Death Metal Tattoos: part 1

I went to the Maryland Deathfest this past weekend and OH BOY did I see so many amazing metal tattoos! One million distorted zombies! Ten thousand blurry black and white messes of somethingorother! A good handful of band logos! I have a LOT to share with you guys, but let me start with this gem (perhaps the best of the bunch):



THAT GIRL IS TRUE. EVIL. I love the fancy flourishes added to each word, it really rubs in the brutality of her tattoo.

Tune in soon for more!

It's a dog going through a divorce

This is another tattoo in my favorite category ever: friends convincing other friends to get ridiculous nonsensical tattoos. Hilarious and awesome. And awful.

This was the first tattoo for this poor/rad soul. Description from the friend whose idea and drawing it was is below.





"i dont really remember what led up to the idea of swift getting a 20 second drawing i did of 'a dog going through a divorce' as a tattoo, but it was certainly assisted by it being 3am and a fair amount of alcohol on his part.. he woke up that next day and said "you know what? fuck it. lets do it." so less than an hour later i was paying someone $60 to permanently put it on swifts arm. dudes got sad depressed moppy divorced hair, hes unshaven and mopey, and hes got a little suitcase and dufflebag. he just needs to crash on your couch for a week or two. you know what happens when you call a tattoo shop and tell them you "want to get a cartoon dog getting a divorce", they dont believe youre serious. like 3 places didnt believe us."

Now THIS is what a zombie should look like!

I got a spur-of-the-moment zombie tattoo last week from Alex at Three Kings in Brooklyn. If you've seen my millions of bad zombie tattoo posts, you know that a good, gory zombie is hard to come by. And I got one!!!!



Because it was a TOTAL impulse tattoo (I just dropped by the shop to hang out and watch my friend Myles tattoo my friend Josh for a couple minutes and ended up getting tattooed myself!) I didn't know where the image was from. It was just something AWESOME that Alex had drawn up (he had a bunch of drawings for their Friday the 13th Zombie day that were too involved for the $40 zombie deal they had going). Turns out it is from this obscure comic that not one, but TWO of my friends knew about!



In other new tattoo news, I also got my other crow filled in. They're by Myles, also at Three Kings.



I'm so stoked on them! They look great.

I'll post some legitimately bad tattoos soon, I promise. I just wanted to share these awesome ones because I am so excited about them.

sxe god free zombie

So I finally did it. I finally got brainwashed by my bad tattoo blog and got a bad tattoo. AND I LOVE IT!



He is a straight edge god free zombie, in honor of Friday the 13th. I love him because he's just like all the rad old metal zombies that I looooooove and simultaneously make fun of on here. Done by Alex at Three Kings in Brooklyn, NY (who is an amazing tattoo artist, please do not for one second think that I am saying his work is bad!).

Bikes (part 2)

whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???????????????



There are so many better things you could put on your chest! Symmetrical, flattering, awesome things! Why why why why why why would you put a line drawing of a BIKE on your BOOBS? It makes her left boob look 10x bigger and droopier than the right because the left wheel is so much bigger.

sdjkskjfhsdfjs

At least it's well done. And I hope it's just the first outline and that she went and got it colored in later. And maybe put some stuff behind it to even the whole thing out.

p.s. my friend has a blog about funny emails he gets at work, if you're bored you should check it out.

When bad tattoos come full circle and become awesome

I bring you the most amazing collection of terrible tattoos that you could ever imagine. This fine young gentleman has agreed to let me post his awful tattoos and stories for your reading pleasure. Behold, the best bad tattoos in the world. They are so bad they are now officially AWESOME. I will let him explain in his own words:

My friend came down from Toronto to visit for a week or two. My roommate Tyson came home one night with about 3 friends, 2 cases of beer, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of vodka, a tattoo machine, needles and ink. We all start drinking and hanging out and having a really good time, then one of his friends suggests we get the gun out and start setting it up.

Not a single person before this had ever held a tattoo gun.

We get the thing running, set the needles in place, put on gloves etc etc and begin to tattoo each other. (different needles, gloves, etc for each person, not totally sanitary but not extremely dirty) after about hour 3 of tattooing the absolute most ridiculous shit on each other we end up falling asleep. Wake up the next morning and most people had no recollection of what had happened and will forever be reminded about the night they forgot they got tattooed.

Here are mine:


I think in the corner there we have a straightedge pyramid with an eye, like on the dollar bill?


The guy with the muscle arms at the top was supposed to be a CUPCAKE, by the way. There is also a cat with butterfly eyes and a mustache dreaming of... something?

But wait... there's more!!!


I had just gotten to a friends house kind of late at night, she was watching an episode of that Housewives of Orange County and i walked in on the part of the show where one of their daughters had told the parents she had gotten a tattoo. They started flipping out wanting to know WHAT and WHERE it was. She finally shows them this butterfly about the size of a dime on her foot.

So... i asked "i wonder how pissed they would've been if she wouldve came home with a bunch of random bugs all over her feet?".




Getting tattoos based on an awful reality tv show is possibly the worst idea in the world, especially if they are weird stickerbook bugs on your FEET, but this is just so funny and bad that I think it's pure genius.

This guy is my new hero.

Sorry!

I'm super busy at work now, so this blog will suffer for the next few weeks. Please bear with me.

I haven't known where to post this, so I've been hanging on to it for a while. It seems appropriate for this post. Just sit down, relax, and please be patient.



P.S. feel free to email me bad tattoo pictures and save me some of the legwork!


