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Tattoos in the Age of the Internet

by Tim Stevens on April 1, 2009 at 05:20 PM


Back in the old days, tattoos were given out in dingy, dark, back-alley parlors by intimidating practitioners whose art you wouldn't dare question. Since then, it's safe to say the process of getting inked has gone mainstream -- but it hasn't exactly gone high-tech. That's changing, though. Many artists still hand-draw their stencils, or copy them straight out of a book, but, according to the New York Times, people are increasingly turning to the Internet to find inspiration for their soon-to-be permanent art. Accordingly, more and more are going online to share pictures of the results, a trend that not every tattooist appreciates.

Sites like TattooLettering.net let you pick from dozens of different tattoo-friendly fonts, type in a message, and get a preview of how the text might look on your flesh. You can then, of course, print it out, take it to the parlor, and get it inked, something you can do with any image you find online.

While many tattoo artists regard this trend as a convenience in one sense, some artists are perturbed by the online proliferation of non-copyrighted images. With all the images of tattoos themselves posted on the Internet, it's not too difficult for one tattooist to copy the work of another. To our minds, though, tattoo artists have been tracing the work of others for decades; we're not entirely sure they have much to complain about. [From: The New York Times]

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Tags: art, tattoo, tattoo lettering, tattooing, TattooLettering, top

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