Temporary tattoos just aren’t interesting.  No matter how good the artwork is, the fact will always remain that it’s temporary and that alone just leaves a lot to be desired.  But uh…well, I just discovered a temporary tattoo that most likely will change the disinterested opinion that a lot of people have toward temporary tattoos.

They’re called “Vatoos”, although some bloggers out there are pushing for that name to be changed to “Twattoos”.  If you don’t know what the hell either one of those names is supposed to refer to, here you go: “Vatoos” or “Twattoos” (if you prefer) are temporary vaginal tattoos.  Apparently this trend is growing and everything from basic small designs to glow in the dark surprises are being air brushed on to the nether regions of hordes of temporary tattoo hungry women.

Hmmm…after watching this video from the Completely Bare spa in New York City, I’m of the opinion that the skill level involved in applying these things needs to improve a great deal.  However, that’s probably nitpicking on my part as I can’t really see many guys (or girls) complaining when they make the discovery that their partner is sporting some airbrushed art (which may or may not glow in the dark) down under.

At $115 (which includes the necessary bikini wax), I kind of wonder why you need to go to a spa like Completely Bare to have the process done.  I mean, can’t you just head over to Toys R Us and pick up a package of temporary tattoos for six bucks or whatever?  Well, whatever the case, I have to admit that the concept of vaginal tattoos is just too much fun to ignore.  If the ladies are liking it, then I say have at it and have fun.  Though I do admit that I prefer the name “Twattoo” over “Vatoo”.

This past weekend was a big one in Phoenix, Arizona as the 2010 Hell City Tattoo Fest took place.  If you’re not familiar with the Hell City Tattoo Fest, then you most likely don’t pay much attention to tattoo conventions/festivals, because Hell City is one of the biggest ones currently going.  Music, tattoos, competitions, up and coming tattoo artists as well as current tattoo legends, vendors, seminars and judging by this photo, some dude in a red, white and blue spandex suit who can fold himself into strange yet intriguing positions.  And that’s only a fraction of everything that goes on at the Hell City Tattoo Fest.  It’s all pretty spectacular, alright.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t lucky enough to be in attendance at either the Columbus, Ohio Hell City Tattoo Fest or this past weekend’s Phoenix Tattoo Fest, but digging around on the internet and finding pictures, video and news about the entire event is kind of like being there, right?  Yeah…I know, it’s a very sad attempt on my part.  I plan to get there one day, but this just wasn’t my year.

At any rate, check out this article for a bit of a taste of the sort of tattoo competitions that went on during the Pheonix Hell City Fest.  There were some outstanding tattoos on display as well as some not so outstanding tattoos from the looks of things, which of course is to be expected any time something as massive as the Hell City Tattoo Fest kicks off.

Italy is a very beautiful country, so it makes sense that it would also be home to a tattoo artist who does very beautiful work.  Miss Arianna makes her home on Italy’s Adriatic Coast at Skinwear Tattoo in the city of Rimini.  For more than two years, Arianna went the traditional route of paying her dues and learning the ways of the tattooist through an apprenticeship.  To her, the apprenticeship is a vital part of a tattoo artist learning to find their way as a serious artist.

It’s this respect for tradition and understanding of its importance that underscores Miss Arianna’s tattoo work, yet at the same time the need to modernize and to move forward with her own twist on the classic American tattoo makes her work fresh and intriguing.

“The style I love to perform is my personal version of the traditional.  I like it because it’s similar to me: it’s direct, clear and solid.  It has a unique strength and balance.  I deeply admire big names such as Sailor Jerry, Bert Grimm, Percy Waters, etc, but I think it’s so limiting to use their flash and only employ the colours of that period.  I don’t like to reshape their flash and put my name on it, as though they were my drawings.  I respect those who do it, but I think that working out my own drawings is definitely more interesting, perceiving what my customer wants, and then perform it in my personal traditional style: solid line, tonnes of black, and full colours.”

– Miss Arianna, Skin Deep Magazine, September 2010

The importance of tattoo artists who want to move forward and yet at the same time maintain links and a strong respect for the past is undeniably important.  After all, trends come and go, but there is never a substitute for hard work and originality.  Miss Arianna proves that.

