Superior Tattoo: May 2011

Mr. Kaves Shares a Mark Mahoney Portrait

A couple weeks back, I ran into Michael Kaves on 3rd Avenue, a couple blocks away from his shop, Brooklyn Made Tattoo. Kaves is also one of the founding members of The Lordz of Brooklyn. I know Kaves from around the neighborhood, and although I've never been tattooed by him, I have been under the needle in his shop and have had the pleasure of seeing him work first-hand and close-up on other clients.

He's familiar with Tattoosday and wanted to share a tattoo with us here on the site. Check it out:

Located on Kaves' upper right arm, this brilliant tattoo was inked by the legendary Mark Mahoney.

Kaves explained he had gone out to Los Angeles a couple months back and worked at Mahoney's renown shop, the Shamrock Social Club. They had a big launch for a limited edition tattoo pigment - "Mark Mahoney's Shamrock Green". He was there, working on St. Patrick's Day for the official launch.

Mahoney, known to many as the " founding father" of single-needle black and gray tattooing, tattooed this portrait for Kaves, which took about twelve hours from start to finish.

And who is the woman tattooed on his arm? "It's my grandmother, Marie," he explained, "from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, right here on Third Avenue, 1945."

Kaves' own tattooing work first appeared on Tattoosday back in 2008 here. Most recently, his work has appeared here. This is, however, the first time we have been honored to share a tattoo by Mark Mahoney.

Thanks to Kaves for sharing this phenomenal tattoo by an American master, here with us on Tattoosday!

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Repost for Memorial Dsy: A Traditional Naval Tattoo on a 21st Century Ship

This post originally appeared on November 7, 2009. I felt it was appropriate to re-post on Memorial Day, 2011:

The USS New York was put into service today by the United States Navy.

Her hull was forged with steel salvaged from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

It's a momentous occasion indeed, and several crew members were in attendance with dignitaries earlier this week at the World Series.

As is happens, I noticed a gentleman in uniform outside of Madison Square Garden earlier in the week and he had this tattoo on both hands:

Turns out, the tattoo was modeled after this naval pin, which represents the rank of Boatswain's Mate, worn on the lapel:

The gentleman, whose name is Fred, serves on the USS New York, as the more commonly-known title of Ships Bos'n, and it seems appropriate to post this tattoo today as the ship officially enters the naval fleet.

Fred has been in the service for 26 years, and has seven or eight tattoos all told.

As Ships Bos'n he works with mission systems on amphibious maneuvers.

The crossed anchors are traditional naval insignia and, even though he drew this design himself and they weren't inked in a traditional tattoo shop, he recognizes the crossed anchors as symbols of his dedication to the trade.

I thank Fred for his service to our country, as well as his willingness to contribute to Tattoosday. We wish him well as he serves with pride on the USS New York!

Skull Tattoos..A little history with photos and sass from Kathleen Volume 1

During the last decade skulls were a HOT design with trendy, fashion forward folks all over the Gods green earth. Starting with traditional tattoo style skulls designed by Ed Hardy, everywhere you eyeballed from 2002 until 2009 was layered in skulls images. To me, it always seemed a wee bit crazy that an image so iconic with death, manliness and outlaw biker culture was being worn on little girls t shirts emblazoned with rhinestones.

Sugar Skull / Day of the Dead Skull by Russell Fortier @ Lucky 7 Tattoo
in Kings Beach / North Lake Tahoe, California

Yet with this now tired clothing trend the tattooing of all types of skulls became hugely popular. So much so our staff puts-on average- one skull a week to skin still. I believe that the "skulls on garments" trend in fashion played a part in making skulls good business at this moment in time. Of course skulls have been a mainstay in tattooing since rubbing soot in to cut skin started in tribes 10,000 years ago. One of the great qualities of any skull design is the timelessness of the skull image in any form.

