At Melbourne’s Inked Expo, a festival of all things body art, Eliza Janssen was on the hunt for tattoos of the movies and shows that fans adore enough to get injected into their dermis.
The pavilions of the Melbourne Showgrounds are filled with the smell of antiseptic: the sounds of pop-punk The Killers and Kelly Clarkson covers boom from speakers, and a dull buzzing can be heard rising in the background, like a hundred lazy blowflies. It’s the countless tattoos that folks have come here to get from over 250 ink artists, over the course of three sweaty days in February.
I’ve come here to perv on the best pieces with a particular subject matter in mind: the scenes, memes, and characters that film and TV addicts love so much, they want them on their body forever. Here’s what Inked Expo attendees had to say about their permanent pop-culture fandom. It turns out that far more of them stem from movie-centric memories of friendship, nostalgia and childhood than any iconic details of the films themselves—there was also way less Joker and Peaky Blinders than you’d expect.
Andy: Caddyshack, Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Final Space, Back to the Future
Andy’s leg is a rogues’ gallery of the most memorable unhinged males from all media, against a pleasing blue-sky background. His big trippy portrait of the main character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came about as he’s a fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s books: he followed around the film’s poster art with the original novel’s cartoons by Ralph Steadman and some ominous bats. Bill Murray’s character Carl Spackler from Caddyshack completes the collage, and of course Andy “had to chuck in the gopher” around his ankle too.
“It started off with letting my good friend here ply his wares with his colour realism: he picked the Tyler Durden and I picked the others, the colours blended in alright.” Andy was currently getting inked, but “a half-finished Back to the Future one from the last convention”, of Doc and Marty gazing at their wristwatches, would have to wait until another day. It’ll be the only cinematic tattoo not isolated to Andy’s right calf: “I have a music arm and a movie leg”, he laughs.
Does he always prefer movies from the 1980s? “A bit like that, yeah, don’t mind the old stuff.” The most modern tattoos are a tribute to his fave comedy (“It’s Always Sunny, I love that show”) and a more innocent tat of green glob Mooncake (“my daughter loves Final Space“).
Dante, Dante The Ripper Tattoos: Alien, Friday the 13th
Artist and horror fan Dante’s left arm is a black-and-grey homage to H.R. Giger’s chilling production design for the Alien franchise. “I fell in love with Alien when I was only a kid. My mum bribed me with letting me watch horror movies when I was underage, and I think it stuck with me ever since then. I’m addicted to horror.”
He describes the Swiss illustrator’s style as “bio-mechanical…Giger’s biggest phobia was overpopulation: his thing was that people can’t judge other people since we’re all ugly inside.” But some icky details of the facehugger difficult to translate onto our lame, uncorrupted human bodies. “I would’ve loved for it to be in full-colour. But the facehugger itself is such an off-white, very disgusting colours, and the guy just didn’t do colour.”
Dante once had the space on his shoulder devoted to Blade Runner, another iconic cyberpunk story, but the piece “literally just gave away too much skin for something so small, and nobody I showed it to even got that it was from the movie.” Now its aqua-blue futuristic symbols add subtle texture to Jason Voorhees and the facehugger’s backgrounds.
Any other horror tattoos coming up? “I want to get, um, Cannibal Holocaust? Maybe the impaled lady on the spike, something grisly like that. I definitely wouldn’t get the turtle or anything like that, the animal cruelty scenes.”
Oliver Butson, Designer Ink Tattoos: The Lord of the Rings, The Crow, Dracula/Frankenstein, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones
Horror, fantasy and sci-fi faces gradually introduce themselves into the conversation as Oliver explains the triptych of Gandalf, Gollum, and The Fellowship of the Ring‘s awesome Balrog battle on his arm. “If I ever had free time I’d just have colleagues at the shop tattoo me. Each segment is one artist, all different people.”
After watching Peter Jackson’s high-fantasy trilogy as a kid, he “always wanted a sleeve: the medieval setting, as a kid I really loved that. Sword fighting, magic, all that good stuff. I read the books as well but the movies introduced me to it in a more epic way.”
I point out the art of Game of Thrones‘ Lannisters, and even Dustin and Eleven from Stranger Things, both relatively new shows. What happens if you look back in time and realise you don’t care for those titles anymore? “I don’t think that would happen. (LOTR and the Universal movie monsters) are timeless in their own right, and anyways it reminds me of when I was young, rather than if I watched it in 50 years and changed my mind about it.
“It locks you in that time period of when you got the tattoo, rather than necessarily relating to the memory of the movie.” Even if, say, any of the actors in these portraits get cancelled for some horribly problematic deed? “Yeah, I guess I don’t really take it too seriously. I like the aesthetic as well.”
Tamara, Ink Obsessions: The Devil’s Rejects
There’s something both haunting and wholesome about Tamara’s tattoo of Sid Haig’s evil The Devil’s Rejects character, the clownish patriarch of the Firefly family. It’s a perfect copy of the one on her best mate’s leg: “if we stand next to each other they match.” Awwww.
“The reason we got it done is we’ve watched Devil’s Rejects more times than we can count: we’re both huge Rob Zombie fans. Captain Spaulding’s our favourite, just love him so much. We just constantly quote it, it’s become that film where one of us can quote it and both of us instantly know what we’re on about.”
Simple, graphic lines and that flamboyant bow give the cult horror baddie a weirdly approachable and sweet vibe that tells the story of the pair’s friendship—much less eerie and photo-realistic than the Hocus Pocus and The Shining designs higher up on her leg. “We went through quite a few designs and wanted a cartoony-looking one: it looks cute and kinda matched what we both want.”
Yogi, Yogi Arts: Batman and Hervé Villechaize
An unlikely combo of black-and-white, midcentury TV legends appear on Yogi’s calf. Offered up a free tattoo by an artist working on his skills in realism, “we settled on Batman: I f**king love Batman.” Ever since watching the original live-action series as a kid with his father, that Adam West portrayal has been Yogi’s favourite. “I was really devastated when Adam West passed away. LA had a memorial night where they shone the bat signal up on LA Town hall, it was really cool.”
I point out that it’s a cool contrast to go for realism here, when the 1960s series is so colourful and campy: “With the rest of my stuff, I do have way more cartoony pieces. It’s the one tattoo i can show off like, ‘look, I do have good ones'”.
Lower down lies a simple outlined tattoo of…Tattoo, Hervé Villechaize’s role on Fantasy Island. Yogi admits this is purely because it was too much of a good pun to pass up—but he also seems to have a deep interest and empathy for the actor behind the sidekick character.
“He had a very fucked up life. The fame got to his head and it stems from his parents: they never really cared or showed affection, but he tricks himself into thinking they did for the longest time. It’s kind of heartbreaking as he was a massive talent: before he was an actor he was a legit painting artist. He was renowned around France at the time.”
Huh. The things you learn while staring at a stranger’s leg…
