Not Your Typical Knuckles Tattoo

Last month I was trying to figure out why so many interesting people were walking around the Penn Station area when a trio of tattooed guys enlightened me: it was the Friday commencement of the New York Comic Con.

Now, I realize, I could go to one of these events and have a field day with some amazing tattoos on some very committed fans, but then I'd also be writing up posts for another month or two, as well, so I was content to chat with Rob and his two friends (who will appear in subsequent posts - stay tuned-).

Rob offered us one of his three tattoos, this animated creature on his inner right forearm:

This is, I'm sure many of you may know, a character from Sonic the Hedgehog, an iconic video game series that appeared in the early 1990's and has since sold, according to Wikipedia, 70 million units worldwide.

Rob explained that he grew up playing Sonic games and his favorite character was Knuckles the Echidna, who first appeared in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. "He was the only one I wanted to be," Rob told me. An echidna, by the way, is another name for a spiny anteater.

Rob credited this tattoo to "Debbie Doo" at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, New York.

Thanks to Rob for sharing his Knuckles Tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

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Eric Shows His Dedication to Being a First Responder

In what was the first new instance of inkspotting outside of a tattoo shop since Christmas Eve, I met Eric in Penn Station and he shared this, the newest of his four tattoos:


Eric explained that he is a volunteer firefighter and EMT out on Long Island, and he wanted a tattoo to represent both sides of his service to his community.










This was done by Debbie at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, New York.


Work from this shop has appeared previously on our site here.

Thanks to Eric for sharing his new tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

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Cogito Chuck Robbins (Literary Ink)

Sometimes I abbreviate post titles and they seem nonsensical, like one of those captcha messages, or a subject line in a morsel of spam.

So I'm sticking with this title "Cogito Chuck Robbins" because I like the way it sounds. So there. It will all make sense eventually.

I met Chris outside of Penn Station one Friday afternoon, intrigued by his forearm tattoo:


"Cogito ergo sum" is a Latin phrase that means, in English, "I think, therefore, I am." It is attributed to the 17th Century French philosopher Ren� Descartes.

This was the first of Chris' three tattoos. He is a philosophy and creative writing major at SUNY New Paltz. This phrase is the "missing link in a belief system," or, in his words, "what I always knew, but never knew".

The tattoo was done at a shop in East Meadow, New York.

Chris also has this dead bird near his right elbow:


Inked at Skin Deep Tattoo in Levittown, this is inspired by the art on the cover of Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby.

Work from Skin Deep has appeared previously on Tattoosday here. Palahniuk also has quite a cult following, and his work is the most often represented in ink here on Tattoosday. Check out other Palahniuk tattoos here.

And Chris' third tattoo is based on the cover art from one of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins:


This echoes the front of the great book Still Life With Woodpecker, which has made many people a fan of the writer.


The piece, which was inked by Mike Vlad at Triple X Tattoo in Manhattan, is a subtle nod in appreciation of Robbins and his great book. Work from Triple X has appeared previously on Tattoosday here.

If you like these pieces, and are a fan of literary tattoos, you should certainly check out Contrariwise, a site dedicated solely to contributors' literary ink.

A hearty thanks to Chris for sharing his tattoos with us here on our site!

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