Tattoos have been accused in some instances of being about personal vanity.  I personally don’t agree with that sort of assessment.  I mean, after all, this is an art form that is so diverse and ultimately so personal that it kind of transcends any attempt at pigeonholing it.  No one ever knows for certain why a person gets the tattoo that they get without outright asking that person their reasons for doing so.

There’s also a somewhat blurred line in some respects as to what exactly qualifies as a tattoo.  Take permanent makeup, for example.  Not a tattoo in the traditional sense, yet it still remains on the body for anywhere from 2-5 years before fading.  Because the makeup does disappear after time and does not remain absolutely permanent like a tattoo puts it on a different level of classification.  In England, anyone under the age of 18 can get permanent makeup put on and that is where a new controversy has started.

Sophie Watson is a 14-year-old girl whose parents have recently allowed her to have her eyebrows, lips and eyes done with permanent makeup.  Watson regularly takes place in beauty pageants and says that she likes having the permanent makeup done because now she doesn’t “need to bother with it every morning”.  The issue has caused people to question what sort of values that this is imparting on a 14-year-old girl, but even beyond that it seems to me that 14 is far too young to be tattooed with anything.

This is a particular scenario in which tattooing is about personal vanity.  If a 14-year-old boy has to wait until he’s 18 (or in some places, older than 16) to have a tattoo done because there is a definite lack of maturity toward the commitment that a tattoo involves, then why should a 14-year-old girl be permitted to be tattooed with makeup, which in some ways is a far more mature commitment than a basic tattoo?  If there isn’t a basic respect for tattoos from an early age – whether they be makeup or traditional – then what’s the point in having laws that dictate when a child can or can’t have a tattoo?  For her part, Sophie Watson already has two very real and very illegal tattoos on her body.  Does this disregard for the law and for the responsibility related to being tattooed have anything to do with the conflicting laws between permanent makeup and tattoos?  Hard to say, but I think that they both should at least be on the same terms with regards to a legal age.

I try to cover a lot of different angles on the tattoo blog.  If it’s about tattoo and it’s something that I haven’t really seen a lot of before, I tend to automatically gravitate towards it.  One of the easiest and most plentiful topics out there in relation to tattoo is the whole Hollywood angle.  You can barely run a quick search on the topic of tattoos on Google without page after page of gossip about Hollywood stars and their brand new tattoos.  I guess I’ve never really focused a lot of energy on reporting on stuff like this because I’ve never really given a crap if Brad Pitt got a new tattoo or not.

But today I found a brief blog post on the UK Guardian news site.  On it the author listed the various movies which contain tattooed characters.  When you really get down to it, over the years there have been a lot of characters in film with tattoos.  At any rate, the article makes a good point as it talks about tattoos in film:

“Most of us will know someone with a tattoo, even if they’re not willing to show it. Inking has definitely become a part of the mainstream, but in cinema it remains something of a novelty. A lot of film characters have become like politicians; make them as bland as possible so as not to offend anyone. Where are the tattooed romantic leads?”

“Whatever the reason, you can generally pigeonhole film characters with tattoos into psychos, gangsters and Angelina Jolie. But at least one thing is certain: these characters always have interesting pasts …”

I can’t help but agree with all of this – why are tattooed people only used as the trouble makers in film? Even if I try really hard to think of a film in which a tattooed character isn’t a criminal or psychopath, all I can really come up with is Adam Goldberg in the 2007 film 2 Days in Paris.  Goldberg plays the American boyfriend of a French woman visiting her parents in Paris.  The fact that I can only recall one film with a positive (more or less) role for a tattooed character is pretty lame – and I watch a lot of films.

Well it might be a while before Hollywood decides to give us a good hearted tattooed character, so I guess that until they do, we’ll just have to enjoy watching the tattooed psychopaths and criminals cause trouble on screen.

Throughout the United States, there is certainly no shortage of tattoo shops.  Like a lot of other countries however, the amount of tattoo studios to choose from changes drastically depending on the city that you find yourself in.  Some cities are very ink friendly, with a large population of tattooed people and a steady supply of talented tattooists.  Others, not so much.  I’ve written a great deal of stuff on the Tattoo Blog about various tattooists in tattoo hot spots like Austin, Texas and pretty much the entire state of California – to name a few.  But it wasn’t until today that I discovered a nice little study which lists the top ten most tattoo-friendly cities in the United States.

