At Last, Good Pix of Ink

The Asheville Art Museum is currently hosting a tattoo show, which, if you are in fact in Asheville, you should make every damn effort to go and see. As we all know, I am somewhat of an alumna of the museum, being as how I worked there for five years and in fact was kind of involved with the genesis of this show. It's turned out really well - probably better than it would have if I'd worked on it, heh. It provides a very cool, well documented capsule history of tattooing and an incredibly cool series of tattoo related contemporary pieces and no, I don't mean those pages of flash with the little hearts and winged skulls and such. More like utterly creepy tattooed/embroidered baby dolls and a fantastic chess set made of tattoo needles and stuff like that. Stuff that it is well worth your $6 to see. Go.

And, indirectly through this show, I finally, finally managed to get some decent pictures taken of my own personal ink, or some of it, which is presented here for your delectation. I don't know why it's so hard to take decent pictures of tattoos - maybe because they're round rather than flat, or maybe because nobody's skin really benefits from harsh flash and close up lenses (eww! moles! pores! bumpy bits!) but at any rate these are quite fabulous.

Friday evening at Bele Chere a man asked me about my leg tattoo in less than pleasant or flattering terms. He was with his young daughter and I have a feeling that he was trying to use me as an object lesson as to why she shouldn't get tattoos. I like confounding people like that so I stopped and spoke courteously and literately (and by that I mean that I was polite and used big words) with him, which totally was not what he expected. I think he thought I was going to grunt or something, or get mad, or just ignore him. Don't you love people like that? What object lesson is he giving his daughter by demonstrating that he feels perfectly justified in commenting loudly on the appearance of any passing woman? Yuck. Oh well. I am fond of my tattoos; every so often I vaguely consider getting more - in particular I'd like to find an artist who could expand the Hokusai on my back so it doesn't end quite so abruptly - but on the other hand it's possible that I have enough ink for a middle aged lady with no biker pretensions. Still, getting inked is probably the one thing in my life that I don't regret, at all. Even if I do have to always wear long pants around my mother for the rest of my life.