Science Monkey

So I’m thinking about getting a tattoo. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for several years now. Why haven’t I gotten one yet? Easy. I’m a wuss. Time to get over it. Well, soon. My plan is to donate blood again in early September (a double red again), then get a tattoo for my birthday. I guess it might have been a little more appropriate to get one last year, on my 30th birthday, but oh well. I’ll start the fourth decade of my life with a tattoo.

The question, of course, is what to get? I don’t want just some boring flash or some lame barbed wire on my arm. I’ve got a couple lines of thought and figured I could solicit my friends’ (and random internet strangers’) opinions about them.

First, I really dig the Yggdrasil/world tree imagery and have been thinking about that on a shoulder. I found this picture somewhere online and think it’d be pretty cool. I really like the light/dark theme, almost like a yin-yang but not quite as commonplace.

But then I was thinking, why not be nutty and get something really cool? I found this image online recently and really dig it, but would want to make some adjustments. Emma says I can’t have the boobs in the center and I think I’d want it a little shorter on my arm so it would be mostly covered by a short-sleeve shirt. Not that I think most people really care anymore, but still.

So that’s one idea. My biggest problem with the second one is that it’s so large. I’m a wuss, remember?

Second, and this is what I’ve been really hot on lately, is some sort of biomech tat. I’m a huge fan of biomech and steampunk imagery…I think it looks hella-awesome. A few months back I saw a cool text-under-peeling-skin tattoo on BoingBoing and thought it’d be cool to do something similar, but have a mechanical appearance underneath. After a bit of Google Image searching, dig what I found:

I hadn’t considered an ankle/leg tattoo, but damn, that looks awesome. I had been thinking about something similar on one shoulder, with a joint and cables and cool crap like that “underneath”. And check this out. Earlier today I found some pictures of tattoos with a UV/blacklight-sensitive ink. How awesome would that be if the cables would glow under UV? This cross tat is the best example I found of how the ink looks.

I don’t want the cross, of course, but isn’t that great?

The third idea is some sort of a raven. I really like the raven myths and there’s this fantastic, nihilistic poem by Coleridge that I love called “The Raven”. Yes, I know there’s another, more famous poem, but this one’s pretty sweet. Plus there’s a lot of raven imagery in the Norse mythos, which would fit nicely with the Yggdrasil/world tree tat. Actually, in the top left of the first image there’s a raven flying away from the tree which breaks the symmetry of the tattoo. I know it’s hard to tell that that smudge is a raven but it is. Trust me.

So what do you think? Any suggestions? I’m really leaning towards the biomech tat at this point, especially if our local tattoo parlor has the UV ink.