Tattoo Trend

Last night at 11:37 P.M., someone in Fairfield, California googled "owl tattoos".

Seventh on the list of results was the link to this tattoo:

With the onset of Fall, I compose this note as the month of September is coming to an end.

I look around sadly at the long pants, long sleeves, and covered frames that, just a few weeks ago, were so much more interesting to behold.

I am filled with sadness.

The past month has been a record-breaker for Tattoosday. When we first spun off from BillyBlog, we garnered 120 hits in the first three weeks of our infancy.

Last year, I was amazed by my progress, in September '08 we racked up 13,351 hits.

And this September, when I anticipated a drop off from a record August, Tattoosday soared into uncharted territory, on pace to top 38, 000 hits on the last day of the month. This may not seem like a big deal, but blogging is often lonely, and the number of hits is often the only measure of recognition we receive.

So, the summer ink is running dry, but despair not, I will continue to spot tattoos, although perhaps not at the dizzying rate of the past few months.

I have a backlog of posts and a head full of ideas to keep us entertained as the leaner months loom.

I thank you all for your continued readership and participation. I am very appreciative of your support!

Bill Cohen

That's what I wrote two years ago today on my original site BillyBlog.

Little did I know how much this once weekly feature would turn into such a significant aspect of my life. In little over a month, I had spun Tattoosday off of BillyBlog, from a recurring character to a site of its own.

And we have grown! This month we will have our biggest visitor load of our short career here, reaching just under 30,000 hits. This month also marked a quarter of a million hits since Tattoosday stood alone in September 2007.

And we have our sights set even higher.

I once again want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the blog, from the occasional visitors, to the rabid fans, from the enthusiastic tourists and New Yorkers who have contributed their work, to the talented tattoo artists who created that work.

And most of all, I want to thank my friends and family, who have seen my passion for tattoo writing, and have supported me whole-heartedly. And to my beautiful wife Melanie, who is my biggest cheerleader, most avid supporter, and one of the most understanding women I know. Not may wives would be keen on their husbands taking pictures of tattoos of strange women
(and men) they've met on the street. But she is my number one fan. And I love her all the more for it.

A week from tomorrow my oldest daughter Jolee, who inspired this, my first tattoo, will be celebrating her bat mitzvah. The week ahead will be filled with planning and visits from family, so I am taking a week off in posting, so I can focus my energies on this landmark event.

Rest assured, I have two dozen tattoo posts in the queue and will likely be unable to restrain myself from collecting more photos and stories in the week to come.

I will resume posting on August 9th or 10th.

I thank everyone for their continued support and words of encouragement.

Bill Cohen

The previous post featured our recent adventures at Dare Devil Tattoo on Friday the 13th.

I wrote specifically about my wife Melanie getting her lucky 13 tattoo on her birthday. People who know me and know Tattoosday were excited not just for her, but for me as well. They knew I'd be surrounded by tattoos, and that I would therefore be busy talking to people about Tattoosday, and collecting stories and photos that would last me through summer.

Not quite.

Certainly the cold weather helped (or hindered, depending on your perspective), but the concept behind Tattoosday has always been about the random spotting of tattoos on the streets of New York. The expression "shooting fish in a barrel" comes to mind. There is no "sport," if you will, in going to a tattoo shop, or convention, and collecting blogfodder.

I could certainly do it, but the randomness and surprise element that one finds on the street are what really help propel the blog along.

So, by the end of our Dare Devil adventure, I had material for the post on Melanie's tattoo, nothing more. I did pass my card to the two young ladies behind us with whom we had a mutual friend, but I did not request their participation, although I could have. I did not identify myself to shop employees as an ink- blogger, although I could have.

Not to mention, it was Melanie's birthday, not mine. I was there for her, not me. No lucky 13 tattoo for me, although I would have loved one.

I was rewarded later in the day by two other tattoo encounters, which I did document, and which will appear in the days to come. I am hoping to receive emails from the participants to fill in the blanks that time and necessity left incomplete.

So, stay tuned.

Thanks for visiting.

For those of you following Tattoosday, I am going to take a different approach to the blog in 2009.

The concept will be the same, but I am going to enhance it a little bit. All posts will be dated and time-stamped around the time that they happened. So, if I don't get around to posting the ink for a few days, it will be back-dated for chronological effect.

I also want to blog above and beyond the successes (i.e. the people who said "No") and expand to other tattoo-related topics, when they arise.

For example, if I stop in Borders and look at a tattoo book, I'd like to link it here. I am hoping to turn all the "no thank yous" into items of interest.

I also have a couple of new features in the works that I hope to unveil in the new year that will continue to make Tattoosday the interesting experience that I believe it is.

In an effort to start out with a clean slate, I am cleaning out my drafts and posting all the remaining drafts I have in house, including several pieces by Jessica, who I met back in June.

Once again I want to thank everyone who regularly reads Tattoosday, and those who visit once in a while. 2008 was a banner year, registering over 100,000 hits this year alone. I'm looking forward to seeing what 2009 will bring. Happy New Year!

On Thursday, December 4, at 4:31pm E.S.T., Tattoosday logged its 100,000th hit.

Someone up at Humber College in Toronto googled something that directed them to this photo:


which is from one of my favorite posts ever.

If you have become a reader since last May, I encourage you to go back and check out that post.

Regardless, thanks to everyone who has visited since Tattoosday's inception. 100k is nothing to sneeze at. I wouldn't keep doing this if it weren't for the people checking in on a regular basis.
Please, keep coming back!

