1.21 gigawatts, Jigga WHAT????

Whooo, what a trip that was!  So I’m back from lovely Brooklyn (what-what?) where I got to tattoo alongside Steven, the guy who started it all for me.   It was like our very own time machine; we turned our machines up to eleven, tattooed at 88mph, and even crossed the streams (no sexy).  And we mixed lots of movie metaphors all day long…

Since I was back in town, Steven gave our friend Jonathan a call, so the three of us got to catch up big time.  Some of you may know Jonathan as a shot-caller, big-baller in the art world, but he’ll always be Feelin’ Fine, J. LeVine to me.  Check out his site here and buy yourselves some amazing art.  J.J. and I were talking about a recent New York Times article about him, and I mentioned to him that he could get a Times obituary now, since one of the criteria for a Times obit is that one must have been mentioned in an article vivus before one gets an obit mortuus.  Jonathan is suddenly very excited at the prospect of his demise now that it would be punctuated by a Times obit.  It’s the little things in life and death, apparently.

I tattooed this dragon for my first appointment at Fly Rite on a client who is originally from Maine but now lives in the city.  If you saw his legs, you’d probably ask him to put some damn pants on, but then you’d recognize the Joker tattoo that’s on our website.  I could have tattooed the dragon smaller and finished it in our allotted time, but why limit the parameters of the tattoo to what I can finish in one session?  He’ll be happier in the long-run, I think, with a tattoo that’s the right size but is unfinished for a bit.  It’s a good rule of thumb- get your tattoo bigger than you want it to be.  Ask Sue about her backpiece the next time you’re in the shop, and you’ll get the whole litany- she’ll tell you that she wishes she had gotten it bigger.  This rule might secretly apply to her choice of husbands, too, since she definitely wishes that I were a little bit taller, a baller, had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and a ’64 Impala.

For my second appointment, I did a koi (which I did finish)- all in all, it was like playing my greatest hits all day long!

The sweatshirt saga:  We would have had them all about a month ago, but the grey and brown ones that we ordered from American Apparel sucked weak sauce and could only be screenprinted with one color.  WTF?!  Our screenprinter called American Apparel and asked them about this, and they were like, “Oh, yeah- we’ve been getting complaints about this.  Why don’t you just screenprint it in one color?”  Why?  Because I don’t want no janky sweatshirts, that’s why!!!

Seriously, American Apparel?  You make sweatshirts that can only take a one color screen?  How am I supposed to make my shop’s hoodies superlatively hot-sauce awesome when you make weak-sauce hoodies?

So, at long last, we have black, brown, and grey hoodies.  Hopefully, New England’s chilly evenings will keep our hoodies a hot gotta-have-me-item like a G4 iPhone and not punchline detritus like Betamax.  That would be a great business card, huh?  “Not the Betamax of Tattooing.”

Oh, and here are some more photos of sweet tatties…