Creepy Black & Grey Skull by Corey Boobar @
Lucky 7 Tattoo, Kings Beach, North Lake Tahoe, California

Even when a skull tattoo is done poorly, perhaps with just a grainy looking outline and a few black holes for eyes, nose and mouth - you still know exactly what the image is suppose to be. Not many shapes can be identified that quickly or universally. As small children we are taught that a "skull and crossbones" image meant the contents of that container was poison and therefore bad for us. Or if that same image was on a ships flag it is called a "JOLLY ROGER" and meant pirates commanded the vessel.

Indian with Head Dress Tattoo by Ben Karnofsky @
Lucky 7 Tattoo Kings Beach / North Lake Tahoe, California

Skulls as an ageless symbol have a great number of positive and negative meanings in different cultures. Interestingly, except for marking poisons, there is no "common" meaning worldwide. Skulls meanings have been evolving ever so slowly from ancient antiquity to our modern times. Going back to the Aztecs , skulls were kept by warriors from battles. Then brought back to their village tribe as trophies to symbolize death and rebirth. For the last 500 years Mexican culture has taken some bits from their forefathers in Aztec worship of their dead, added ritual from the Catholic religion brought over from the Spaniards who conquered and settled South America and added a bit of their own twist - all brought together to create "Day of the Dead." Skulls and skeletons are the symbols of this celebration honoring departed loved ones each year on November 1st. A tradition treat for this holiday are candy skulls, with the name of your loved one written on the skull of your sugary confection. These treats are to be eaten by the dead souls earth bound loved ones.

Traditional Americana style Sugar Skull for "Day of the Dead"
By Corey Boobar @ Lucky 7 Tattoo and Piercing,
Kings Beach, / North Lake Tahoe, California

Other ancient cultures have used skulls as chalices for sacred drinks while worshiping , celebrating victories or displaying the skulls of their enemies to intimidate others. or to show their tribes "fierceness."
It is said by a few sources online that some outlaw bikers believe tattooing a skull on their forearm helped them cheat death. Personally I think that is bogus, but hey, it sounds good huh?! In London of the middle ages many of the population could not read or write. Businesses and craftsmen used universal symbols to let lower classes and the illiterate know what each storefront or trades person did. Some prostitutes of this era used a skull with no lower jawbone as a wordless way to advertise that they were a "working girl." Wonder how that "logo" was decided upon?

Carpe Diem Grateful Dead Skull by
Corey Boobar @ Lucky 7 Tattoo

Triple Skull in One by Corey Boobar
Lucky 7 Tattoo, Kings Beach, North Lake Tahoe, Ca.

Remembering back to Halloween of my childhood (before parents got over protective and created "safe" Halloween) my mom use to bust out all sorts of cool, scary decorations. My personal favorite was a skeleton with movable limbs that glowed in the dark. I use to pose him as a model. My brother would always make it look like it was grabbing its crotch....to my mothers great embarrassment. Funny I never thought about how gruesome some of the images were from "All Hallows Eve." All the bones were just part of the celebration of this fun Autumn ritual as a kid.

Under bite Skull with Massive Fangs By Russell Fortier @
Lucky 7 Tattoo & Piercing, Kings Beach / North Lake Tahoe, California

Black and Grey Double Tartarus Skulls by Russell Fortier @
Lucky 7 Tattoo and Piercing, Kings Beach / North Lake Tahoe, California

The beautiful Hindu goddess Kali has a Garland of skulls around her neck when in her "fighting" form. She is quite the warrior, even shown eating the innards of her husband at times. Yet this Goddess also is known to offer worshipers "Life." Part of Kali's spiritual make up also includes "Time and Change." The skulls themselves are to represent "Karma." I LOVE that!

Hope this bit of info was fun for ya. If you enjoy my blogs click an ad and help me keep the faith. Or leave your e mail address and be sent a copy of my new entries as they happen. As I hope to write a few books in the next couple of years I dig feedback of all kinds. Don't be shy, take a moment to

New maori tattoo gallery optimized for Ipad and Iphone

Hi,

I recently bought an Apple Ipad2 and use it mainly for shooting pictures and recording movies of the design process. I can easily add these photos to my twitter messages (@storm3d) and upload the movies to Youtube.com in a few clicks. It's also very usefull for quickly browsing the web...