Nathan over at KnuckleTattoos.com, who has featured Tattoosday content before, has now added me as a contributor, and I'm pleased as punch (and oh-so-thankful). My first contribution, although not original (it appeared in a longer form here first) is up and viewable here.

I'm excited because affiliation with his site will expand my range of inkspotting and lend me some additional street cred. I mean, what sounds cooler? "Can I ask you about your tattoo? I write a tattoo blog..." or "Hi, I'm a contributing writer at Knuckletattoos.com....".

Either way, I'm stoked to be expanding my repertoire, and am looking forward to a long and productive partnership with Nathan and his site.

Last week I had a bizarre lunchtime walk on Thursday. I met a woman outside of Macy*s who had an interesting neck tattoo. She seemed like a willing participant until the older woman standing with her kept repeating that what I was doing was "weird". The tattooed woman began to appear uncomfortable, so I bowed out gracefully, handing her a flier and moving on.

A while later I stopped another woman with a really cool pin-up on her arm. She said I'd stopped her before and thanked me, but wasn't interested. I vaguely remembered her after the fact, but couldn't pinpoint when or where I may have met her before.

Inkspotting can be streaky, and I considered quitting for the day, but I was determined to give it one more try. It was then that I met Melanie. In fairness to her, and to give her tattoo the spotlight it deserves, her ink is posted below (here).

This is a non-photo post.

I want to thank all the folks e-mailing me and several sites that have added me into their folds.

Check out the Alltop Badge I added. We're on their tattoo page here.

Even more exciting is this awesome review Tattoosday received here on InkedTalk.com. InkedTalk.com is a "daily tattoo blog featuring all original content on tattoo artists, ink trends, tattoo commentary, and more". Thanks to Jennifer Collins for the shout-out.

And if you're looking for ideas for tattoos, you can check out this resource: Free Tattoos Designs and Pictures.

And don't forget about my pal Mel over at Tattoosday UK.

I know, I know. You may recall a post from July 31 of this very nature. A year of tattoo blogging in New York City. But this is slightly different.

A year ago today, as I was celebrating BillyBlog’s 2^nd year in the ether, I launched Tattoosday as a separate blog, apart from the weekly Tuesday post on its parent site. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since then, Tattoosday has grown in leaps and bounds, although it is still in its infancy, by blogosphere standards.

What’s remarkable is this: after three years, BillyBlog has 69,100 hits. After one year, Tattoosday is just over 65,000. The numbers have astonished me, from 120 hits in all of last September, to 3000 hits in January, 6500 in May, and cracking the 10,000 barrier in June, July and August.

But enough of that, when I first started Tattoosday, I wondered if people would even give me the time of day. I started with friends and co-workers, but quickly moved to the streets. And although I’ve had a few people ignore me completely, most folks are receptive to the idea, and there are a lot who bought in and shared their ink with me.

Some more numbers. I’ll discount the pre-September 8 posts, which were imported from the BillyBlog archives.

Since last September 8, I have written 201 posts for Tattoosday. Of those 201 posts, 15 were on the subject of the blog or tattoos in the news, but 186 were posts of people’s ink. 18 were in the “Tattoos I Know” category and 10 were pictures that were e-mailed to me from people in the blogosphere, friends of friends, or strangers who I met and subsequently sent me photos.

So, 158 posts were comprised of encounters in the street with strangers, people I didn’t know, who were kind enough to share their tattoos and the stories behind them with me and the Tattoosday audience.

You may be wondering where I crunched all these numbers from. A spreadsheet, of course. The same spreadsheet tells me that the blog, in a year’s time, featured photos of 287 tattoos. That’s a ton of ink. The shop that has had work appeared here most often is Brooklyn Ink, which happens to be the shop nearest my home. Just look at the blogrolls and see the sheer volume of different shops listed. It’s staggering. The number is certainly a testament to the popularity of tattooing in the United States and beyond.

63 tattoo posts came from Brooklyn, 110 from Manhattan. Penn Plaza, my favorite spot for meeting the inked, was the site of 33 of those 110 posts.

But all of that aside, I want to thank everyone who has participated, and to all of you who visit regularly. Those of you who let me photograph your tattoos make this venture possible, and without a readership, this would be a lot less fun. Knowing I have an audience makes this project that much more fulfilling.

Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute to the Tattoosday microcosm. Whether you are an occasional reader, a one-time contributor, or an avid fan, I appreciate each individual who helps make Tattoosday what it is.

Here’s to a great second year!

When, on July 31, 2007, I posted my first installment of the weekly Tattoosday feature on BillyBlog, I didn't know what I had started.

Had you told me then that, a year later, Tattoosday would have spun off from BillyBlog, that it would have set a personal best in July '08 with over 13,000 hits, and that I would be posting daily, I would have been skeptical.

Nonetheless, that's what has happened. And, although I expect a drop-off in visits as summer ends and shorts and tank tops give way to jeans and long-sleeve shirts, I am pleased with how Tattoosday has progressed.

I want to thank everyone who has visited and contributed to the success of Tattoosday. It's still a little baby blog by blogosphere standards, and its stand-alone self (apart from BillyBlog) doesn't celebrate a full year until September 8, 2008, which is BillyBlog's 3rd anniversary.

The lingering question is this: will Tattoosday surpass BillyBlog in traffic by then? As of July 31, Tattoosday had just over 48,000 hits in a little less than 11 months, whereas BillyBlog is at 63,500 hits just a month and change shy of 3 years. Check back on September 8 to see what happens.

Inkily yours,

Bill