TattooAftercare.org

If you’re interested in the process of tattooing as well as the end result, check Myke Chambers tattooing as a guest artist at House of Pain Tattoo in El Paso, Texas, right now. You can watch Myke tattoo live, and as an added bonus, overhear shop banter.

I’ve seen other Ustream videos by tattooists like Durb Morrison but Myke has been doing these videos pretty regularly lately in his non-stop tattoo tour. [His travel schedule is just exhausting to look at.]

Read this article: Timothy Boor now at Last Rites

Poetry of body art as spied on craigslist.

Read more: I Spied Your Red Heart (Tattoo Mine?)

I completely geek out over body suits-in-progress blogs, especially when the work is done by tattoo phenomena. [And it seems many of you do too considering the popularity of John Mack's series on getting tattooed by Horiyoshi III.]

One such blog is Munewari Minutes where Brooklyn’s own Mike Crash posts on the progress of his Japanese backpiece and munewari. As Mike explains in one of his first blog posts,

“Munewari (literally ‘chest dividing’) is a tattoo style which
covers the front of the torso while leaving the center of the chest
untouched…The shape is meant to conceal the tattoo when traditional clothing such
as a kimono is worn. As a matter of practicality, I confess the shape has become an
anachronism. You’re not likely to see many folks in kimono
outside of the rare formal occasion. But the style is unique to
Japanese tattoo and I think quite stunning visually, which no doubt has
contributed to it’s longevity–it is still a commonly tattooed style.”

It’s this information on Japanese tattoo, combined with Mike’s own personal experience, that makes Munewari Minutes such an interesting read.

The artist creating the work is the renowned Horizakura, aka Shinji, of the Horitoshi Family. Horizakura has been tattooing Mike–by machine and tebori–for six years at NY Adorned.

The artists of NY Adorned have inspired other tattoo bloggers whom I love like my friend Sarah whose site Evolution of a Backpiece (which we posted here) relays her experience getting tattooed by Stefanie Tamez. Sarah was inspired by the blog (one of the first tattoo-in-progress blogs) of another dear friend, Keith Alexander, who died in July 2005. While his site is no longer online, you can see here
on BME his backpiece, which was tattooed by Chris O’Donnell, also of Adorned.

Horizakura will not be at NY Adorned for long, however. As Mike noted in his most recent post, the artist will soon be opening up his own studio on the Lower East Side.

Other big changes are taking place at NYA:

What could be better than discussions and close-ups of tattoos in the seventies set to music my parents had on 8-track tape?  Watch the video above and try to come up with something.

Also check Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

The third and fourth are mostly close-ups of tattoos, with a lot of boobs and butts and creative posing. The tattoos include facial work and a big penis in one’s armpit. In Part 5, there are some large gauge nipple and genital piercing, so yeah, not work safe.

Back in February, we talked about performance artists Wafaa Bilal, who was embarking on a tattoo-based performance-art piece entitled “…And Couting,” in which he would be receiving a tattooed dot – in both black and UV ink – to commemorate the military and civilian casualties in Iraq.

So, seeing as how I’m a “white-noise” freak who keeps WBGO blasting in the living room 24 hours a day and NPR equally cranked in my office here at the Needles and Sins Compound, I was pleased to find out that the latter had done a piece on Bilal.

Click here to read the transcript, see some cool pictures or stream the audio of the segment.

[above photo by Brad Farwell]

Follow this link: Wafaa Bilal on NPR