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.

Alan’s Adventures at the Tea Party.

Alan’s Adventures at the Tea Party.

Posted by Mel Noir on March 6, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Our good friend Alan Aldred has shared some more of his adventures, this time at the Tattoo Tea Party, which took place over the past weekend. Thankfully this time there were no fuck ups with the hotels. Alan’s experience of the convention takes place behind the Cosmic Tattoo booth, so this page is therefore decorated at the end with photos of the tattoos the guys did

Never Say Never, and Never, Ever Give Up

Readers of Tattoosday first encountered my friend Brooke's tattoos here (in 2007) and here (in 2008).

I work with Brooke, as well, and we often chat about tattoos. A year or two ago, she had told me she was done getting inked. But, you know what they say, never say never.

So I was not terribly surprised a few months back when she and I talked about new work she was thinking about.

Then, out of nowhere it seemed, Brooke returned from a trip to San Francisco with a fresh tattoo, She provided me with this photo, which added kanji vertically on her back:

I sat down with Brooke last week and asked her to tell me how this new ink came to fruition. Here's the story, in her words:

"My grandfather and I decided about six-plus years ago that we were both going to get tattoos. And he doesn’t have any tattoos. So, we thought it would be cool - one quote that he’s always said to me over and over again was Winston Churchill's 'Never, never never give up.' So, we thought, all right,  it would be really cool  to get this tattooed on us, but let’s do it in Japanese, or Chinese, or something, so we both started doing some research and trying to find someone we trusted ... neither one of us could really come up with anything that we felt comfortable with. So, we just never did it and then he got sick … he’s been in and out of hospitals for five years now. He ended up in the hospital in the beginning of December, so I went and saw him at the beginning of January - they weren’t sure if he was going to make it or not.

I wanted to try and get the tattoo before I went out there, so I scrambled - you know, something to kind of cheer him up and make him happy and I couldn’t really pull it together, so I just didn’t do it.

One night [in San Francisco] when I left the hospital, I went looking for something to eat and found myself in Haight-Ashbury and decided to pull over and just go walking around and I walked past a tattoo shop [Soul Patch Tattoo] and I just went i