Kamis, 12 September 2013

Tattoosday in the Berkshires: Sean's Corpernican Title

I met Sean last month at Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts.


Sean was working at the snack bar at the Tina Packer Playhouse, but I had seen him earlier in the week in an amazing performance as Trufaldin in an adaptation of Molière's Les Faux Pas.

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is the title of a book published in 1543 by the Renaissance astronomer Copernicus. The title, translated from the Latin, is On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.

Sean elaborated about the origins of this tattoo, which he had done at a shop in Seattle:
"I was looking at the root of the word revolt or revolution and it comes from Copernicus ... so I was wanting something that had ... the idea of revolt and revolution ... I became curious as to where the word came from ... [and] I started reading about his theory."
As regular readers of this site can tell you, I love textual tattoos, and the idea of inscribing the title of a book almost 500 years old is fascinating, because it's not just about the title, but about the ideas espoused therein.

Thanks to Sean for sharing this cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2013 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.

Rabu, 11 September 2013

Re-Post: Paul's Memorial

I posted this originally in 2008 and re-posted it again in 2009 and 2011. As I've said in the past, it only seems appropriate to re-run it again today:




Earlier this month, I mentioned meeting Paul here, on the bike path that runs along the southern tip of Brooklyn.

I saved the other tattoo photo I took of Paul's work for today, the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

What I didn't mention in the previous post is that Paul is a federal agent who grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

From his vantage point there, he watched the World Trade Center being built in the late 1960's. He was working in 6 World Trade seven years ago for the U.S. Customs Department when the towers came down, and he spent four months at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, searching for remains.

The tattoo is a poignant piece, with the sun shining between the towers. Below is Paul's badge from the Department of Homeland Security, which has evolved into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Particulatly unusual is the depiction of 9/11 in Roman numerals:

IX XI.


I don't believe I had ever seen it represented that way before.

Like the tattoo in the earlier post, this piece was inked by Joe at Brooklyn Ink.

Thanks to Paul for sharing this WTC memorial piece with us here on Tattoosday.

~ ~ ~

We here at Tattoosday send our thoughts and prayers to all the families of  people who died on 9/11, and to the families of all of the men and women who have died since then, serving our country.

This entry is © 2008, 2011, 2013 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.

Jumat, 06 September 2013

Tracy's Owl for Jamie

I ran into Tracy last month in a drugstore in Penn Station.

She agreed to share this tattoo on her arm:


The name "Jamie" refers to her son. This is a mother owl with a protective wing over a baby owl, whose head can be seen resting in the middle of the mama owl's chest.

This was inked by the talented John Reardon at Greenpoint Tattoo Company in Brooklyn. Reardon's work has appeared countless times on Tattoosday, and it's always an honor to feature his work on the site. Readers may remember this narwhal by him which we featured back in June.

Thanks to Tracy for sharing this lovely tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2013 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.