So exactly what sort of criteria must a city meet to make this little top ten list?  Well, according to The Today Show.com:

“To figure out which U.S. cities were the most tattoo-friendly, we perused chat forums and looked up every state in several public directories, including Yellow Pages, Google listings, Tattoo Yellow Pages and AAA Tattoo Directory, to find those with the most listed tattoo and permanent makeup shops. Then we looked up which cities in those states had the most shops listed per capita with populations based on latest U.S. Census numbers. We also took into consideration the city’s demographics and whether or not it hosted tattoo conventions, remembering that not all tattoo parlors were listed in the directories.”

Though Austin had been my initial guess as to what US city is the most tattoo-friendly city out there, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was Miami Beach, Florida that took the number one spot.  Boasting about 24 tattoo shops per 100,000 people, plenty of beaches and the opportunity for skin to be exposed on a regular basis, Miami Beach is the sort of place that just seems made for tattoo enthusiasts.  It was also the home of the Miami Ink reality television series and the skill level of the tattooists on that show was clearly impressive.  Los Angeles, and Honolulu, two other sun-soaked destinations, ranked 10th and 8th respectively, while good ol’ Austin, Texas came in at 6th.  What I was genuinely surprised about however, was that New York City did not make the cut.  I realize that this isn’t exactly dense scientific research here, but I would have thought that a city like New York with such a vibrant tattoo scene, would have at least cracked the top ten.

Check out the complete list of the top ten most tattoo-friendly cities in America, here.

You’re never too old for a tattoo.  It’s easy enough to say that and I’m sure a lot of us have said that at some point, without really giving it much more thought.  Old can be a pretty relative term.  I mean, 50 could be old to some people, just as 30 can be old to others.  But what about 99?  100?  101?  I’m pretty sure that no matter who you are or how old you are, you consider a century to be seriously senior citizen.

At the age of 99, Mimi Rosenthal made the decision to get her first tattoo.  A surprising decision for any 99-year-old, but even more surprising given that 17 years earlier, Mimi’s approval of her granddaughter’s brand new tattoo was less than favourable.  At that point in her life, the concept of having a tattoo had apparently still not become acceptable to Mimi.  Given some time however, Mimi Rosenthal’s opinion of tattoos began to change.  Why the change of opinion?  Rosenthal answers that with a simple “Why not?”

Her first tattoo came at the age of 99.  It was a small blue butterfly, about the size of a dime, on one of her ankles.  Rosenthal liked the tattoo, but lamented that it was a little small.  The second tattoo was done to celebrate her 100th birthday.  This time it was on her other leg, and it was a flower about the size of a silver dollar.  This was a decent size for Rosenthal, but having to lift her pant leg to show it off got to be a bit of a pain.  I guess when you’re 100 years old and you have tattoos, people tend to want to see them often.

Now 101-years-old, Mimi Rosenthal has just had her third tattoo done – a sunflower on her arm.  This one was done this past weekend in Spring Hill, Florida.  After getting the sunflower, Rosenthal joked that her next tattoo on her 102nd birthday will be done on her butt.  It sounds like a joke, but then again, hearing that a 101-year-old woman likes to get tattooed isn’t always the easiest thing to take serious, either.  But Mimi Rosenthal is serious all right.

Not to mention very cool.

Some people just like to take their time.  In the tattoo world of Boff Konkerz, the journey is just as important as the destination.  And he knows it.  Tattoo machines might be the norm with most tattooists, but give Boff a needle lashed to a stick and a little bit of black ink and he will commit himself to hand poking some of the most intricate and beautiful looking work that I’ve ever seen.

These are tattoos that take a great deal of time and patience – not just for the artist, but for the client as well.  It’s important to Konkerz to take his time, a characteristic that highlights the devotion he feels as an artist toward the work he does.  Yet another side of this devoted belief in precision and care was Boff’s road to actually becoming a tattoo artist.

