your early morning crap: lion!

Roar... this sucks!



If you have an awful tattoo, feel free to contact alice@vivalavinyl.org and she'll try to get to it.

Bad straightedge tattoos volume one: text

I have a confession to make. I secretly love bad straightedge tattoos (maybe because I am straightedge? probably because they are just goofy). I actually secretly love all bad tattoos, that's why I do this blog. But I have a special soft spot in my heart for three x's that are stick-and-poked into someone's ankle. Many people get them, many people regret them later, but they are still awesome. These abominations, however, are not so awesome. Behold: the bad straightedge tattoos, volume one.


Bad font, bad linework, bad coloring, bad placement, just a generally bad idea.


Ditto! Only worse.


Why did he decide to put the text in a pool of water? I don't understand!


And finally- starship troopers straight edge dude. I have to admit this is actually pretty awesome, because I too love science fiction and not drinking. I hope this guy had a sense of humor about what he was doing, because that instantly turns this questionable tattoo into a hilarious and rad one.

If you have any regrettable edge tattoos (or any other kind of regrettable tattoo, for that matter) feel free to email me: alice@vivalavinyl.org.

your early morning crap: wizard!

I know how much Alice just loves wizard tattoos. Here's one to get your day going.


If you have an awful tattoo, feel free to contact alice@vivalavinyl.org and she'll try to get to it.

It is never good... the "taz tattoo"

If there is ever a terrible god damn tattoo that people get, it's that piece of garbage "Taz" tattoo. For some reason or another the Warner Bros. Tasmanian devil has become one of the more well known shitstorms of ink pounded into the skin of the willing. I am unsure if it's some need to feel as if the person getting the tattoo is "wild and crazy" or some true love for the actual character. Nonetheless it is almost always an awful tattoo and unfortunately tends to be a "first" choice for a lot of people. All my searching on the internet found so many people saying that their Taz tattoo was their first and how much they loved it. I think it falls under the cheap flash art that on a dare someone finally gets to impress others. Now we look further into the lexicon of tattoo art and discover together this craptastic series of tattoos.

I love how Taz takes on so many different roles and attitudes in these pictures. He is wild, crazy but hard working. Either way, they are all just awful.

who ya gonna call?

Man oh man... I loved the movie too, but why?

sports and tattoos, a terrible mix...

Now I am a die hard Yankees fan and will never deny my devotion to the team. I however have always had an apprehension to getting a team related tattoo not because I dislike the team in some way, but mostly because sports related tattoos are normally god awful. They are almost always poorly executed and have stupid subject matter if it's not a specific logo. Here are some real stinkers I've found on my search around our faithful internet.




Since I mentioned I am a Yankees fan, it's only fair to start with them. I've been to enough games in my day to see some really terrible Yankees related tattoos. This one is just bad all around. Terrible idea, terrible execution and just poorly done. I would hide this from my friends and neighbors who might be fans themselves. I would be ashamed that I disparaged something I liked so much with absolute shit results.




Now it wouldn't be fair to all those Yankees fans like myself to allow our beloved pinstripers to be defaced in such poor ink fashion. So it's time to retaliate against the Boston Red Sox by exposing what is just utter crap. They took the team logo, which is fine, but the, added matching sweet, sweet tribal. Tribal that is color matched to the logo, absolutely brilliant. What is the point of the tribal? To show how you can make something that much more awesome by putting lines around it? I will never understand the obsession with tribal.




Holy Christ, quite possibly the worst logo reproduction I have ever seen. What this person must have done was found the best blind tattoo artist in the New England region of the United States and just described what this logo looked like. Imagine being proud of this enough to take a photo of it to show to people on the internet.



Ok so another combo of total stupid. Let's take a dragon (a wonderful tattoo cliche) and give him a soccer ball. What the hell, who gives a shit what nonsense you put on your skin. The dragon itself is barely recognizable. I mean is the soccer ball in the dragon's mouth?



Tough guy here thought he would show that playing hockey on broken, melted ice was a way to express his devotion to the game. Is the the hockey man wearing a gas mask? I don't blame him, this friggin thing stinks.



