"Well it's unethical, it's immoral. It's everything I can think of that is a travesty against empathy..."

"... against caring for a human, a child. I mean yea, it's everything that's important to me as an artist in this field," said the tattoo artist about the woman who was arrested for letting her 3 children get tattoos.

The children were all under 13, and the tattoos were not done at a commercial tattoo parlor — is that still the term? tattoo parlor? — but by her brother. The children's father called the cops. He's the mother's ex-husband, and he's fighting for custody of the children.

What were the tattoos of? How big were they? What part of the body was tattooed? Do these questions matter to you? Does religion matter? The tattoos, on the ankle, were: 1. a cross, 2. an infinity symbol with a cross, and 3. a heart with an arrow.

Can children get tattoos? Here, there's a specific statute: "tattoos prohibited for certain persons," a Class A misdemeanor. So the answer is clearly no, unless you want to make an argument for a religious exemption.

Here's a Wikipedia article "Religious perspectives on tattooing."

Christian Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina started tattooing, especially of children, for perceived protection against forced conversion to Islam during the Ottoman occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.... This form of tattooing continued long past its original motivation. Tattooing was performed during springtime or during special religious celebrations such as the Feast of St. Joseph, and consisted mostly of Christian crosses on hands, fingers, forearms, and below the neck and on the chest. In India many Christians tattoos Cross Sign under thumb area. Orthodox Coptic Christians who live in Egypt commonly tattoo themselves with the symbols of Coptic crosses on their right wrists, the history of this custom is similar to that of the Christian Croat tatto[o]s.... 

I have no idea if this woman — her name is Ashley Weir — had any religious notions about what she was doing. Only 2 of the 3 tattoos had a cross. So let me pose a hypothetical. What if 3 children received cross tattoos that the Christian mother believed were needed as protection from forced conversion to Islam?

Here's an illustrated article about old women in Bosnia and Herzegovina who have tattoos they received when they were young. They did not go to commercial tattoo parlors to get these tattoos. They tattooed each other.

At the height of the cult, mothers took to tattooing their children at home, usually before they were ten years old. The tattooing process involves using a crude needle and a special solution made of charcoal, grime, honey, and milk extracted from the bosom of a lactating woman who has already had a male child....

Special power was ascribed to this milk.

Although the cult outlasted the Ottoman oppressors, communist authorities made tattooed women targets of hate campaigns. Threatened and treated like criminals, they would often lose their jobs due to their religious allegiances. Eventually women stopped tattooing their children out of fear and the practice was more or less extinct by the 1950s.

... "There was a paraffin lamp," [one woman remembered], "milk was taken from the woman who feeds a male child and it was mixed with the soot from the lamp. Then she took the needle, dipped it, and tattooed a cross on my hands until the blood ran. My hand was numb so I didn't feel anything. She wrapped it and I held it like that for one day without washing."

What would you do with an American mother who belonged to a cult like this and followed the traditional practice? What would you do with an American mother, a Christian, who heard about this practice and adopted it as part of a custody battle with her ex-husband, a Muslim?

(Again, I don't know the details of the case reported in the news today. I'm just pursuing the ideas using hypotheticals.)

NOTE: This post was corrected to show that the second tattoo, the one with the infinity symbol, also had a cross.

"Polish town installs lime green statue of Lenin taking a leak."

"The statue replaces a more traditional sculpture of Lenin that was removed in 1989, following the fall of communism in Poland. The piece, dubbed the ‘Fountain of the Future,’ is designed to encourage debate...."

ADDED: I oppose, in addition to communism, tag proliferation, but this was the post that made me do what I'd resisted in the past, making a tag for Lenin. Having done so, I went back and added the tag to 11 old posts with the name Lenin and it's an interesting lot — including:

"Why would I want to have all these hours of tattoo work put into my body for me to be buried with them?"

Said Chris Wentzel, whose tattooed skin was peeled off his body after he died and is now preserved and displayed in a frame. Photograph of the eternal artwork at "Preserving a loved one's tattoos after death" (BBC). There's a company — Save My Ink Forever — that specializes in this craft. It was started by a father and son who were already in the funeral business.

