voice

Body Tattoo- blog about tattoo art is a straight forward title for a straight forward enterprise. The voice behind the posts was a little less forthright, as it took me a few posts to try and determine who is speaking. In fact, it took 9 posts for me to figure out Body Tattoo's author was a guy named Bill. It took one posting to figure out he lives where it is cold,  because a person living there would need gloves (the first posting was about a tattoo he spotted on a woman's ungloved hands). It took four posts to grasp that this glove wearing Bill lives in New York, as he mentions doing his regular "quick pass" through Penn Station. All in all, I would say that New York Bill operates as though he has a regular slew of Body Tattoo readers. This is the impression I get through his candid manner, and his lack of desire to fill in the details.

New York Bill tries to come off as an expert on tattoos, though I'm not quite sure why. There does not appear to be a life history or credentials of any sort. I guess the medium of blogging allows for this sort of expertise. Not that Bill is pretentious, far from it. He writes simply, utilizing laymen's terms and even commonplace nomenclature like "nifty" or "gee".

 One posting is a response to a question of healing normalcy. The answer to the girl is concise at first, setting her at ease about her question of how well her butterfly tattoo was healing. Then it throws in an extra bit of advice, telling her to go to the doctor and see if her slow tattoo healing had to do with some disease like diabetes or a vitamin deficiency. Needless to say, I found the two part answer contradictory. At the bottom of the post was a link, displayed as "link" without explanation, so I clicked on it, and came to find that the entire posting was a question and answer post from about.com... nothing to do with NY Bill. Why did he choose to include it? Well, the title is QOW: Tattoo Healing Slowly, Color is Dull, so question of the week? It makes sense, but why not have his own forum for questions that he can answer on his own tattoo blog? 

This got me wondering about his largest recent posting on Sailor Jerry. The posting has an authoritative voice, as it is a life history of one of the "founding fathers" of tattoo. The post is well written, though arrogant at times, including one sentence that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up,  "He did more for the ancient art than any other single person". My interpretation was, NY Bill is clearly a big fan of Sailor Jerry. Well, this may very well be the case, however, this post, too, had been transplanted to Body Tattoo. Ahem.

Now, what does appear to be his own brainchild, is something called "Tattoosday".  This is where Bill spots a tattoo bearer on the street,  interviews and photographically documents them. These postings are where his rich material is revealed. This is where he has a voice. He is interested in why people get the tattoos that they have, as well as why they have or don't have tattoos period. He includes  circumstances as to where they met, how the person received him, and his own thoughts on their choices.

If this blog were entitled Tattoosdays, I'd be a bigger fan. Oh, and not that it has an effect on how I perceive him, but NY Bill's linking strategies make me feel like some sort of linking savant. The only ones he has are after his posts, and cleverly projected as "link", or if there are more, "this link" and "that link".