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INKEDblog takes you beneath the skin of today's tattoo culture. Our mission is to celebrate tattooing as a modern art form which incorporates art, fashion, style, and pop culture. While paying homage and respect to the past, we look to present a contemporary take on the present and future of skin art.
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Wednesday Jun 22, 2005
INKEDblog Interviews Darren Barefoot
Darren Barefoot's search for textual tattoos has lead him to create one of the best repositories of permanently penned phrases on the internet. Fascinated by tattoos comprised mostly of English words and sentences, Darren has become the internet's defacto expert on words on skin. Recently we caught up with Darren to chat about the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of textual tats.
INKEDblog: So, how and why did you first become interested in textual tattoos?
Darren: I watched an episode of "Lost", and noticed that Dominic Monaghan (formerly Merry in the Lord of the Rings movies) had some words tattooed on his upper arm. They read "living is easy, with eyes closed". That, of course, is a lyric from the Beatles'"Strawberry Fields Forever". In a world of celtic and Asian characters tattooed on backs everywhere, I thought that was pretty cool.
INKEDblog: So Darren, do you have any tats yourself?
Darren: I don't have any tattoos. I've got a bit of a rant about some tattoo owners here. It may explain why I'm disinclined.
INKEDblog: But, if you did have one, what would it say?
Darren: If I did get a tattoo, it would definitely be of the textual variety. I meditate on what I might print on my body here. It would almost certainly be a song lyric or line from a poem. Two that come immediately to mind are "I have heard the mermaids singing" from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing" from Neil Young's "Powderfinger". Something short and pithy.
INKEDblog: So, what's the coolest and most interesting textual tattoo you've seen?
Darren: My favorite is probably a quote from Ghandi
INKEDblog: Okay, so what's the worst quote you've ever seen on skin?
Darren: Unless you speak the language, or have strong associations with the language (as in, you were born in a given country or spent a long time there), I'm really not crazy about foreign language characters. It seems to me that every time I see a 20-something women lean over I spot a Japanese kanji character on the small of her back. To me, it reeks of a kind of cultural imperialism and a shallowness that I find really distasteful. Often they're terribly done -- and deeply inaccurate in their meaning. There's a whole blog solely dedicated to debunking poor usage of kanji characters. You can check it out here.
Here's a good example of such a tattoo gone horribly wrong:
INKEDblog: Is there a certain kind of characteristic in someone that is associated with getting a textual tat vs a tat of a bird or butterfly etc?
Darren: As I've said, getting a textual tattoo takes more courage, because its meaning is unambiguous. As such, I'd expect textual tattoo owners to be more thoughtful than the average person. As you'll see in my rant (referenced in answer #2), many tattoo owners seem to give very little thought to what image they get.
(Photo of Darren Barefoot by Kris Krug)
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