Ink for Beginners

Ink for Beginners: A Comic Guide to Getting Tattooed is today's Retrofit/Big Planet comic.  It's available on Amazon for $4, and it's a nice little book that introduces the subject well.  I got my first tattoo six years ago (according to Facebook), of my son's name.  It's been three or four years since I got any new ink, so the book was good enough to reinvigorate my interest.  The last work I got done was a series of tattoos on my feet, including a reference to the poem, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  I've also wanted to get a ukulele with a palm tree, and add to my collection of sobriety medallions (I have nearly eight years sober but only two medallions inked).

The book is clever, short, and informative.  It warns potential inkers of the pitfalls of tattoos - getting them done by amateurs, getting them done hastily, not taking care of them.  I particularly like the cover, which has a bunch of typical small designs people get without thinking, such as skeleton butterflies, diamonds, stars, and flowers.

I particularly like tattoos of literature.  The tattoo on my foot is a take off of the poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Right now, outside of comics, I'm reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.  It'll take a good two or three months to read the seven-volume set, I bet, and maybe a tattoo would be a good way to commemorate the occasion.  I also plan on reading the graphic novel of the first volume, Swann's Way.  I've also thought of getting a Hesse, Nietszche, or Murakami tattoo.