"People put urns on their mantle and to me, my tattoos are more meaningful than an urn on the mantle," says [the son]. "It's an actual piece of a person that symbolises something."...

"When my husband passed away, half of me passed away with him," [Wentzel's widow] says. "I didn't know what to do. I just knew he wanted this preservation done. I had to set aside my own emotion to get this part done."

Ms Wenzel chose the pieces to be preserved - two full sleeve tattoos including the top of Chris' hands, his throat and chest piece, his full back piece, two thigh pieces and calf piece. It was the largest tattoo preservation the Sherwoods had done....

I haven't mentioned this in a long time, but for many years, I maintained the opinion that the best blog post I ever wrote was "Tattoos remind you of death," written in 2005. It was about a Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye, who had a place in China called Art Farm, where pigs were raised and tattooed. When the pigs eventually died — we're told they got to live until they died of natural causes — their skins were removed and turned into wall art.

The quote from Delvoye was: "The Art Farm is a real enterprise and by selling, eventually, the skins, the whole thing gets financed and I can go on... Tattoos remind you of death. It's leaving something permanent on something non-permanent.... Even when tattooing flowers, there is a morbid side to the activity."

From my post:

I agree: tattoos do remind you of death. When I see someone with a tattoo, I usually think: you're going to have that as part of your body until the day you die. And then you're going to have that on your body in your grave. You and that tattoo are in a death grip....

[T]here's the question whether we're outraged about the use of pigs or about going to rural China to do the project. And if we're outraged about both, which is worse? Maybe it's kind of a positive thing, though, both for the pigs and the villagers.

Surely, the villagers must be getting some laughs -- perhaps at the expense of Westerners generally. Maybe we Westerners should be irked that some egoistic artist is making us look ridiculous.

For the pigs, it's a nice life. They get to take sedatives, so they probably enjoy the tattooing experience. Then, they are "raised carefully" until they die a natural death. Think of the pig alternatives. These pigs are living like kings!

And what of the rich folk with tattooed pig skins hanging on their walls? I think the final artwork might look quite nice, and they're not exploiting poor Chinese any more than you are when you buy cheap leather shoes made in China. In fact, it's less exploitative, and the Chinese are learning tattooing skills. Maybe they will emigrate here and tattoo your ass for you as a memento mori.

What was good for the pigs is good for the humans. Why call it a "sleeve tattoo" if you don't envision slipping it off like a shirt?

"Tattoos remind you of death."

CNN reports:

Tattoos of mermaids and roses, cherubs bearing crimson hearts, Lenin's head and the trademarked pattern of French luxury brand Louis Vuitton stand out against bright pink skin soaking in the sun outside Beijing.

This living gallery of skin art is not on display for a tattooists' convention or a Harley-Davidson fan club meeting. It is an everyday sight in Chenjiatuo village and is borne on the flesh of some unlikely subjects -- big, fat pigs.

The idea was cooked up by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who has hired a small staff of local farmers and tattoo artists to raise some 20 sows and use them as canvases for skin art at his rustic China base, Art Farm.

"I decided to do something in China first, and I realized tattooing pigs would be a good introduction to the country. It's low-tech," Delvoye, 40, told Reuters.

The pigs get sedatives before they go under the needle and are carefully raised until their natural deaths, normally well past the six-month mark when farm pigs are slaughtered.

Collectors can buy the pigs live and pay for their keep as "foster parents" or simply purchase their tattoo-festooned skins for display after the pigs pass.

"The Art Farm is a real enterprise and by selling, eventually, the skins, the whole thing gets financed and I can go on," said Delvoye, who has pushed other artistic boundaries with previous works.

Mortality is a primary theme in the porky "paintings".

"Tattoos remind you of death. It's leaving something permanent on something non-permanent," he said. "Even when tattooing flowers, there is a morbid side to the activity."

I agree: tattoos do remind you of death. When I see someone with a tattoo, I usually think: you're going to have that as part of your body until the day you die. And then you're going to have that on your body in your grave. You and that tattoo are in a death grip.

But aside from tattoos generally, this story raises some other questions. First, there's the whole placement of Lenin's head amidst mermaids, roses, cherubs, and crimson hearts. But maybe all these things, like tattoos themselves, remind you of death.

