Amy's Lucky Little Tattoo

I spotted this tattoo on Amy while passing through the Brookfield Place/World Financial Center last summer:

Amy, who is from the United Kingdom, explained that she got this on her 21st birthday, along with her sister. "When we were younger," she explained, "we used to horse ride." They got the matching horseshoe tattoos "for good luck for both of us," she noted.

The lucky little tattoo was tattooed at Kids Love Ink (@kidsloveink_london) in the Deptford district of southeast London.

Thanks to Amy for sharing her lucky horseshoe with us here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2019 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.

A Sleeve on the L Train (Tattoosday Plays the Alphabet Game)

I took a lunch break in the Tattoosday Alphabet Game, and then resumed, heading for an L train. See the prior progress here.

12:04 PM, I'm on a 4 train to 14th Street/Union Square where I can grab an L train. Definitely ahead of where I was last year: A-J, 8 trains in 4 hours, or 2 per hour on average. L-Z remain, 9 to go and I have 5 hours, maybe 6. So far, so good.

12:10 PM, On the L, just missed someone covered with ink, got off at 6th Avenue. Just went 2 stops to 8th, now will head the opposite way - toward Brooklyn.

The L was sitting at 8th and our doors didn't open in time, so the train on the opposite platform left before I could switch, so I stayed on the original L. Good thing, because that's when I met Tina, who shared her wonderful sleeve:

This cool sleeve was the work of Steve Boltz (@steveboltz), out of Smith Street Tattoo Parlour (@smithstreettattooparlour) in Brooklyn. Tina estimates that this was created back in 2002-2003 over five sessions.

Really cool stuff, including a black cat, lucky horseshoe, sugar skull, sailor woman, pirates, and etc.

Thanks to Tina for sharing this fabulous sleeve with us here on Tattoosday as we continue playing the Alphabet Game!

This entry is ©2018 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.

Ending with a Little Luck on the R Train (Tattoosday Plays the Alphabet Game)

After the Q, I knew, alas, I was throwing in the towel. I could potentially finish out the Alphabet Game, but I would be battling commuters during rush hour on the R, S, W and Z trains, and I was, to be honest beat after having ridden the rails for eight-plus hours.

So, here's the final chapter of the first annual Alphabet Game on the MTA:

4:39 P.M. Off at 57th Street in Manhattan with the intent to catch a southbound R train.

4:45 P.M.  Board the R, southbound.

4:58 P.M.  At Prince Street, I decide to drop by my office to get some things, take a bathroom break, recharge the phone. I can still ride the R home and hopefully get one last tattoo.

5:07 P.M.  Exit the R train at Rector.

5:45 P.M.  Back on the R at Rector.

This is the final train of the day. For fun, I map my route:

R->A->B->C->C->D->D->E->[Break]->E->F->G->F->J->J->N->L->L->M->N->N->Q->Q->R->R 

That's 24 different trains between 8:15 A.M. and 5:45 P.M.

Just shy of 6:00 P.M., on the R between Union and 9th Street in Brooklyn, I introduce myself to Mita, who shares the 12th tattoo of the day from the subways (13th, if you count Adrien on the F train, who shared two almost five hours earlier).

This is Mita's tattoo:

Mita tells me she got this from Brooklyn tattoo legend Michael Angelo, who has been working out of his basement in a residential neighborhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, since 1976. He doesn't take appointments. You just show up and he gets to you when he gets to you. She says she camped out for it to guarantee she got the tattoo.

This lucky horseshoe has Taíno colors for her Puerto Rican heritage.

Thanks to Mita (and to all my the subway riders who shared their tattoos) for helping make the Alphabet Game a successful endeavor. We'll be sure to play again some time in the future!

To see the whole sequence of tattoos, from A to R, check out the main post here.

This entry is ©2017 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.

Rob's Rite of Passage

I braved a trip to Staples on Sunday, contrary to my notion of self-preservation. September in Staples is one of the outer circles of Hell, at least in my neighborhood, where it seems everyone with children goes for their school supplies. Everyone.

But I digress. On a mission for a printer cartridge, I spotted Rob, who is covered moderately by tattoos. I approached him with a flier, which he was already familiar with, as I had handed him a few weeks back when he was sitting in the front of Brooklyn Ink, a nearby tattoo shop.

If you read Tuesday's post, you can see how many different folks have contributed their ink to these hallowed pages. I estimate that only 1 out of 7 people I approach actually participate, so estimate that in the past year, I've spoken to (conservatively) six to eight hundred people about
Tattoosday. Sometimes I forget a name and or a face.

So, it's amazing to me that I've only, by my best estimates, only asked people about their ink a second time on maybe five occasions.

Once Rob reminded me who he was, I remembered him from the shop, and he told me I could stop by any time and take pictures of his tattoos.

It was then that I qualified one of the things that makes Tattoosday special. I won't go to shops to take pictures. That's just too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. The sport is in the random stumbling upon a fellow citizen of the inked nation.


So, to make a long story short, he offered up the piece above (posted so long ago, I will show it again).

This was tattooed by Alex at Brooklyn Ink, and the placement on the hand is as significant as the piece itself.

For many tattoo artists, the inking of the hands is a rite of passage. Once you tattoo your hands, it is very tough, nearly impossible, to hide the fact that you are a tattooed individual. The tattoo in theory meant that there was no turning back and that he was fully devoted to his craft.

He chose the sparrow flying through the horseshoe as both are emblems of good luck. I particularly admire the perspective created by the back wing of the bird behind the horseshoe and the front wing in the foreground. This device adds a nice depth to the piece.

Thanks to Rob at Brooklyn Ink for sharing his momentous tattoo here with us on Tattoosday!