***** EDIT
I got a few comments saying it's a good tattoo. Please note the label for this post is "good execution, bad idea". I will agree that pretty much any tattoo that is executed well isn't truly going to be an AWFUL tattoo, but you have to agree that getting a chair tattooed on you is a little over the top!!!

Text tattoos

I am sure there are WAYYY more bad text/ script tattoos out there, but I didn't try to find any of these. They just dropped in my lap as I was searching for other things. One of these days I am going to specifically look for bad text tattoos and I am sure I will find a million of them.

UnfuckwithablE
the funniest part is the capital E at the end. And also the font, which is exactly what I would have chosen when I was 14 and still thought I was goth.


I think the word "SOUTHPAW" is flying out of the guy's skin, but why he would get this tattooed on him I don't know. It's a venue/club in NYC... does it mean anything else? The fact that it has flaps of skin tattooed around it is what puts it into this blog.


I have no idea what this means (the photo is named "iwillnotbedenied.jpg" so I assume that's what it is), but if they're going to have letters coming up out of the smoke, shouldn't they look like smoke and not block characters?


Goth meets Graffiti meets Detroit. I really don't know why I find this so funny.


sdkfhsdkfhsdkjfhsdkjfhsdkjfhsdkh!!!!! WHY?????


The best part about this (besides the worst bubble lettering ever) is that it is in quotes. He's not REALLY a bad boy.

Some more bad portraits

When I first saw this tattoo, I thought the artist was going for a watercolor french impressionist painting style, but then I saw the terrible lettering under the tattoos and realized it's probably the work of a really bad artist.


This was pointed out to me by one of my readers. Thanks, Steph!


This is the worst Betty Page I have seen. The triangle boobs are a little disturbing, but no big deal. The mushface is terrible but I'd like to think that when the tattoo heals it will look better. What is inexcusable, however, is the arms and hands. Especially the right arm. She looks like a T-Rex on one side. Plus she has major camel toe in the armpit area.


And finally... this isn't so much incompetent as ridiculous. The moon baby is kinda cute, but the sun has the biggest nose in the universe and shark teeth. At least the script is done really well.

Free For All Friday

I found a bunch of amazing tattoos today but none that really fit into any good theme. I'm about to rush out of work and go to a wedding this weekend, and my brain is kind of frazzled from some intense video footage I've been working on, so I'm just going to post the pictures and let you guys decide where they fit yourselves.

Have an awesome weekend!

xo

Logos

These tattoos are like getting someone's name tattooed on you, except worse. I don't get it. If you really love video games, get some awesome video game characters tattooed on you. If you really love cars, get an awesome vintage car tattoo. If you really love movies, get a tattoo from your favorite movie. If you really love a particular brand of computer... ok, I don't know what to say to you. Getting a tattoo of a Dell computer would be more lame than their logo.

I can't even comment on these individually. But seriously. DELL? BUICK? What are these people thinking?

Geeks and Nerds and Dorks, oh my!

The sad thing about most of the tattoos in this blog is that they could be so awesome if the tattooer and tattooee (is that even a word?!) just had a little more sense. Or skill. Or both. Nerd tattoos definitely fit into this category. I am all about awesome tributes to dorky things and there are so many amazing nerdy tattoos out there (see the last entry of "good as in bad" tattoos for proof). However, it's very easy to miss the mark. And unfortunately the following people missed it by a mile.

This tattoo comes with an explanation (because seriously, there is no way anyone would get it, even if they do recognize fractals). It looks like blobs from outer space that are bleeding out into the skin.
"This is a piece of the Mandelbrot Set, the most recognizable (and first?) fractal. It uses the quadratic recurrence equation: Zn+1 = ((Zn)(Zn))+C"


Here are a couple people who decided that, instead of illustrating their nerdiness by getting an awesome tattoo of something they really love, they would just get the word. Because tattoos of words always look cooler than pictures, right? Wrong. Especially when they're done this badly.



And finally, here are a couple tattoos that aren't done badly, and aren't even horrible ideas, they're just placed and sized horribly. Both of them would be pretty cool if they were smaller and on an arm or a leg, but taking up that much prime space with something so simple and blocky just makes me cringe.

Also, it was pointed out to me that having LVL UP and a half-full EXP bar makes zero sense. The bar should be totally full or totally empty.




And finally, here's one that I found that I actually like. I think it's a cute combination of traditional tattoo design and nerdy content.

Kurt Halsey fan tattoos

I think Kurt Halsey's drawings are unbearably twee and obnoxious, but I can see the appeal among the young and twee crowd. I knew there were people out there with tattoos based on his drawings but I had no idea there were so many! I figured most of them would be innocent little birds like the following (which is so cute it makes me want to puke, but I can understand it) :


But noooo. A ton of people went next level and got the little drawings with the little sayings about puppy love. How many of these people got matching tattoos at age 18 with their first boyfriend or girlfriend? A lot, I bet (I know for a fact a lot of the following are matching tattoos, but the first love thing is just conjecture). And that is kind of sad, because although I am by no means old or bitter, I am old enough and bitter enough to know that matching cutesy Kurt Halsey tattoos are a terrible, horrible, awful idea, and will almost surely be regretted a few years down the line.

The following are so gross and cutesy I can't even comment on them individually. The first one isn't even that well tattooed, but the rest are technically fine. It's just th idea that is so bad. Keep in mind that this is a small sampling of the inordinate amount of Kurt Halsey tattoos that are out there.