Aviva Yael - No Regrets: The Best, Worst, & Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever

Copyright 2008 by Aviva Yael and P.M. Chen

Foreword copyright 2008 by David Cross

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

First eBook Edition: May 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-53732-2

I want to dedicate this book to my family. I love you guys and Im sorry that you raised such a potty mouth.

Aviva Yael

To Juju!

P.M. Chen

The authors want to thank our amazing editor, Ben Greenberg, Robin Cameron for the cover art, Camille Finefrock for her research, and our super agent, Elisabeth Weed.

Aviva:

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this book, even if your tattoos didnt make it into the finals. Thank you to Tasha, Justin, Liz, Jen Jibs Baca, Jeremiah, the Cross family, The Virgins, and Robin Cameron.

P.M. Chen:

Hi to Hiro, Earl, LTR, Yancey, Charles, Hebs, Tai, Claudia, Walker, Ben, Gav, Yao & Lisa, Jamie, Stone, Hecker, Rothman, Diner Crew, Roosevelt Island and New Orleans.

By David Cross

Growing up I had always thought of tattoos as merely representing the idea itself. That having a tattoo simply said, Im the kind of person that would have a tattoo. That may have applied to the standard prison or military tattoo, but somewhere down the line tattoos stopped being the sole province of the badass and seamlessly slid over to the propriety of the soft, sensitive, malnourished hipster. My guess? The unsolicited rockabilly/punkabilly revival had a hand in it. Those selfish fuckers. When the hip and affectedly unaffected get a hold of something that belongs culturally to another group, excitement abounds as they then excitedly co-opt it and an open display of competition is set in motion. Thats half the point of that shit anyway. The tacit one-upmanship and approvals and disapprovals whispered throughout the land.

This applies to tattoos as well, of course. Weve seen the evolution of the ugly, blurry monochromatic Navy anchor, or the dark snakes-and-dagger-through-the-heart tattoo becoming those now ubiquitous mysterious Chinese letters reading tranquility, or boiling sea, or who knows what. But recently the evolution has jumped almost tenfold from there. In only just a few short years, we find that the tribal tat we were staring at in every dance club on the Jersey Shore has now become a twenty-color tableau of Bea Arthur giving Alex Trebek a hand-job on the calf of the professional dog walker ahead of us in line at the community gardens bike repair shop.

What? That isnt a tattoo yet? Hmmm, well as this book goes to show, just give it time. Its inevitable day draws near. Thats whats so fascinating and unnerving about this collection.

After leafing through it one is left with the question, Jesus Christ! Whats next for these people?! This book is filled with mistakes, bad jokes, and delusions. Even given the qualification of irony, most of these tattoos are so horrific that I predict a painful suicide will be the future for at least a handful of their owners. What happens to the young man who has a full-scale back tat of a smiling, beatific Adam Duritz with the legend Straight Edge above, when he realizes that perhaps Ian Mackaye might have been the better choice for something so bold and permanent? And Bob Barker? Who the fuck is gonna remember that guy in ten years? And then you have to explain that he was an unremarkable game show host? And then you have to explain that you thought it was funny (at the time) and then you have to revert to roofies if you ever want to get laid again? Oh well, whether they know it or not, or whether it was intentional or not, these brave people collected herein have done us a tremendous service. They have entertained us and filled our lives with song!

When this book was conceived in 2005, I had a career in fashion working at Vice magazine, where I picked up some much needed skills for expressing my distastes. You see, Im from Northern California where its taboo to say how you feel about anything unless its dipped in purple and teal tie-dyed, crystal-hugging affirmations. Ew. As you can imagine, finding people who hate the same things as you is sort of crucial to living in New York, and Id happily found that at Vice. The interoffice e-mail humor wasnt like the amateur stuff that banters about in your office. No corny jokes about dating or George Bush or sarcastic checklists. No, Vice was and still is one big riff factory. And its also where I learned how to stop being such a pussy, which ultimately led me to start embracing that which I dont understand. For instance, tattoos.

When I started this venture, I didnt get the whole tattoo thing. Id seen some cool ones, but truth be told, they just werent for me. I was jaded over a decision Id made at age nineteen to pierce my navel (blech), and I always thought that people who were brave enough to get tattoos would someday feel the way I felt about my little deal-breaker but they wouldnt be able to remove their ideas like I did. I couldnt deal with my own little regret, much less add a new one to my body. That was a long time ago. Ive since changed my opinion about tattoos, the artists, and the entire culture, but Ill get to that in a minute.

It was Christmastime in New York, and a bunch of my pals were having a pint at one of my favorite bars. We started talking about the worst dates weve ever had.

One friend told us how he had met some girl on MySpace and that they had started an e-mail flirtation for a few weeks that led to a date. He asked her to dinner one night, but she told him she had to go to L.A. for work and would call him when she returned. Cut to three days later: She called him while the plane was still pulling into the gate to hang out that night (yikes). When he showed up at her place he was welcomed by a roomful of burnouts sitting on her couch glaring at him like he was that kid from Mask. No hellos, just stares. She offered him a drink and within twenty minutes started taking sexy pictures of them together (uncomfortable much?). When she went into the kitchen to fix another drink, he scrolled backward through the pictures only to discover that she had been performing lewd acts on a very happy young actor. The photos were taken by a third party. Sweet!

Obviously, my friend had already decided at this point that she was the worst date and possibly the least appealing woman he had ever gone out with, but he wanted to be polite so he let her take him to a place for a drink and dancing. They ended up at a now defunct bar known for its nefarious parties, where she proceeded to show him her tattoos. First she took off her shoes and poked her toes through her fishnets (nice visual) to reveal the lucky charms on all ten toes. Then she turned her back to him, lifted her shirt, and revealed a lower back tattoo of an alien sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah. Needless to say he never saw her again.

After hearing this story, P.M. turned to me and said, Someone should really write a book of the worst tattoos ever. And so the book was born. Many, many tattoo conventions, road trips, tattoo shop visits, interviews, e-mails, and phone calls later we have what you see here, presented in all their glory.

However, this is not a book of the worst tattoos ever. I assure you that after looking at thousands and I mean over ten thousand tattoos these are not the worst. There is no book that could capture what weve seen. In fact, we found the BEST: the funniest, smartest, weirdest, most ridiculous, insane tattoos ever.