Then there's the paired image of Harley-Davidson conventioneers and big, fat pigs. Stereotyping the rider of the beautiful motorcycle again. Stereotyping the pig too.

And then there's the question whether we're outraged about the use of pigs or about going to rural China to do the project. And if we're outraged about both, which is worse? Maybe it's kind of a positive thing, though, both for the pigs and the villagers.

Surely, the villagers must be getting some laughs -- perhaps at the expense of Westerners generally. Maybe we Westerners should be irked that some egoistic artist is making us look ridiculous.

For the pigs, it's a nice life. They get to take sedatives, so they probably enjoy the tattooing experience. Then, they are "raised carefully" until they die a natural death. Think of the pig alternatives. These pigs are living like kings!

And what of the rich folk with tattooed pig skins hanging on their walls? I think the final artwork might look quite nice, and they're not exploiting poor Chinese any more than you are when you buy cheap leather shoes made in China. In fact, it's less exploitative, and the Chinese are learning tattooing skills. Maybe they will emigrate here and tattoo your ass for you as a memento mori.

"It seems the gut reaction should be, ‘No, minors should not get tattoos,’ but minors will get tattoos."

Said Marisa Kakoulas, "a lawyer based in New York City who has written a series of books on tattoos and consults with artists on tattoo law," quoted in "A 10-Year-Old Got a Tattoo. His Mother Was Arrested. In New York State, you must be at least 18 to get a tattoo. Elsewhere, the rules are different — and perceptions are changing" (NYT). 

The 10-year-old's tattoo was "a crude rendering of his name in large block letters on the inside of his forearm.”

And here's a quote from "a tattoo anthropologist" named Lars Krutak: "Maybe decolonizing the Western thought concept of ‘age-appropriate’ tattoos could be enlightening. But I am not saying that children should be tattooed at 10 and 11 years old, because they still have a lot to learn about the world."

The NYT runs the style piece "Face Tattoos Go Mainstream" the day after the obituary for the heavily face-tattooed Zombie Boy.

August 4th: "Face Tattoos Go Mainstream" (noting various characters with an "amazing pop star life" who have things tattooed on their face, such as "Stay Away" on the forehead or a marijuana leaf on the temple or a portrait of Anne Frank on the cheek-to-neck region (and then tattooing a marijuana leaf on Anne Frank's cheek*)):

[In the past] one saw a face tat and thought: Aryan Brotherhood or gang member or sideshow performer. Famous face tattoo wearers of the recent past, like Mike Tyson, Charles Manson and the drug-addled skateboarder Jay Adams, conformed to the stereotype of the rough character....

“A lot of kids are doing it to make themselves bigger on social media,” said Travis Hardy, 30, a creative director in Los Angeles who works with musicians. “It’s kind of corny.” Last month, he a got a lightning bolt tattooed under his left eye. “I don’t need that,” Mr. Hardy said, referring to others’ quest for attention. “This isn’t for followers or comments.... There’s no turning back. There’s no normal job or whatever... I’m going to continue to creative direct or write treatments for music videos or stage design. I’m not going to turn around. This served as a stamp: I believe in myself.”

August 3rd: "Rick Genest, Tattooed Model Known as Zombie Boy, Dies at 32":

When he was a teenager he was told by doctors that he had a brain tumor and that he would need surgery that would leave him disfigured for life. [But instead he received a laser treatment that was not disfiguring.]...

He then began getting tattoos. His first was of a skull and crossbones on his left shoulder. Then he had his face tattooed to resemble a skull. He decided to shave off his mohawk and had his head tattooed to resemble a brain....

Lady Gaga approached him in 2011 to participate in the “Born This Way” video,** in which she wore makeup that resembled his tattoos....

Mr. Genest wrote in The Mirror that he was proud of achieving his boyhood dream of becoming “a freak.” “And yes,” he wrote, “Please do stare, I like it.”

_____________________

* For real.

** Here's that video, and, obviously, he was not born that way. It was a later, intentional imposition on his physical being... as was the death, if Lady Gaga's initial tweet is to be believed.




