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I was away last night having a consultation with my tattoo artist. Yup, I’m going to get a new tattoo. Some of you may know I have a couple already. It has been several years and for a while I thought I might be done. But I have always wanted something bookish. I never thought it would ever happen because every time I thought about it nothing felt right and when you are getting something permanently inked on your skin you want it to be right.

As the years passed I’ve been leaning toward a quote, but what one? There are so many good ones, so many meaningful ones for me that I just couldn’t decide. But about a year ago I landed on a quote from a Sonia Sanchez poem (if you have never read Sanchez, she is a-mazing!) and thought just maybe. I have been sitting with it for months mulling it over to make sure it felt right. And it began to feel so right that I started to imagine what it might look like on my skin. And late in 2015 when I could picture myself with this tattoo I decided it was time to get it.

The shop I am going to is called Jackalope and it is not far from my house. It is a woman-owned shop and I heard about it on public radio. Their reviews are nothing but positive. Their online portfolios are amazing. I sent them an email.

I met my artist last night. Her name is Amo (short for Amoreena). She is twenty-something, has blue hair, a nose piercing, beautiful tattoos. She is perky and confident, loves doing lettering and is also an expert in watercolor technique. Perfect. We talked about what I want and I left feeling like she is going to do a really beautiful piece. My appointment to get inked is April 23rd. I can hardly wait.

Amo is going to design the script herself but I am to send her examples of lettering I like. I am also to send her examples of watercolor tattoo work I like.

At this point you are probably wondering what the tattoo is going to be of. Here is the quote:

The words loved me and I loved them in return

A perfect bookish quote for both reading and writing. The words are going to spiral down my left arm and there will likely be some watercolor ink drops splashed along it in a few places.

The rightness of the quote was cemented even more a few days ago when I found out there is a Sonia Sanchez documentary. The Los Angeles Review of Books has a great article about Sanchez and the making of the film. It has a few examples of her poetry and an interview with the women who made the film that will be airing on March 8 on PBS for International Women’s Day. At first I was worried that Sanchez had died and I had not heard about it, but she is 81 and happily alive and well and participated in the film.

There is no denying now that this is the right quote and the right time to get it. So many things to look forward to in April. Chickens at the beginning of the month and a new tattoo at the end! And yes, I will take pictures so you can see what it looks like.

Please look at these closely before deciding it’s a good idea to get a Disney image permanently stained onto your body.

(via Trexarms)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 15 comments | Post tags: Tattoo

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No, not mine (ye-gods!), but a friend's.

Remember, ages ago, I was asked to do a design for a tattoo of an angel?

Well, it's taken all this time for my friend Gary to get sorted with an appointment to have it done, and it took more than one session, as you can imagine, in fact, it took over 7 hours to get it all done.

He came round to show me this week and here are the photos of the finished thing, hot off the press, so to speak. It's hard to get the full effect in just one image, because the wings spread round the back onto his shoulder blade and round the front towards his chest.

I rather like the additions the tattooist has made, especially the roses at the bottom. The tattoo is in memory of Gary's wife Sindie, my cousin, who died recently, and Gary tells me that yellow roses were her favourite.

Gary has a jacuzzi in his garden (lucky devil), so I imagine him sitting in the hot bubbles one frosty evening, with his angel rising out from the steaming water...

see my work at www.lynnechapman.co.uk

Okay, more and more tattoos

by Anatoly Liberman

HOOSIER.
Almost exactly two years ago, on July 30, 2008, I posted an essay on the origin of the nickname Hoosier.  In it I expressed my cautious support of R. Hooser, who derived the “moniker” for an inhabitant of Indiana from a family name. I was cautious not because I found fault with his reasoning but because it is dangerous for an outsider to express his opinion on a special subject; American onomastics (a branch of linguistics devoted to the study of names) is not my area.  The bibliographers who had done outstanding work in listing the documents pertaining to Hoosier seem to have missed the article in Eurasian Studies Yearbook, 1999, 224-231. However, none of them reacted to my defense of the Hauser/Hoosier hypothesis either.  Perhaps they missed that post: it is impossible to follow everything that appears in the Internet.  Only Mr. J. Vanhoosier wrote a few words about the history of his family.  His comment dates to February 2009.    Mr. Randall Hooser (in Yearbook, his full name was not given) noticed my post in June 2010 and responded in some detail.  Comments that are added so late have no chance of attracting my attention, because this weekly blog has existed for more than four years, but Mr. Hooser contacted me and sent me numerous supporting materials.  His interpretation of historical evidence does not seem to be controversial, and I will deal only with the etymology of the nickname.

