Monday Miscellany - Some Odds, Ends and Personals

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From Sue in relation to the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy:

That is the joy of a list like this - something that is familiar to me is novel for you and vice versa. It takes us both in richer places

Thank you!

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Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia?

Lydia, the Tattooed Lady

She has eyes that folks adore so

And a torso even more so

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopydia

Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo

On her back is the Battle of Waterloo

Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus, too

And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue

You can learn a lot from Lydia

- Lydia the Tattooed Lady, first performed by Groucho Marx in the 1939 Marx Brothers movie, At the Circus. 

(Interestingly, the the final stanza originally contained the lyrics "When she stands, the world gets lit'ler. When she sits, she sits on Hitler", but the lines were removed because the studio feared the song would sound too dated. The line that replaced it begins "Grover Whalen unveilin' the Trylon", Whalen having opened the World’s Fair in 1939, which seems far more dated today than the reference to Hitler.)

My reason in featuring Lydia and Groucho is that Number 1 son Thomas is currently having a sleeve done.

Although I have been an aficionado of skin art myself in the past, having half sleeves plus leg tattoos, including a dragon that winds around my left leg from crotch to toes, I nonetheless have sought to dissuade him for a couple of years. Nonetheless he finally he decided to get it done and it is now a work in progress. It is being done in stages by Jamie Giant, the world’s shortest tattooist, midget boxer and ggg, general good guy. He is highly regarded in the industry.

Shortly before commencing, Thomas and I had the following conversation:

Thomas: “I have worked out the design with Jamie and he will work on it freehand.”

Myself:     “What is it?”

Thomas:  “A mix of images leading into each other, about the cycle of life and death, growth. . . “

Myself:     “What’s wrong with a dragon?”

  

Anyway, here is the Boy Wonder’s work in progress:

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Still on the topic of tattoos:

Last week there was an item on news.com headed “Is this picture of NBA superstar Kobe Bryant the best over?”

The superb needle art is by South Korean tattoo artist Dongkyu Lee and it is hard that the image is not a photograph:

The tattoo is on the leg of another tattooist, Steve Butcher from New Zealand.

According to Lee:

“I used to be a musician but I soon realised I had no talent, so I joined the army for two years. My job was to plan war strategies. One day, a lower ranking soldier went away and came back with a tattoo. I had never really seen such a good tattoo before. It looked so cool and I became very interested in the artform.”

Tattoos are illegal in Korea so Lee moved to Canada. He has been tattooing for only 2 years.

Some others:

Lee’s personal favourite, a portrait of boxer Roy Jones Jr

Lee’s portrait of Floyd Mayweather Jr

Lee’s tattoo of Mike Tyson

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On the topic of amazing tattoos, I recently came across a blog that posted comments and photographs of women who have had mastectomies. These inspiring women have chosen to meet their changed body with tattoos rather than with cosmetic surgery or plastic. The website is at:

http://www.babble.com/mom/in-celebration-of-a-scar-25-amazing-mastectomy-tattoos/

There are also other sites that display mastetctomy tattoos, google those words and go to image search to see images.

Some examples:

(The story of this tattoo and the comments of the person who has the tattoo, Inga Duncan Thornell, can be read on her blog at:

http://dunthor.com/2012/07/31/tattoo-tuesday/)

The following pic shows tattooing used to hid the prominent scarring renmaining from surgery:

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