(My screenshots from "Born This Way." To see the Zombie Boy part of the very long "Born This Way" video, begin at 4:11.)

ADDED: Here's the ad Genest did for a tattoo-covering product:

"It’s easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well-respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday."

Says Megan Rosenbloom, author of "DARK ARCHIVES/A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin," quoted in "Yes, Books Were Bound in Human Skin. An Intrepid Librarian Finds the Proof" by James Hamblin (NYT).

In fact, anthropodermic bibliopegy was not the practice of some singularly heinous regime.... Human skin leather looks indistinguishable from that of other mammals, and only recent developments in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to tell a skin-bound book from a forgery. The making and selling of such books was pursued at many times and in many places, including late-19th-century America. John Stockton Hough, a Philadelphia physician, is known to have bound three textbooks about reproduction in the skin of Mary Lynch, a local woman who died at 28 in 1869 of tuberculosis and a parasitic infection. During an autopsy, Hough removed and preserved skin from her thighs, and then bound his books with it — presumably as a form of homage....

Rosenbloom [details]... the techniques of tanning, soaking and scraping the “hides” to preserve them. At times her descriptions seem gratuitously to indulge the same morbid fascination that has long drawn people to these objects....

Cremated remains are manufactured into all sorts of keepsakes: paperweights, gazing balls, blown-glass "art," jewelry. Is that more acceptable because it's processed into glass and retains none of the feeling of a human body?

What if a dying person wanted her skin used to make a keepsake book? My hypothetical requires the future dead body to want to be used to make a book — what book would you want to be if you wanted to be a book? — and someone who wanted to receive such a book. Presumably, the cost would be high, so deduct that from your inheritance before you say, sure, I'd love a copy of "12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos" bound in the skin of my late father. 

"Ephemeral Tattoos Were 'Made to Fade.' Some Have a Ways to Go."

 The NYT reports.

This is a story that originated in social media — Reddit and TikTok. Customers of a business, Ephemeral, are complaining about the product — disappearing ink, injected — and displaying pictures of tattoos that were always bad but at least "made to fade." 

What sort of disclosure and consent form the tattooees signed? Paragraph 4 shows this is just another tattoo regret story:

How did I and "groin" get into this article about tattoos?

Just one of those mysteries I need to solve because I have a Google alert on my name.

And no, it doesn't have to do with my old post -- which I've said exemplifies what I want to do when I blog -- "Tattoos remind you of death."

And when did I ever say that about "groin"? It's in a comment in the post "What Britney's Crotch Did To My Stats."

Oh, yes, tattoos remind me of death. And Britney's crotch reminds me of blog traffic.

Tattoo artist doesn't really want to spend his tattooing time creating trompe l'oeil nipples.

But the universe and The New York Times keep prodding him.

Poor Vinnie Myers whose artistic skill made him really good at tattooing realistic nipples. At the end of the video at the link — which concentrates mostly on the woman's emotional arc — says:

"You know, you definitely lose the artistic satisfaction... when you're doing the nipple tattoos all day. You don't get that same gratification [that you get] when you finish a back piece or you finish a sleeve [and] you're taking the final photos. But you gain this other satisfaction that's... that's... even more rewarding."

He tried to quit. From the text of the article:

As Mr. Myers developed his technique, word spread and his business grew, giving him little time for other tattoos. Mr. Myers said that in 2010 he decided to stop doing nipple tattoos.

“The morning that I planned on telling the guys to stop taking appointments for them, my sister called to tell me she had breast cancer,” he recalled.

He took it as a sign. 

Tattoos, tattoos, tattoos.

Yesterday, I started a discussion about tattoos. Chip Ahoy said, for himself, he'd always wanted "a snake crawling out of my arse crack," that is a tattoo of same, not an actual snake. For me?

Something tattooed on a spot on the body that moves like an elbow or a knee so that a frog appears to croak or a woman's breasts bulge, or eyes widen.

A tattoo that appears to be a rip in the skin revealing underneath to be steam-punk mechanism of gears and levers rather than muscles...

Like a sly reference to the "In His Image" episode of "The Twilight Zone"? (Video.)

...or perhaps a sack of worms.

