Yakuza

[jimmyhoffa]

The Japanese can be sort of funny about tattoos. If you ever go there you should know that tattoos are so very much more a branding of criminality in Japan. The Japanese 'Mafia', the Ya-ku-za, are generally associated with tattoos. Show your tatts in Japan and get kicked out of a hotel, a pool, a restaurant. I think there is some exquisitely painful way of getting the work done, too. Anyway... here's some cool ones.





Years back, I knew this skinhead guy with a Japanese woman-in-kimono which took 6 hours in one sitting. He developed jaundice from it.
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"A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand." -- Kahlil Gibran

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

"It is the hole in the wheel which makes it useful." -- Lao Tzu
(where there is nothing, everything else is enabled)

emeraldsandash.blogpot.com

G.

[sexcasualty (deleted)]

thats an amazing story, i want to get a japanese style sleeve, but im not sure id give up all that canvas to one giant tat like that.

[jimmyhoffa]

amazing stories... I just discovered that the woman in the B&W photo above has a book which sounds pretty interesting about her life as the daughter of a Yakuza and all the things she went through...

Quote: Yakuza Moon is the shocking, yet intensely moving memoir of 37-year-old Shoko Tendo, who grew up the daughter of a yakuza boss. Tendo lived her life in luxury until the age of six, when her father was sent to prison and her family fell into terrible debt. Bullied by classmates and terrorized at home by a father who became a drunken, violent monster after his release from prison, Tendo rebelled. A regular visitor to nightclubs at the age of 12, she soon became a drug addict and a member of a girl gang. At 15 she was sentenced to eight months in a juvenile detention center.
Adulthood brought big bucks and glamour when Tendo started working as a bar hostess during Japan's booming bubble economy of the nineteen-eighties. But among her many rich and loyal patrons there were also abusive clients, one of whom beat her so badly that her face was left permanently scarred. When her mother died, Tendo plunged into such a deep depression that she tried to commit suicide twice.
Tendo takes us through the bad times with warmth and candor, and gives a moving and inspiring account of how she overcame a lifetime of discrimination and hardship. Getting tattooed, from the base of her neck to the tips of her toes, with a design centered on a geisha with a dagger in her mouth, was an act that empowered her to start making changes in her life. She quit her job as a hostess. On her last day at the bar she looked up at the full moon, a sight she never forgot. The moon became a symbol of her struggle to become whole, and the title of the book she wrote as an epitaph for herself and her family.

I'm gonna get me that book soon...

I don't think I would want to get too much ink... I get s---ty responses from enough people with the few tatts I already have... it pisses me off how people (some people) have strange interpretations of these things...

I know a guy with the "samurai breastplates" tattoo thing with fish and flowers and flowing designs - really nice work... he is sort of a biker, I guess... so it suits him...

____________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand." -- Kahlil Gibran

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

"It is the hole in the wheel which makes it useful." -- Lao Tzu
(where there is nothing, everything else is enabled)

emeraldsandash.blogpot.com

G.