For 15 years prior to ever tattooing anyone, Boff simply designed tattoos for friends.  He was, in his own way growing and maturing as an artist before the decision came to actually get into the industry as someone who tattooed people – and who tattooed them without a machine.  It was his friend and “World’s Most Tattooed Person”, Lucky Diamond Rich who showed Boff how to build a hand tool and then proceeded to allow Boff to tattoo him.  It was the first time that he had ever tattooed anyone and after that, he quickly became hooked.  Boff tattooed himself numerous times and when friends saw these tattoos, they instantly wanted him to tattoo them.

These days Boff Konkerz can be found at London’s Divine Canvas Bespoke Tattooing.  You can see Boff’s online portfolio by heading here.  Like I said, the work is beautiful and if you like to take things slow and love the look of art done by a different set of rules, then I would definitely suggest seeking out the talents of Boff Konkerz.

‘“We believe the ink becomes the beginning of time. Before there was any light, there was darkness. The black ink can represent our own past and all the knowledge that past contains in a symbol.

“By displaying this on our body, we give life to our ancestors and the knowledge they have, so it becomes our guidelines in life, helping us to navigate towards our goals.

“It then becomes a living thing, it is very spiritual.”’

– Te Rangitu Netana

The tattoo work of New Zealand tattooist Te Rangitu Netana is not about flash, nor does it use the methods that most of us think about whenever we think about tattoos.  Netana began his education as a tattooist when he was very young, from his father.  However, it wasn’t simply learning how to tattoo that came with this education, it was the culture of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand that was indelibly linked to the art form that was just as essential – if not more so – than the tattooing itself.

At the age of 17, Netana performed his first tattoo and went on to become the official tattoo artist for three of his local tribes in northern New Zealand.  From this point he went on to win awards and to tattoo celebrities like British musician Robbie Williams.  His tools vary and he does use a tattoo machine, but he also uses everything from traditional hand tools of the Maori people to albatross bones.  That in itself is pretty original and fascinating to me.

Perhaps what I like the best about Te Rangitu Netana and the Maori approach to tattoo is that it completely removes itself from the concept of tattoo as a fashion statement.  Netana’s tattoos are pure representations of the person who wears them and that to me is something that I feel is at the heart of the tattoo art form, be it Maori or not.

“It is all about that person’s past and their future, and what they need to feel empowered.”

– Te Rangitu Netana

Like a lot of people out there, I know what it’s like to want something that you can’t afford.  It sucks and the more you think about that thing you want and the more you see that thing that you want, the more it stings that you just can’t get it.  Fortunately, there are a couple of solutions for this problem.  The first one is to work more hours or get a better job.  The second option is to just forget about it and go on with your life.  Well, in the case of 20-year-old Michael Watts of Port Richey, Florida, either option would have been a better one than what he ended up doing.

After moving in with his grandmother, the unemployed Watts began coming home with new tattoos.  There was the Christian fish on his left ankle, the “Jesus Saves” script on his right forearm and an outline of a “Christ-like” figure on his left arm with the words “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.”  How does a 20-year-old kid with no job and hardly any money manage to get tattoos?  Scratcher friends?  Nope.  Did it himself?  Nope.  Steals his granny’s jewelry and sells it to a cash-for-gold kiosk at the local mall?  Yep.

“Watts admitted pilfering the gold bracelets, hoop earrings, necklace and a half-carat diamond — altogether worth $3,400 — and selling them at a cash-for-gold kiosk at Gulf View Square mall. He told detectives he used the money for tattoos and other things.”

Stealing from your granny is bad enough, but stealing in order to get Christian tattoos?  How frigging ironic is that??  Judging by the photo of Watts over at the St. Petersburg times, he should have used a little of that money to head over to a barber and get that nasty-ass neck beard of his cleaned up.  Surely there was a barber in that mall?

All right, I won’t rip on the guy like that.  He did make a stupid mistake and I sincerely hope he recognizes the foul logic involved in stealing from your aging grandmother in order to get some crummy tattoos.  Especially if you claim to be a Christian.  It could have been worse I guess; he could have been spending the money on meth or something.  Still, bad idea all around, Michael Watts.