A tattoo to look like an alien being born by tearing its way out.

A realistic eyeball on the back of your neck. [When I was a youngster I asked my mum how she knew what I was up to and she answered, "Because I have eyes in the back of my head." Being a literalist, I took her on her word, and for years tried to examine her head more closely to confirm it. She was always such the bullshitter.]

Conversely, a realistic eyeball on your forehead that blinks when you furrow your brow.

Weighing scales that rise and fall depending on your arm movement would be too trite. Reject those.

Something in Latin that makes a person asking appear foolish for having asked isn't worth the joke. Reject that too.

Also reject some long passage or inspiring message that must be closely examined in order to be read. They're pretentious and the reader is ultimately let down for having troubled.

A dung beetle placed on your gluteus maximus appearing to be rolling a piece of dung away from your anus.

A radiation hazard symbol tattooed on your penis. Oh wait.

An archer fish depicted spitting placed near your urethra.

A Boxer dog tattooed on each breast so that when they sag they magically become Shar-peis.

For myself, I've always been partial to Egyptian designs, at least that's what I doodled all through college, and that's the art I sell, so the only tattoo acceptable for myself is a design of my own in the Egyptian style. It would be large, colorful, and dramatic. Probably a winged solar disc with something within the disc, possibly a uraeus.

There's an idea for you, a uraeus on your forehead.

Back to the snake!

Or a snake wrapped around your arm.

Or a gold bracelet with lapis lazuli. But then that begs the question, why not a real bracelet? I always thought if you were inclined to tattoo barbed wire around your arm, then real barbed wire would be much more dramatic.

A crown of thorns across your forehead.

Bugs crawling from out between your breasts.

An "R" and a "L" tattooed on the back of each hand appropriately. Or the word "Down" tattooed on top of each foot and possibly "Up" tattooed on your forehead.

"I'm with Stupid --->" tattooed immediately beneath your clavicle.

A diver hands clasped together aiming downward tattooed on you one side of your belly appearing to be preparing to dive into your pants.

An alligator snapping out of your crotch.

An elf, a fairy, a gnome, a leprechaun, or otherwise, some tiny being tattooed making it's way out of your pubic hair.

Ropes tattooed around your arms and legs so when you crossed your arms or legs it would appear as if you were suggesting bondage.

Robot parts tattooed on working segments of your body.

Open eyes tattooed on your eyelids.

A mustache tattooed with glow-in-dark ink, just for fun.

Jagged backhoe bucket teeth tattooed around your mouth.

Mucus tattooed draining from your nose.

Ants tattooed crawling in a line across your shoulder or torso carrying off some treasure like a leaf segment or other bug parts.

Bees laden with pollen tattooed to appear crawling out of your ears as if they [were] flowers.

A raptor on one knee and a bunny, chipmunk, fox, lamb or some other prey animal on the other knee, so that when your legs are crossed one appears to engulf the other.

Wow! Chip was a blog thread unto himself. Such overwhelming thread domination could have silenced everyone else. But we still had Christy:

A stylized slightly tilted fibonacci spiral that starts directly above the center of your left eyebrow, arches up and drops to end in a tight swirl beside your left eye. In blue, a strong blue. With wings coming off the outside edge of the curve that reach up and out to your hairline. A little black can be used to give definition to the wings.

Then, Dody Jane said:

I am going to answer seriously... I was in a writing seminar once called "Writing Family Stories". There was a man in the class of East Indian heritage - he was first generation American. 

He told a lovely story about being taken to India as a child. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. His mother had the back of his neck tatooed with a round black dot. She was not going on the trip. He was going with his father. She told him she had the tattoo placed at the nape of his neck so that God would be able to easily identify him when he looked down from heaven and protect him from harm while on his journey. The way he told the story was so incredibly moving. 

I think this is an ideal tattoo. I told my daughter it is the only tattoo I would sanction. Otherwise, I told her I am leaving everything to charity. She remains untattooed...

See, I hear that story, and I imagine God thinking: There's that kid with the dot again, whose mother thinks he's so special, like I'll be all screw the other kids, this one has a dot.

