Guns and Tats

When I first started writing Tattoosday, I may have had a couple of tattoos, but I was really very naïve when it came to the subject of the craft itself.

I learned very quickly, maybe within the first week or so, that one should never refer to a tattoo machine as a "gun". An anonymous reader chastised me over that one and I still bear the emotional scars of that mistake.

Another term that is thrown around a lot is "tats". Again, I started out thinking that it was okay, and was quickly called out by a reader.

In all fairness, you hear the words "tat," "tatted up," and other variations with fairly common regularity, so it's not as taboo as calling a machine, a gun, but I made a decision early on to use the extra syllable, and always say "tattoo". It just sounds better, and since I am writing posts that I assume will live forever, I figure I better use full and proper terminology.

Next up: who are the Meaty-Beaties, and why don't I like them?

Tattoosday Overflow and the Inkspotting Glossary

It’s the circle of life.

BillyBlog begat Tattoosday and, since then, BillyBlog has been my neglected alter-ego. But, there may be hope. I have decided to attempt yet another form of CPR, and it involves Tattoosday.

I have often wanted to write about Tattoosday on Tattoosday, but everything came across as a replacement of a legitimate tattoo-on-the-street post, which is generally what people want to see on Tattoosday, so I often wrote, and then scrapped my prose.

So now BillyBlog may (I hate to say will, lest I get caught in a lie) be an overflow for Tattoosday, where I can tell stories like this:

Last week, I spotted an incredible tattoo on Penn Plaza, outside of Borders, where I often go inkspotting. The tattoo will never be seen on Tattoosday, despite its awesomeness. It was a double skull with Indian headdresses, and it was exceptionally done.

I approached the gentleman who had the tattoo, as he was talking to a woman. I expressed my admiration for the piece and handed him the Tattoosday flier. Having done this for almost four years, I have a fairly good sense of things, and can read body language and tone pretty well. I felt that he was willing, until his female companion stepped in.

“Actually,” she snarled, “the artist has a picture up on his website and I don’t think he’d like anyone else takin’ a picture of it.”

If we were in a room, you would have heard the air being sucked out of it. She was basically saying that, on behalf of the artist, she was intervening and preventing this guy from sharing his tattoo on the site. Usually, doing so gives the artist more publicity and is beneficial.

The tattoo was great, but not worth fighting about. They seldom are. But I was curious, and I might like to see the artist’s work, so I asked, “Oh, what’s the artist’s name?” A perfectly reasonable question, if you ask me.

The response, “Oh he’s in Oklahoma,” and then with derision in her voice, “you wouldn’t have heard of him.”

I didn’t ask if I’d heard of him. I asked his name. It was clear I wasn’t going to get anything from this encounter, other than a headache. I couldn’t help but validate my position and say, “I’ve been doing this almost four years, and I’ve interviewed people from all over the world, so you’d be surprised. I may have heard of him.”

She just shook her head and said “Doubt it.” To which, I looked at the guy, who hadn’t uttered a peep since his female companion had intervened on his behalf, and on behalf of the unheralded tattoo artist, and said, “Thanks for your time. Have a good weekend.”

I refer to this type of encounter as a “Frohner,” in which a third party disrupts, dissuades, and/or discourages a tattooed individual from collaborating with me on a post. The name comes from an old fraternity brother who had the uncanny knack of unwittingly walking in on a situation in which a guy was establishing a mood with a girl. Said disruption ended up preventing the couple from hooking up and he was blamed for the guy’s inability to “close the deal”. Juvenile as it may sound, Frohner became synonymous with mood-killer and, to me, represents a person who ruins, for me, an inkspotting encounter.

Dear reader(s), you may see now why I didn’t want to bog down Tattoosday with such marginally interesting drivel. My readers generally like to read about tattoos and see the works in question, not hear about the failures. Nonetheless, I’m a writer, and I have to channel it somewhere, so BillyBlog gets the overflow. Stay tuned for more misadventures.

Rising from the Ashes

Someone just venturing over to BillyBlog may notice something: not a lot has been going on here in recent months. My last post was in December. Since the end of the 2010 Tattooed Poets Project, I have posted here only nine times.

This kind of makes me sad, but it also makes sense, I read somewhere once that the average blog lifespan is three years, at best. Started in September 2005, BillyBlog had 113 posts in its first four months, In 2006, I expanded to 448 posts, and peaked in 2007 with 532 posts.

And then, dwindling returns: 299 posts in 2008, 83 posts in 2009, and 46 in 2010.

So what happened? Tattoosday happened and Facebook happened.

Readers familiar with me know that, in the second half of 2007, I started blogging once a week about tattoos and, before I knew it, I found a consistent subject about which I never got bored. I month later, I spun off the site to its own blogspot, and the rest is history, albeit recent history.

I even moved the poetry section of the Tattooed Poets Project off of BillyBlog and onto Tattoosday beginning in 2011.

One can also attribute the demise of BillyBlog to Facebook, as any look at my wall will reveal a lot of stuff that I used to blog about got posted up on the social network instead. It was just easier, what else can I say?

But reports of BillyBlog’s demise may be exaggerated.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes (explaining, of course, the tattoo above, which was originally seen here), there is life yet in these pages.

Or is there?

We’ll see, dear readers. Although, you may just get stuff that was just too wordy for Tattoosday, posts about ink, and other tattoo supplies. How about a poem entitled “Ode on a Clip Cord”? Who knows?

BillyBlog will never retain its old glory. 532 posts? That even impresses the older me, that 1.457534246 posts per day average. But here’s hoping for two or three decent explosions of words every few weeks, just for old times sake!

Cheers.