Amy's Circle of Sanskrit Honors The Loss of Something She Needed to Lose

It was one of those New York City Tattoosday moments, when you really hit it off with someone and a simple question about a tattoo turns into a lengthy conversation.

I was coming home much later than usual and, at West 4th Street, where I'll occasionally switch from the A train to the D train, I spotted a woman in front of a subway map on the platform. She had tattoos on her ankles and was carrying a large hoop.

Amy, a nursing student and trapeze artist, shared the long segments on either side of her right food, inked in Sanskrit, quoting the Baghavad Gita:


She paraphrased the meaning as "Weapons do not pierce this. Fire does not burn this. Such is the eternal nature of the soul."

Or, in one translation, referring to the Atma, or higher self:

Weapons do not cut this Atma, fire does not burn it, water does not make it wet, and the wind does not make it dry. (2.23)
This Atma cannot be cut, burned, wetted, or dried up. It is eternal, all pervading, unchanging, immovable, and primeval. (2.24)

Why this quote? Aside from her appreciation of Hindu art and design, she got in "in honor of forgetting a person's number that I really needed to forget".

In other words, as I interpret it, she couldn't remember the number of someone who she was better off without. Her mind released the link to the person the heart craved and, in hindsight, the mind was operating in the best interest of the soul.

She had this work done by an artist at Purple Panther Tattoos on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood California.

Although the photos above were taken on the train platform at West 4th, we spent a good amount of time chatting on the D train after it pulled into the station. We talked about tattoos mostly, and I recommended some artists to check out in New York.

Amy said she had been recently thinking about a new tattoo and it was funny that I just happened to approach her about her own work.

We parted ways when the D rolled into 36th Street in Brooklyn, where I switched to the R train, and Amy headed to work teaching an Aerial Hoop class (which explains her possession of the large ringed object I alluded to at the beginning of the post).

A hearty thank you to Amy for sharing her inspirational tattoo with us here at Tattoosday!

Hoot! Hoot! Thanks for Your Support!!

Last night at 11:37 P.M., someone in Fairfield, California googled "owl tattoos".

Seventh on the list of results was the link to this tattoo:

(the post here)

This visitor registered Tattoosday's half a millionth hit, a number that seemed impossible when we first started out as a spin-off from BillyBlog 2 1/2 years ago (almost to the day). And although we're no Huffington Post (or I Can Has Cheeseburger, for that matter), which tosses off 500k in a day, or a week, or a month, or whatever, this little tattoo blog is very happy to celebrate this milestone.

Thanks to everyone who visits regularly, stops by occasionally, or just pops in from time to time. And, of course, a hearty thank you to all those tattooed folks who have volunteered their body art over the last 30 months!

Tattoorism: Corline's Beautiful Tree

As we rapidly approach the milestone of a half a million hits, it only seems fitting that today's post features a tattoo from one of our fans. We recently received this photograph of a lovely tattoo from Corline:


This beautiful tree on her lower back was tattooed by an artist known as "Hellboy Dennis" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It's her first tattoo and took about four hours.

Corline says she and Dennis collaborated on the design. They worked at a friend's home studio, he drew it on her back, and then took about four hours to tattoo it, making his own interpretation of their design. She adds, "Trees are really important to me. I went to travel after a long relationship and found my roots and my freedom...".

Thanks to Corline for sharing her lovely tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Tattoosday's First Ambigram Tattoo

Now that we have the horrific ink-hiding months of January and February behind us, I was looking forward to seeing what March provided.

I was rewarded by the cooperation of Brian, who shared this, one of his five tattoos:


For those readers unfamiliar with ambigrams, they are designs that reveal images or words from both perspectives.

Brian's tattoo, for example, reads "Life" from this perspective. But, when flipped, reads "Death". In this case, a perfect dichotomy, with each word opposing the other.


The better ambigrams have a correlating juxtaposition, emulating a yin and yang approach to the art form.

Brian got this done by Melissa at Sparrow Tattoo in West Hempstead, New York.

I must say, as ambigram tattoos go, this one is pretty cool, and I'm happy to have it be the first of its kind featured here on the site.

Thanks to Brian for sharing his life/death tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Tattoos I Know: Anna's Culinary Ink

Several months ago, one of my co-workers, Anna, wanted to commemorate the completion of her externship from culinary school.

It was funny, because at the time, she didn't realize I wrote Tattoosday and then discovered the site through googling. She stumbled upon this post that featured a chef's knife.

Anna liked the idea of using a knife, but wanted a whisk too. She spotted this piece and met with Vinny Romanelli at Red Rocket Tattoo in Manhattan, giving him the several source images she had found and explaining what she wanted.

He designed this for her and then completed the tattoo for her in about twenty minutes. She had him stick with black and gray and wanted him to emphasize the shading. This is the end result, positioned just above her ankle:


Other work from Red Rocket has appeared on Tattoosday here.

Thanks again to Anna for sharing her culinary ink with us here on Tattoosday!