Freeman Hunt said:

I told my husband about this thread, and he had a recent tattoo anecdote I have to share:

Last week my husband was down in our basement with his friends for their weekly movie get together. One of the men took off a fleece pullover and inadvertently pulled up the t-shirt underneath, revealing what appeared to be a large flower on one pectoral muscle with his nipple forming the center.

"Wait a minute--what was that?! Is that a flower around your nipple? Lift up your shirt again."

"No. That's the only time you'll ever see it."

"Why do you have a giant flower around your nipple?"

"It's not a flower. I'm going to get it fixed. It was going to be something else, but it hurt too much, so they couldn't finish it."

"Well, right now it looks like a flower."

"I know."

Ha.

Ha, indeed.

"The parents of a girl born with a large birthmark on her leg have got matching tattoos in a show of support for their 18-month old daughter."

"There's not many people with that birthmark, so to us it is really, really unique. We love it and we are going to teach her to love it. We'll treasure it for ever, so even if hers does go she knows what was once on her leg."

ADDED: I ran across that by chance as I was researching the subject of anti-tattoo discrimination. On that topic, see: 

"Should anti-tattoo discrimination be illegal?"

"Tattoos are sad and stupid – we should discriminate against people with them."

"Dear fellow tattooed people: Lighten up/Are you really surprised that some people don't like your ink?"

Today is my 73rd birthday, but, more importantly, 2 days from now is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of this blog.

That's a huge milestone! Is there anything I can do to mark the occasion? There are more than 71 thousand posts on this blog, quite evenly spread out over the years and days. It's not as though I can make a top 20 best posts list. 

Do I even have a favorite post from all these years? I used to say my favorite post — the post that exemplifies what I most hope will happen when I set out on a new post — was "Tattoos remind you of death." But that's from back in 2005. Surely, something in the succeeding years topped that.

I was just talking to my son John, and he urged me to include the post about "the Washington Post guy with the mustache." My post, from 2006, is here: "Of oversized things, MSM, and the internet."

John — wishing me a happy 10th bloggiversary (in 2014) — declared that it represented the "essence" of this blog.

So that gave me the idea to ask you, my dear readers, if you have some post — in there among the 71,000+ posts — that represents what you think is the best (or the essence) of this blog? I would like to learn something about what you think is the reason for doing this.

You don't have to like what you imagine is what I most want to do. Maybe you groan when I veer into tattoos-remind-you-of-death territory and wish I could give more clear answers about who should win the next election and how the Supreme Court should decide this or that case. That's okay. I'm just soliciting material for a blog post I feel I ought to write when we get to that milestone.

"The ways you can get infected with this bacteria are, one, you can eat something that’s contaminated with it [and] the other way is by having a cut or tattoo exposed to water in which this bug lives."

From "California mom had all of her limbs amputated after consuming bad tilapia: 'She almost lost her life'" (NY Post).

The bacteria is Vibrio Vulnificus, and here's a link to an article from last month, "New York State Department releases guidance after 3 dead from flesh-eating bacteria in New York, Connecticut." 

I think the problem with swimming and tattoos refers only to recent tattoos, in their healing phase. It would be quite something if getting tattooed represented a decision never to go swimming again. 

Meanwhile, the woman who lost all her limbs merely encountered fish, and it's not enough to avoid eating raw or undercooked fish. You have to worry about handling raw fish. Wear gloves.

I love these scribbly tattoos!

Much more — from Yann Travaille — here. (Warning: some clickable thumbnail-sized photos have naked breasts.)(Via Neatorama.)

Do these tattoos remind me of death? No, they remind me of taking delightful chances.

At the Special Touch Café...

... you can get tattoos, fireworks, and more. We didn't get any fireworks or tattoos. Not today, anyway. We did get some dinner at Culvers, though.

Did you miss any of the 20 things I blogged about yesterday?