There's only one big downside to Apple products, and that's the fact that Apple doesn't support the Adobe Flash plugin. For my website galleries, I use(d) the "simpleviewer" plugin, that creates a really nice and simple Flash gallery with a thumbnail and a larger image next or above it.

Now I use my Ipad, I see that a lot of mobile visitors cannot see the designs in my gallery, so I had to make changes to it.

My website design is based on the principles of the "Save the Pixel" e-book by Ben Hunt, which states that the design should be as simple as possible and every pixel should contribute to the main goal of the website.

Keeping this in mind, I redesigned the tattoo galleries. Here's a picture of the 'before' gallery:

flash gallery with maori tattoos for sale designer artist

The red marked area is the flash movie containing the maori tattoo gallery.

People could scroll through the images and see the number and price of the design.

Before ordering it, customers had to select the correct tattoo nr. from the dropdown list and hit the "Buy Now" button.

People often selected the wrong tattoo and bought the piece they didn't want.

To get rid of this problem I decided to implement the Lightbox plugin/script to my gallery instead of the simpleviewer movie.
One other advantage was that I could add the size and price of the design in the header/description and even add a Paypal button, so it became impossible to order the wrong tatoo design.

The new gallery is now looking like this, with the lightbox frame popping up:

maori tattoo gallery high resolution designs for sale

So if you have an Ipad, Ipod or Iphone, please check it out and let me know if there's anything I can change to improve it.

Kind regards, Mark Storm
info@storm3d.com

Life is War

Back in April, I met Joshua outside of Penn Station, and he shared this, one of his five tattoos:

This forearm tattoo, exemplifies Joshua's philosophy that life is war: "you have to go through war to get where you're going."

An ex-girlfriend drew it up for him and then he had it tattooed by Jamie at Bullseye Tattoo Shop in Staten Island, New York.

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

Chad and the City

I met Chad one afternoon in April outside of Madison Square Garden. He shared this tattoo which is on his left shin:

As one might have guessed, Chad is a huge fan of the former HBO series Sex and the City and this is one of a large number of tattoos that he has. When I asked how many he had, he quipped “I have no clue.”

Chad’s work was inked by Eileen Fabbricatore at Lady Luck Tattoo in Aurora, Colorado.

Thanks to Chad for sharing these tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Stephen's Killer Klown

One of the significant changes in the chronology of Tattoosday was the discovery that the Amtrak waiting area in Penn Station was a wonderful place for inkspotting, not just on rainy days, but whenever I had the chance to pass that way.

Stopping someone on the streets of New York City, especially when they are in a hurry to get somewhere, can be challenging. I have discovered that people waiting for their trains, with nothing but time on their hands, are much more likely to be open to discussing their tattoos with strangers like me.

What’s nice, as well, as the trains running out of the Penn Station Amtrak hub go to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and beyond (New Orleans and Toronto are possible rail destinations).

In early April, I ran into Stephen, who was visiting from Auckland, New Zealand. He has ink on both arms, one leg, and the top of his back, so there was a lot to choose from, once he consented to sharing one of his tattoos.

He offered up this horror-themed illustration, on the upper section of his right arm:

The clown with a cleaver is one of those funny/scary images that appeals to fans of the horror genre. Stephen liked the image and collaborated with the tattoo artist, Jamie Thorburn, to come up with the final design.

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

Tattoo pictures of a "Cesc Fabregas" inspired elbow tattoo

Hi,

Yesterday one of my customers (thanks Ruairi! :)) showed me some pictures of his new tattoo that I sketched a few months ago. The tatoo design is inspired by the elbow tattoo of the Arsenal soccer player Cesc Fabregas, and is in a graphical polynesian style.

