"They are my favorite band of all time and when I say the Misfits, I mean the 1977-1983 Misfits. That to me is one of the greatest bands of all time and Glenn Danzig is my favorite singer of all time."
"inspired by the carvings in Cambodia in Siem Reap ... it's one of the temples of Indra, Indian god of thunder ... he's also the god of change and progress ...
At the top of Alex's arm is this symbol:... He's very human-like because he messes up a lot ... he's somewhat of a womanized, so it makes him very original from the rest of the Indian gods..."
"...Basically, I grew up there ... I grew up in Bensonhurst, but [Coney Island] is kind of where I became myself, adolescence and all that stuff - that's the old Coney Island..."Alex credited all of his work to a tattoo artist named Seth Wood who is currently working out of Saved Tattoo in Brooklyn.
"It's the right side of the face, [which] is really hard to find because the arm for the torch is in the way ... I had to research forever and then I found two photos which I matched up ... one was when it was under construction, someone got the right side ... the crown part we had to reverse and put onto the picture ... I'm pretty particular - it actually took two weeks to come up with a good design..."Alex says he got this tattoo a few years back "to commemorate President Bush leaving office." He was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and is originally from Albany, New York. The collaboration on the tattoo was with an artist named Ron at a shop whose name he doesn't recall.
"It's called a spaulding dragon - it's old sailor flash ... I just wanted to go to one of the guys that could do one really, really well. Everybody in the tattoo community up in Buffalo that I know said, 'you gotta go to Steve Boltz', so I traveled down here to got see him."
"I knew that I wanted a monarch. And I knew that I wanted it on my arm. And I knew that I wanted it coming out of a chrysalis ... I did a lot of research online and ... didn’t know who I wanted to get it done by and was just in San Diego for the day with my cousin. Pacific Beach, actually, and was ... shopping in Pacific Beach and walked into a tattoo parlor, just like 'Oh, let’s go look at tattoo parlors!' and was flipping through all the catalogs and it was like dragon, dragon, dragon. Samurai guy, samurai guy, samurai guy. And then opened one and it was just all these amazing beautiful naturescapes and just amazing detail and I immediately, right there was like, 'whoever this is, I want this person to do my tattoo'. And they were like, 'Hold on. She’s in the back' … her name is Rebecca Min and I basically came to her with the idea and was like, 'You’re the artist, so I want it hanging from a dead branch. I want the branch to be black and gray and I love monarchs.'
I have always loved monarchs for my whole life from when I was three. That’s one of my earliest memories, I found a monarch caterpillar with my great aunt and took it home from Wisconsin to, at the time, Chicago, in a jar with some milkweed and watched it spin a chrysalis and then hatch out of the chrysalis and then let it go and ever since then I’ve just loved monarchs …they’ve reminded me of the older women in my family, my grandmother, my great aunt.
It’s still a work in progress and she combined all these pictures, she put them together and I knew that I wanted the chrysalis to be empty, like it had just come out of the chrysalis, like a rebirth sort of thing and we both had the idea to make it translucent so that you could see the branch through the chrysalis...
We’ve been working on it for over a year and a half now, just bits and pieces , my longest session was three and a half hours and I had the idea to do a whole swarm from different perspectives and once we have all of those one, she’s going to pick a light source from one direction and do shadows….and she’s gonna do moss on the branches, a white lichen."
They are the first two lines of the last two songs in a set called "Aria T'oublie" by Claude Debussy. The poetry is by Paul Verlaine. I was a classical voice major in college and I wanted to do the set for my senior recital and I am obviously not your normal opera singer and my voice teacher said, 'Okay, that’s fine you can do the set, except for the last two songs. They’re too hard for you.' And I said, 'Fuck you.' And I took a year off and did nothing but practice and did lessons and studied and performed the set and was, too my knowledge, the first undergraduate ever to perform the set in its entirety. And so this was my badge of honor. Now seven year later, eight years later and until I’m in my eighties, I can look down and read these first two lines and remember every single word in French to both of these songs.
I was in West Hollywood, I was 23 and had 50 bucks and was like 'who can do this for really cheap?' and I don’t remember what his name was but I do know that at the time he had a sprained wrist and he was like 'I’ll do it. I’ll do it cheap. But I can’t believe you’re making me tattoo in a foreign language, upside down, with a sprained wrist.'
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| Tattoo by Denise de la Cerda |
"This is Amma, who is the Divine Mother and comes from India ... she's a great humanitarian leader and spiritual leader. She does a lot of good work. The 'Hugging Saint' they call her in the West...Denise [de la Cerda] is amazing, one of the things is that it's really difficult to capture ...it's considered a great blessing if you can have Amma's image like this ... Denise is very blessed because this is so real life that it's kind of unbelievable....Take a look, also, at the amazing detail Denise created in the flower garland around Amma's neck. This truly is a sensational piece of tattoo art.
Tattoo by Denise de la Cerda
She tattoos the way that an artist paints, she's a real artist .... the detail of the fabric and everything you see her are traditional Indian offerings ... the lotus, apples, bananas ... incense stick - see the smoke ... Indian sweets ... rice ... a lamp ...it's so amazing, right?"
Tattoo by Denise de la Cerda
"I came up with the idea of So Brooklyn ... I see a lot of people with a lot of just plain Brooklyn tattoos and I have yet to own a car, so I put the trains under it, as you can see, to represent my Brooklyn, and how I get around, far as the bridge and everything else. I took a lot of time to really design this tattoo and give it to my artist and it came out really well."He credited an artist named Chia at Big Fish Tattoos in Jamaica, Queens. It should be noted that their MySpace page says that Big Fish is no longer in business.
"I was a Women's Studies major an an undergrad and when I started getting a lot of tattoos, I thought, 'This'll be funny'. That's what most of my tattoos are."The tattoo was done by Alex Franklin when he was at Sinister Ink in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Sinister Ink has long since closed (Revolver Tattoo is located in its place) and Alex has been working out of Brooklyn Ink in Bay Ridge for many years now.
"Back in the day, when she was 19 or 20 years old, she was in the Irish mob and she made whiskey and hooch and she would basically run it back and forth across state lines and that's how she made her money. That's how she supported her family. That's what the derringer is for, because she would always keep a derringer in her bra, just in case something happened ... the black rose ... is symbolic of her life and her passing, which is the skull ... the bird - she's free - you know, God always keeps his eye on the sparrow ... it's a montage of her very interesting life."
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| Photo Courtesy of Daniel Valvano and Guido Baldini |
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| Photo Courtesy of Daniel Valvano and Guido Baldini |
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| Photo Courtesy of Daniel Valvano and Guido Baldini |
"We wanted to keep the theme going so I said I wanted a creepy background and he just free handed the clouds and lightening. The rotten apple was thrown in there at the very end."
"My best friend Sandrine Schaefer is a performance artist ... she did work where she would use pineapples and cherries on her body, because they're also used as common meat garnishes. And her artwork is a lot about feminism and veganism."
"was originally an actual photograph of a maple tree, but it was too difficult - you can see the shading is relatively delicate for it ... it looked better with a cloudier image ... so it looks more of a cherry blossom but it was originally a maple...
"I really wanted it to be something that represents being rooted and grounded and steadfast, but still growing upwards and moving towards the heavens, something that is strong and can withstand the wind, but is adaptable and changes with the seasons ... so it's just kind of, who I would like to be."She credited Randall Muntz at Divine Machine Tattoo in Buffalo, New York with this work. Coincidentally, Randall started full-time (according to their website) at Body Electric Tattoo in Hollywood, California, just this week.