You save the best for last. This is the best. A pink bunny playing basketball. See ya next time...

hi, i am jay and i have a terrible tattoo.

Hi guys, I am Jay and I love terrible tattoos. Alice has me along for the ride to discuss the absolute awesomeness of total crap zapped into people's skin.

I have a really bad tattoo, it's of a "rune" on my leg. At the time I listened to a lot of black metal and swore I was going get a whole bunch of runes. One day an ex girlfriend of mine wanted to get her belly button pierced. While at the shop I wanted to get a cheap tattoo to show off how cool I was. Well I made the worst possible choice and I just have this dumb arrow on my leg that means "warrior" in rune speak. Anyway, one day I will cover it up with something less retarded.


I will do my best to find the worst possible tattoos to contribute to this very important blogging experiment.

When bad tattoos come full circle and become awesome

I bring you the most amazing collection of terrible tattoos that you could ever imagine. This fine young gentleman has agreed to let me post his awful tattoos and stories for your reading pleasure. Behold, the best bad tattoos in the world. They are so bad they are now officially AWESOME. I will let him explain in his own words:

My friend came down from Toronto to visit for a week or two. My roommate Tyson came home one night with about 3 friends, 2 cases of beer, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of vodka, a tattoo machine, needles and ink. We all start drinking and hanging out and having a really good time, then one of his friends suggests we get the gun out and start setting it up.

Not a single person before this had ever held a tattoo gun.

We get the thing running, set the needles in place, put on gloves etc etc and begin to tattoo each other. (different needles, gloves, etc for each person, not totally sanitary but not extremely dirty) after about hour 3 of tattooing the absolute most ridiculous shit on each other we end up falling asleep. Wake up the next morning and most people had no recollection of what had happened and will forever be reminded about the night they forgot they got tattooed.

Here are mine:


I think in the corner there we have a straightedge pyramid with an eye, like on the dollar bill?


The guy with the muscle arms at the top was supposed to be a CUPCAKE, by the way. There is also a cat with butterfly eyes and a mustache dreaming of... something?

But wait... there's more!!!


I had just gotten to a friends house kind of late at night, she was watching an episode of that Housewives of Orange County and i walked in on the part of the show where one of their daughters had told the parents she had gotten a tattoo. They started flipping out wanting to know WHAT and WHERE it was. She finally shows them this butterfly about the size of a dime on her foot.

So... i asked "i wonder how pissed they would've been if she wouldve came home with a bunch of random bugs all over her feet?".




Getting tattoos based on an awful reality tv show is possibly the worst idea in the world, especially if they are weird stickerbook bugs on your FEET, but this is just so funny and bad that I think it's pure genius.

This guy is my new hero.

More reader-submitted tattoos

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for putting up with my laziness and still sending me photos of terrible, awful, no good tattoos. Thanks to you I have three new beauties to show today!

Love,
Alice

The first tattoo that I have for you all is a chest piece.

Now, I know chest tattoos can be tricky to get right. Mine is not all that great (I might be getting it redone soon). It can be the best looking spot or the most awkward looking spot, and, unfortunately, this one just looks awkward. The great reader who emailed me this photo said that it looks like a Lisa Frank tattoo, and she is so right! I am not sure what is going on inside the heart- is that a landscape of some kind? The waves look awkward and the stars over them are superfluous, not to mention the weird swirls on the bottom.
One good thing is that the execution looks decent enough, although how gross is it that they didn't use a paper towel to cover her up? All the ink and goo has seeped into her shirt!

This next one is pretty small, but worth looking at all the same:

A heart with crossbones is a cute idea, and the little line stars are traditional and can be good filler on some tattoos, but jeeeeez louise what is going on with the black shading? And the linework looks so sharp it makes me wince just to look at it!

This one was submitted by the same reader, and may be from the same artist:

Again, the linework is beyond awful. The composition is beyond awful. And is the princesses name Reesie?
I must admit I do kind of like the awkward little bumblebees though, as terrible as they are.

If you have a terrible tattoo to share with me, don't hesitate to email!