Usher in the New Year with a Hugs and Kisses Monster!

I met Laine earlier this month in Penn Station and she shared this, one of her "eight or nine" tattoos:

 

Laine explained that her friend Jason Lee, who tattoos and DJs in Florida under the name "Mr. Monster," inked this on her as a spur-of-the-moment tattoo. She was with a friend who was getting inked by Mr. Monster and it just happened. His signature tattoo is a monster design, so he just drew it on her with a Sharpie, and because they are such close friends, it developed as this friendly "Hugz and Keesez" monster.

Thanks to Laine for sharing this with us here on Tattoosday and happy new year to all! Please beware the Hugs and Kisses monsters lurking on New Years' Eve!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site 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.

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Kerry Unveils Some Masterpieces

A couple weeks ago, I felt like I had won the Tattoosday lottery. In my own neighborhood, I ran into Kerry, who had a bit of a tattoo peeking out of her left sleeve. I stopped her and introduced myself, and she shared some simply phenomenal work. We'll get to that left sleeve in a second, but Kerry figured I'd be impressed with this tattoo on her upper right arm:

Well, she was certainly right about that!  This is a piece by Anil Gupta at Inkline Studio in Manhattan. The detail of this work is astonishing.

 

Anil Gupta is considered a master of the biomechanical tattoo. Kerry explained:

"I'd seen Gupta's work and I really wanted something in the biomechanical style ... I just thought of a butterfly, which is usually something very feminine and soft, just made it out of parts and steel ... like a cool mix of the styles ... we just kept building and adding more stuff to the design ... he was great to work with."

To get a full appreciation of the tattoo, check out the work from Gupta's portfolio. Simply stunning!
 

 

That's twenty-five hours of work by a master of the biomechanical.

Remember, it wasn't the Gupta tattoo that caught my attention, but this colorful section of a sleeve, on the lower part of Kerry's left arm:

 

Kerry rolled up her sleeve to reveal the entire arm:

What you see is approximately forty-two hours of work by the talented Kaz at New York Adorned.

Kerry explained the genesis of this sleeve:

"I saw this picture when I was looking up samurai stories, because I'm a martial artist and, initially, we were just going to do it half-sleeve, but then just decided to go whole hog. Kaz is really good, so I just let him go crazy with it."

Kerry's focus in martial arts is grappling and kick-boxing. 

And to think, I would have missed all of this amazing work, had I not been intrigued by the head of this Japanese monster, peeking out from one of her sleeves!

Thanks to Kerry for sharing her simply stunning tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday.

If you are reading this on another web site 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.

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Monsters & Music

Do you know (in response to a couple of posits last post on the titular notion above), my firsts thoughts about the monsters is that musically they are largely quiet. They sing softly to themselves, to Providence, in sympathy with the cosmos, in sorrow; perhaps some of the more feral might gather together to spontaneously hoot and jabber at Phoebe, while others might chortle off some rhyme or ditty they heard once when secretly watching children at play or people at a dance or stalking some unwary band of happy, vigil-day picnickers.

Monsters' own music will be impromptu, vocal, rolling, raw yet often oddly complex, wild and disconcertingly alien unless informed by everyman tunes previously encountered.

My sense of it is that the making of structured musics is the domain of everymen, based on the notion - the historied order of things - that monsters make life, everymen make things.

IMHO.

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Meet the Herdebog Trought

This will be, from now until I change it I suppose, is to be my new profile image (along with a new title graphic too, it seems). It looks more like me than the previous illo - and it also happens to be a sneek peek into Book 2.

Which makes think of a question for you all:

What or who is your favourite monster of all time?

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A happy holiday

Well, I am back from a break in Sydney-town - should anyone be asking where I have been you may say I have been there, with my wife, re-energizing.

But now I have returned.

So there we go...

Given that I was born and raised on the south central coast of Australia (and that I am an indoorsy kind of fellow) I have never seen the marvel I saw on Foresters Beach on the New South Wales central coast. There had been a storm a few days before (or so we - my wife and I - were told by a stranger - a fellow walker - along the strand) and washed up on the whole length of the beach were dead, sun-dried blue bottle jellyfish. Their air-sacs were like brittle plastic, that popped loudly when trodden underfoot.

Later we found more recently washed specimens still firm and rubbery, spasming and curling in on themselves when touched. The largest would have been no bigger than an apricot, fitting neatly in the palm of hand, yet their bright blue stinger stretched out across the sand for three feet or so.

Nature-nerd that I am, I was astounded and amazed and immediately inspired as to what such things might be in the Half-Continent: small mucosa spawn, living, mindless buds released from their "parent". Storms wash them ashore where, depending on the species, some might wither and die; others dry and become dormant - waiting to be washed into the vinegar seas again some other storming night, revive and grow into terrors. Yet others might actually take up home on the shore, slowly burrowing to make treacherous toothy or sucking pits of themselves to trap crabs and gulls and the occasional careless limb (this might be too Star Warsy, hmm...)

I have visions in my head of some story of such a wash-up of these gelatinous spawn. I see the local fishers and sea-side village folk come down to the beach to squash and hack and burn the little, defenseless jellies, wishing to destroy at least some of the sea-monsters while they are vulnerable and spare later griefs. This might all get written down someday. Hmm... again.

Meanwhile, I have to pop off to spend the afternoon with my editor as we go over some of the last tweaks to MBT 2, Lamplighter. Almost there folks, almost there. As to the excellent questions posed last post, they have really got me thinking (and indeed one of them is answered in Book 2) and I shall get to them.

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