The original high quality flash design that I made looks like this:

Cesc Fabregas elbow tattoo arsenal soccer football design sheet flash linedrawing

It has a shark tooth, some kind of an eye and other repetitive patterns.

The band wraps around the elbow and connects perfectly on the outside of the arm.

My customer sent me the following photos of elbow:

polynesian armband tattoo elbow Cesc Fabregas football arsenal player

arsenal player fabregas elbow tattoo design polynesian

cesc fabregas elbow tattoo download free stencil

Any questions? Just let me know

Kind regards, Mark Storm

info@storm3d.com
www.storm3d.com

Extension shoulder tattoo in Polynesian mixed style

Hi,

Last year I created a half sleeve tattoo in polynesian style for a Dutch customer. It's a bit of a mixed tribal style, it has some stylized flowers and other repetitive shapes:

custom maori mixed tattoo design with flowers tribal

polynesian tribal flash halfsleeve tattoos for sale

Unfortunately the tattoo artist applied the stencil too small, so it now needs some extensions.

I marked the upper shoulder part that had to be inked.

I created a basic sketch and once it was approved I finalized it. To give you an idea how that process works I shot a short movie and placed it on youtube:

If you liked this video, or want to see more, please take a look on my youtube channel or visit my website Storm3d.com

Kind regards, Mark Storm
info@storm3d.com
www.storm3d.com

Our 1000th Post! David's Mermaid and Seahorse Blow Us Away......

Pardon the royal "we," but this is our 1000th post, and we feel a little celebratory.

To honor this milestone, we are sharing this amazing half sleeve belonging to David:

This astonishing work is the creation of artist Erick Lynch at Redemption Tattoo in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

David said that he had wanted a mermaid, as his wife loves mermaids, and that Lynch's work reflects a traditional Japanese style, thus the female figure appearing as a pearl diver, which is more in line with Japanese artistic tradition.

The whole of the half sleeve represents about 12 hours of work, in David's estimation, which includes the inside of the biceps, and this phenomenally vivid seahorse:

David points to Erick Lynch's use of white highlights in the seahorse, which really makes it "pop".

All in all, this is a remarkable piece of work that we are honored to have as our 1000th post here at Tattoosday. Thanks to David for sharing it and to Erick Lynch for his mastery of the art form!

Christine's Sleeve of Colorful Flowers and Butterflies

Some posts don't need a lot of explaining. I met Christine on 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge earlier this month, and she shared these stunning tattoos, perfect for celebrating on a warm spring day:

The Tiger lily and Red-spotted Purple butterfly above are only the top section of a full sleeve:

The flowers on the forearm are Violets, which span the inside of Christine's arm, as well:

And that's an American Painted Lady butterfly in the ditch.

This amazing, and vibrantly colorful sleeve was inked by Tim O'Connor at The Red Parlour in the Woodside section of Queens, New York. We featured work by Tim and The Red Parlour once before, here, back in 2008.

Thanks to Christine for sharing her wonderful sleeve with us here on Tattoosday!

Don't Sit Under the Cherry Tree with Anyone Else but Me

I spotted Christina one Friday afternoon in Penn Station, sporting this awesome cherry blossom tattoo:

She took some photos in to Jason Loui, then at Redemption Tattoo in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He sketched out a design, and the rest is history. Mr. Loui now works out of Good Faith Tattooing, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Thanks to Christina for sharing her cherry blossom tree with us here on Tattoosday!

Tribal tattoo mask design polynesian style

Hi,

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from the company "Paddle Republic", a surf/fitness school in the Key West, Florida.

Their design studio had come up with a polynesian mask logo, but it needed some adjustment, especially on the mask, because it was a design from a stock library. I was asked to redraw the (tattoo)mask with an original Maori inspired touch to it.