1. How to be as unheterosexual as possible.  2. Knocking the cover off the baseball.  3. Elitist chickening. 4. The history of the letter W.  5. The Clinton "conspiracy commerce" memo. 6. A Monica sequitur. 7. Stages of mocking the stages of grief. 8. Nevada wants its land back. 9. VAWA amended to help U.S. Attorneys off the hook for their chronic failure to prosecute domestic violence cases. 10. The down side of desegregation. 11. The game young folks spurn. 12. Theme blogging. 13.  Floating nuclear power plants. 14. Lawyers in shorts.15. The political football. 16. The Alienation Museum. 17. Outsourcing umpiring.18.  Idol fluff. 19. Eiffel fluff. 20. Flying tentacles of Drudge.

ADDED: A commenter seems to have missed these posts because, he says, he was out getting a tattoo. Since he seems 1. To like tattoos and 2. To want to make up for his lapse in failing to read yesterday's 20 posts, I suggest that he get 20 tattoos, corresponding to the 20 posts:

1. 2 men who look alike, 2. A deconstructing baseball, 3. a fancy-schmancy chicken, 4. a W, 5. Hillary looking offended, 6. the smiling face of Monica Lewinski, 7. the Grim Reaper laughing, 8. Harry Reid wrestling with a map of Nevada, 9. A lawyer with the letters "U.S." on his shirt, looking the other way while a woman is getting strangled, 10. Zora Neale Hurston, Elijah Muhammad, and W.E.B. Du Bois all frowning disapprovingly, 11. An old man with a bag of golf clubs supplicating at the feet of a young man who is holding out his hand in the "Stop!" gesture, 12. Female hands on a keyboard, 13. 3-Mile-Island-style towers rocking atop a Hokusai wave, 14. Alan Dershowitz drawn in an R. Crumb style with skinny hairy legs showing because he's wearing shorts, 15. Leave a lot of room somewhere for that entire 1889 cartoon about Benjamin Harrison, 16. A lady seen from the back next to a framed painting of a woman of approximately the same shape appearing only as a silhouette, 17. An umpire "powwow," 18. Dexter Roberts, 19. The Eiffel Tower, 20. Michelle Obama, Johnny Depp, and Antonin Scalia, the first 2 with their hair swirling Medusa-ishly and the latter waggling his fingers in the "Boo!' gesture.

Tattoos.

Lots of interesting photographs here, quite aside from whether the tattoos are wise choices or well done. I love #19, done with a fisheye lens, which shows a man whose large upper arm is consumed by a technically excellent monochrome depiction of the face of Bruce Springsteen. A terrible idea. Sickeningly earnest to me, but the guy is quite pleased with it, and he's at a Bruce Springsteen concert, so there's something charming about it. Horrible and charming.

The next photo — #20 — takes us in a completely different direction:

"Vinnie" Myers specializes in tattooing nipples and areolas onto women who have undergone breast cancer surgery. Using precisely mixed pigments, he creates a perfect 3-D illusion of the real thing...

Unfortunate...

Tattoos. And then there are the things you do to yourself that you can't hide with a shirt.

Here's a website devoted to bad tattoos. And here's one I like even better. There are different kinds of bad, though, you know, and I'm going to endorse this kind:

"Here’s my perfect blog post. There’s a story in the news. People are interested. I know something other people don't..."

"... about this general area of law, and I can say it in a few paragraphs that I can just whip out. When a reader says, 'Huh, I hadn’t ever thought about that. I hadn’t seen this precedent. I hadn’t been aware of that legal doctrine. I hadn’t realized how this analogy would fit,' that makes me feel that I’ve done what I became an academic to do, which is to spread ideas."

Says Eugene Volokh, quoted in "Right Side of the Law: Eugene Volokh’s Global Influence/The wunderkind-turned-law professor is that L.A. anomaly: an influential conservative blogger."

The "wunderkind" part includes having his IQ tested at 206 when he was 12 and
— his words —  "socially inept" and "goofy," about which he says: "Kids who fit my profile have a difficult adolescence even in a normal junior high school and high school."

IN THE COMMENTS: Unknown says he thought that quote in the post title was about me, but it's clearly not my idea of the perfect blog post for myself. It's something I do sometimes, but it's not what I like to do or hope to do and it's not at all the energy behind this blog. The classic example of what I'm trying to do with this blog is the 2005 post "Tattoos remind you of death." I don't need a tattoo saying "'Tattoos remind you of death' reminds you how to blog" to remember that.