Tattoo has his own tattoo art pattern. Tattoo designs, tattoo ideas, even tattoo pictures are all very different from the other art pattern. Elizabeth is a typographer, by profession, and she works with letters as part of her trade. Over the course of three years, she had the entire alphabet tattooed, two or three letters at a time, all over her body.
Tribal tattoos always go along with mysterious color, such as the Chinese symbol.
With the tattoo printer, you can print beautiful flower tattoos. I was familiar with Stephanie Tamez for, most recently, this tattoo on the writer Eileen Myles. So I sent Stephanie an email and asked her to comment on this particular twenty-six part tattoo. Elizabeth had also mentioned to me that she was meeting with Ina Saltz, an art director, designer, writer, photographer and professor at City College of New York. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Ms. Saltz had written a book called Body Type, which is a study of typographic tattoos.
Having since read the book (highly recommended to all), I related to Ms. Saltz’s quest, that began with a chance spotting of a word tattoo on a crosstown bus several years ago. Of course, I have featured numerous word tattoos over the past couple of years, but Body Type’s chronicling of the vast array of typographic tattoos is certainly entertaining to anyone who appreciates the art. In fact, Ms. Saltz goes out of her way to acknowledge Stephanie Tamez as one of the premier word tattooists. In all fairness to Ms. Tamez, one look at her website will reveal that, although she is acknowledged as a skilled tattooer of words, her skills and artistry go far beyond the inking of letters!
Anyway, back to Elizabeth, who followed up our encounter with an e-mail discussing the font she used for her tattoos, but also with (per my request) an alphabetical catalog of all her letters:
My tattoos are in Garamond (for the real font nerds out there, it’s a few different cuts, mostly Garamond 3 and Stempel Garamond, a couple are in Adobe Garamond). I’m a typographer and I’ve always loved Garamond — the first Roman font to be used on Gutenberg’s press. The typeface has been in existence since 1530, and still embodies so much of what we perceive as ‘perfect’ in letterforms today. Yes, they’re all in lower case. No plans for capitals, or punctuation…no plans for any more tattoos, in fact.
Below is the catalog of letters. although I will say I didn’t get them in alphabetical order, and I got them slowly over a few years. It was usually whatever letters I was drawing a lot at the time, or thinking about.