This is the logo from their design studio:

I made two pencil sketches with a different look:

It was in the right style but they asked me to do another sketch, a bit more round and with more koru/maori curves:

This was exactly what they were looking for, so I could trace the design in Adobe Illustrator, to make it a high quality vector logo:

Once that was completed, I added the words "Paddle Republic" and replaced the red color:

Kind regards, Mark Storm
info@storm3d.com
www.storm3d.com

Musician Monday: Ryan from The Disconnects

Here on our second installment of Musician Mondays, we have a rockin', self-explanatory tattoo from Ryan, lead singer and guitarist from an unsigned band called The Disconnects:

From her mohawk to her Doc Martens, this punk rock girl and her "Too Fast to Live, To Young to Die" banner totally capture that raw, rock aesthetic.

I met Ryan last month, across the street from where I work, on Seventh Avenue and 31st Street, in Manhattan.

The tattoo was inked at Fat Kat Tattoos in Keyport, New Jersey. Work from Fat Kat previously appearing on the site can be seen here.

Thanks to Ryan for sharing his cool tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Ivan's Sleeve: Doom, Zombies, and The Joker

Last month I met Ivan in Penn Station, and I took a bunch of photos of his right arm, fully-sleeved. There's a lot going on here, so let's take a look:

And the inner part of the sleeve:

Ivan's tattoo artist is Larry Davis at Explicit Tattoo in Suffern, New York He also credits Adrienne Levy with the design of the cat on his wrist.

Ivan explains a little bit about his ink:

"The zombie on my shoulder is an original that Larry drew from his imagination. The face with the ragged teeth on my bicep is from the video game Doom.

As for the totem pole-esque image on my forearm, the middle and upper pieces were drawn by the artist Matt Simonetti.

The lower piece was drawn by Micki Fever. Larry did the tattooing, as is true for all my tattoos."

Ivan also has this segment of his sleeve which is noteworthy:

Ivan explained that this tattoo of The Joker and Harley Quinn is based on this illustration by the artist Alex Ross, which appeared on the cover of Batman: Harley Quinn.

Thanks to Ivan for sharing his cool tattoos with us here on Tattoosday!

Best Week Ever: Tattoosday Edition

The last seven days have been quite a whirlwind, and I felt it is worth a recap, just because I can't believe what happened since last Saturday.

A week ago, I had my best trip to the New York Tattoo Convention, saw a lot of great ink, reconnected with old blogging friends, and met a lot of cool people. All my posts since Sunday (with the exception of Friday) recapped the show and some of the folks I met.

On Wednesday, I swung by Kings Ave NYC on the Bowery after work and met one of the greats in the tattoo community, Corey Miller. When I asked him if it would be too dorky to ask to take a picture with him, he said, "Of course, it's dorky, but I love that shit." Do I look just a little bit excited?

For those of you who watch L.A. Ink, last season we saw a subplot in an episode in which Corey designed the album art for his friend Trever Kieth's band Face to Face.

As it happened, this past week the album dropped, and Face to Face had a gig in Times Square. Corey came along for the ride, and joined the band at Kings Avenue NYC to sign posters, singles, magazines, and other goodies.

Corey and the band signed the poster featuring the original album artwork

and the single they produced with Rise Against:

I'm not holding my breath, but I did give out Tattoosday cards to the guys in the band (and to Corey, of course) and asked them to contact me if they wanted to share some of their ink on a future Musician Monday feature. Fingers crossed!

Here's a fan video from the show they did that night:

Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about how the week ended, but I can tell you I was on location Friday on the set of a local tattoo establishment that is home base for a new reality-based tattoo show on a cable channel. Now, I may or may not have received a new tattoo, but eventually I'll be able to tell you all about the experience.

Incidentally, we are less than two weeks away from the premiere of TLC's NY Ink (June 2!) Can't wait to see it, as the show features Ami James, formerly of Miami Ink, as well as amazing artists like Tim Hendricks, Tommy Montoya, and Megan Massacre.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Congratulations to Michael Henry Lee, who won a t-shirt in our Kings Ave NYC contest! Your shirt is on its way!

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