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I Was a 14-Year-Old Simpsons Tattoo Artist
Posted by Billy on Sep 29th 2016 at 11:23 am
Look around the Internet and you’ll find plenty of art that’s inspired by The Simpsons, or OFF, short for “our favorite family,†as us super-fans (read: obsessives) have sometimes called it. Many of these art pieces, maybe not the bulk but a lot of them at least, are neither painting nor drawing but tattoo, that subdermal medium more ancient even than the longest-running sitcom itself. To this day, I have no tattoos on my own body. I am 26 years old now. That is not to say, however, that I have no experience with tattoos. No, my first tattoo experience came young. I was just 14 at the time.
I was a geek, to start with. Every day when I got home from school, I spent my afternoons and my evenings pouring and re-pouring over episodes of The Simpsons, Futurama, and King of the Hill. It wasn’t cartoons that got my blood pumping, not exactly: it was these cartoons, this special brand of animation that FOX had stumbled upon. It was those Ivy League-educated writers who seemed to revel in the fact that they were writing for network TV’s funny pages.
I would talk about these cartoons with Internet strangers, at a time when your username was your identity and not a pseudonym to be uncovered. Facebook was still a few years off in the distance, and as a “webmaster†(that’s the owner of a website, to you laypeople), operating both a Family Guy fan site and a Simpsons one, I considered myself to be something of a big deal in the e-world. After all, this was the real Internet we were talking about, not some slap-it-together we’ll-do-it-for-you fill-in-the-blanks Geocities page. I had, in my mind, really made it: I owned my own domain name, a dream of mine since shortly after I had first dialed up via AOL, and my sites were registering traffic, which was in retrospect minimal.
Out of abundant pride, and maybe just a little honest eagerness to learn, I did everything for my fan sites independently, picking up skills in Photoshop, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP along the way. I had already been an avid reader for some years, but novels and copies of Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, never non-fiction. Now I had a reason to learn these skills. I wanted to make the best damn Simpsons fan site that I could, and if that meant understanding how to write if-else statements, that is what I would do.
June 2004. I was deep into my coding and graphic design self-education, and something that I did often was trace over parts of stills from Simpsons episodes, isolating characters and producing images that were of a much higher resolution than anything that I was getting from the DVD box sets. I wasn’t the only one. There were several of us, sharing and critiquing with each other these images, which we called “grabpics.†This is the grabpic that became the tattoo.
I was decent at making these grabpics. Not the best, but decent. When someone showed up on the forum where we congregated, asking for a specific grabpic, which was to be the basis for a tattoo, I jumped at the chance, putting together an image within an hour of the initial query.
So, no, I never touched the tattoo gun, never picked up any needles, never actually touched the leg where this image of Homer ended up, but at 14, I felt nonetheless timeless. Something I did had been indelibly etched into a living, breathing organism. I was the artist. The rush that I felt at this thought was embarrassingly overwhelming. I had joined the ranks of Plato and James Joyce, surely, my work to be passed down through the ages, studied, scrutinized, loved, abhorred. This is the tattoo.
What was to me an oddity at 14, the Simpsons tattoo, was in reality pretty common. Today, in our post-Facebook world, it is easy to find huge collections of these things, on pages such as thesimpsonstattoo on Instagram and here on Pinterest. Me, I hung up my digital tattoo kit after that first one, satisfied with the heights that I had reached and drawn to all the promise beheld by Adobe Flash.
How long does it take to watch every episode of The Simpsons?