All tattoos by John Hanley
Johnny The Homicidal Maniac
This was the first tattoo I ever got. I don’t really remember when it was, I just remember that I was 18. I’d been a fan of JTHM for a while, but it was my friend & tattoo artist Johnny (no relation) that convinced me to get it permanently etched into my flesh. It came out fucking awesome, and even now over 12 years later it hasn’t faded too badly, and is still my favorite piece.
We used the cover of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, Issue #1 as a reference for the tattoo… It’s probably the best cover in the series, and the style and colors really come through. The original intention was to do a complete Jhonen Vasquez sleeve, with pretty much the whole universe, including Squee, Happy Noodle Boy, Invader Zim, Dib, etc…
As an aside, I wonder what his opinion of his work as body art is, considering I personally requested his permission to use a JTHM shirt in my film Terrace St (Come on, I’m a fanboy, you know this) and was denied… Ah well.
This baby is the second tattoo I got… Me and John were just hangin’ out at the shop being bored one day, and what better to do when you’re bored than get a tattoo, right? Right! So that’s how this came about… I had absoutely no intentions of getting a tattoo that day, but it was definately worth it…
The picture comes from some really rad flash they had… It wasn’t even out for public display, but I’m privileged like that… It came out really good, I’m quite happy with it… It’s actually cool to look at the reference on this page as compared to the picture of the tattoo…
This was the third tattoo I got… I was hanging out at The Edge Tattoo alot and this new guy starts working there… And he saw my spikes and patches and shit so we start talking… His name was Peter or some shit… Turns out he actually drew the cover for The Unseen’s “Lower Class Crucifixion“… Anyway, he had a Japanese textbook and in it was the symbol for ‘Oi!’… and yeah, it was a real Japanese textbook and Oi is a real word (it’s British slang, like us saying ‘Hey!’) and being the punk rocker I am I decided to get it as a tattoo… Of course, we couldn’t just do it plain… We had to go all out with the flames and brick… I dig it
It’s really funny now that I think about it, cause a while after I got this tattoo my friend J decided he wanted the same goddamn thing, but luckily he’s a puss and he wimped out, after signing the release form and all that shit… Oh well, I don’t even think that’s really relevant but whatever…
I thought about this tattoo for a while before I got it… It looked really cool in black and white on the flash sheet, and it just came alive that much more when we colorized it… Especially with the cotton candy pink pussy lips… Nope, ya can’t go wrong with that!
I forget who the artist who drew the flash sheet was, but I think I might wanna get another one from the same series as this one… I mean, how can you go wrong with naked faeries with bangin’ tits, pink pussy lips and huge assed stingers coming out of their asses? That’s what I thought…
It’s actually funny… While really high, the discussion came up that it’d be really cool instead of just having one naked chick on my arm, it’d be infinitely cooler to have an entire sleeve depicting a huge orgy of naked women… I still can’t decide if I made a mistake by saying no…
This was a tattoo I knew I had to get for a long time… Alot of people think it’s just as dumb to get band tattoos as it is to get the name of a girlfriend or boyfriend, and for the most part I agree, but hey, 1.) It’s my band and 2.) Even if we broke up tomorrow it was one of the staples in my life for over eight years, so it definately will hold significant meaning for me, even when I’m old, wrinkled and grey…
I basically came up with the layout myself, using our logo and just random graphics we’ve used on CDs and flyers over the year… It’s pretty rad… My bandmates Nate & J also have Entrophy tattoos, except J’s is in Japaneese, so he sorta weaseled out of that one, don’t ya think?
This is my latest tattoo… I got it to commemorate my rat Vapid who died right before I got it, but now it commemorates all the rats I’ve had that have passed on (5 as of right now)… Anyway, being on my forearm this is probably my most visible tattoo, which of course is helped by me wearing short sleeves whenever possible…
I ended up using the rat on Entrophy’s homepage… The color in the referance picture was done by me, and as of right now, the actual tattoo remains black & white.