wife is a magnificent skull that spans the middle of his arm. The artist is Tamara Santiba�ez (@TamaraSantibanez) out of Saved Tattoo (@Saved_Tattoo) in Brooklyn. "I just came across her," Joel told me, "because I liked some of the work that I saw."

Thanks to Joel for sharing some of his amazing tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

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.