Mr. Hooser is not a linguist, and this is why he made too much of the fact that the High German au corresponds to long u (transliterated as Engl. oo) in Alsace, the homeland of the Hausers/Hoos(i)ers.  But this correspondence needs no proof.  In Middle High German, long i and u (transliterated by Engl. ee and oo) underwent diphthongization, which spread from Austrian Bavarian dialects in the 12^th century and later became one of the most important features of the Standard.  The “margins” of the German speaking world were unaffected by the change, so that the north (Low German) and the south (Alsace and Switzerland) still have monophthongs where they had them in the past.  What has not been accounted for is the variant Hoosier as opposed to Hooser.  In my 2008 post, I referred to such enigmatic American pronunciations as Frasier for Fraser and groshery for grocery, but analogs have no explanatory value.  However, according to Mr. Hooser, linguists from Kentucky informed him that in the Appalachian area this type of phonetic change is regular, so that Moser becomes Mosier, and so forth.  The cause of the change remains undiscovered.  Although in this context the cause is irrelevant, I may note that in many areas of the Germanic speaking world one hears sh-like s, notably in Icelandic and Dutch, but not only there.  Sh for s and zh (the latter as in Engl. pleasure, as you, and genre) for z characterized the earliest pronunciation of German.  The Proto-Indo-European s was, in all likelihood, also a lisping sound.  Perhaps the area from which the Hoosers migrated to America has just such a sibilant.

The original derogatory meaning of Hoosier is certain.  Yet the word’s adoption by Indiana should cause no surprise; compare Suckers and Pukes for the inhabitants

Tattoo

What’s the most interesting tattoo you’ve ever seen?

Gary found a photo of something similar to what he was after, but it was a bit 'goth': too brooding and dark, very skinny and androgynous, and doing something of an Alice Cooper impression round the eyes!

It was a lot of fun actually, having a go at something so different.

I started by redesigning the face (I was going for a kind of Mona Lisa half-smile...) and did a grey-scale painting in Photoshop.

Then I reworked the wings and body, keeping the basic pose, but fleshing things out, so the angel was plumper and healthier.

I looked up tattoo techniques to find out what to do about shading, and discovered they use colour a lot. So I converted my painting to 3 tones (using Photoshop's 'posterize' filter) and then tried out various colour combos, until I found a pair that I liked with the black. Things like that are SOOO much easier with a computer.

It was looking pretty good, except for her skin, where the hard-edged, graphic areas of colour were too crude, and mu

"We are seeking high quality photographs of your literary tattoos for an upcoming book. Send us your ink! Submissions are open to all kinds of literary tattoo work: quotations from your favorite writer, opening lines of novels, lines of verse, literary portraits or illustrations. From Shakespeare to Bukowski to The Little Prince in a Baobab tree, if it’s a literary tattoo and its on your body, we want to see it." http://community.livejournal.com/literarytattoos/590480.html

Fantasy Magazine's Sean Wallace is going to Readercon and he is taking some goodies with him. The second picture made my day, possibly my week, probably my month. Full of July goodness. I can't wait for my story to appear on the site, I have loads of prizes stacked up for my promotion thingy and I need to use them asap as my niece keeps wandering off with them (so far I've lost a pirate flag and an inflatable parrot). I'm doomed if she discovers the fairy and pirate tattoos.

Oh, and if you go to the con, be sure to pick one up.

omeone asked me where I found the art for my nonexistent biopsy scar-covering tattoo, and I thought you guys might be interested…

This came from a series of 18th Century bookbindings. It’s too elaborate for reality, perhaps, but I liked the idea.

This was intended to cover a scar that I have grown rather fond of. The tattoo plan was scrapped, but the concept was good.

I sampled my skin color from a photo, isolated two different florets from book covers I found in a digital library collection, overlapped them, messed with transparency, did a color mask to match a brown ink, and then chickened out at the last minute.

For more on why I didn’t get a tattoo, please see this very special episode of Red vs. Blue.

Erica said, on 3/11/2009 4:36:00 PM

Who needs the bathroom mirror when you’ve got a built in camera on your laptop?

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Is or isn't it true the opposites attract? What would a Preppy and a Punker have in common except their love for one another?

I'm currently working on a CD cover for a band. I've included a "slice" of the illustration. I thought I was finished but have decided to make some changes to the composition as the effect was not really what I was looking for. I'll post the final work when I've completed the changes. Most likely this slice will also change. I really enjoy creating CD covers. A while back I did a remake of Madonna's "Confessions on the Dance Floor" which you can see here.

Getting back to the basic technical skill of drawing feels so good. The way I like relax is to sketch and my favorite place to sketch people is at Starbucks, sipping a yummy hot latte, mmmmm. This was a quick 5 minute sketch to which I added some color as I loved the red sweatshirt she was wearing from Aeropostale. I love their t-shirts too, especially this Pink Shoulder Script Baby T. They're nice and long and go great with low riding jeans. What do you do to relax?