Tattoos. Clearly you love them. They were our number one search term in 2009, and have only dropped down to number four in 2010, despite a lack of new tattoo material.

But that changes today. Tattoos. Good, bad, geeky, ugly. All sorts. Today we look at them.

The Subtle Tattoo

Our favourite kind of tattoo here at the Big Bad Blog — where we aren’t that big on tattoos, believe it or not — is the subtle tattoo. A good example:

Tattoo as Art

While nothing that we would consider sporting ourselves, there is something to be said about turning one’s skin into a work of art. The Internet is full of examples of this, but here are a couple more:

The second photo is by Warwick Saint and you can click on the photo for some more examples of his tattoo photography.

The Geek Tattoo

Travelling even further away from what we would choose for our own skin, yet towards the things we love, we have geeky tattoos. Scientific formulas, Star Wars themes. Nothing to do but say “awesome” and shake your head at the same time.

For the one you love …

Now we begin to get into what I would term “bad” tattoos. We all know the danger of tattooing the name of a girlfriend or boyfriend — the image remains long after the person is gone from your life. But getting a tattoo of your child’s face, that must be safe, right?

Wrong.

Clever tattoos

So far we have covered subtle, beautiful, and misguided tattoos. Things we care about do not always make a good tattoo, but they do have meaning for us. And beauty — well, beauty is a wonderful thing.

But sometimes, people getting a tattoo decide to be clever. I cannot imagine this is a good idea — even if people think it’s clever at first glance, there is no way the same joke continues to resonate once you have seen it in the mirror for twenty years.

If you have an idea for a clever tattoo, don’t do it. It is a bad idea.

And those we do not understand

And then there are the tattoos that we just find to be strange. They might be meaningful, artistic, clever, or even geeky to those sporting them — but to us at the Big Bad Blog, they mean nothing. However, they are most definitely weird, wonderful and bloggable.

Click away!

Remember, here at the Big Bad Blog, we put a link on all our photos — if we took them ourselves, it links to a larger size. On articles such as this, we link back to the source. Most of the sources used had more photos in a similar vein.

If you want to see more, click away!