I’ve only designed two tattoos (on request), but I just realized that my approach to them is absolutely the same as my theories of street design and I think this might be where I differ from most traffic engineers.

Fwiw, my approach to tattoo design seems as unusual as my approach to street design.

Maybe I just bring my death issues to everything I touch?

So this is also where I differ from tattoo artists.

I think of both tattoos and streets as designed objects that exist in a physical world of entropy, where decay happens in not unpredictable but also mutable ways.

I imagine both not in their first year, but in their 25th, 50th.

How do we design WITH our context, without a puritanical denial of death and decay and wear and tear? How do we design for resiliency, for beauty?

Both the traffic engineers and the tattoo artists I’ve peppered with questions seem confused by my line of questions.

Most tattoo artists and traffic engineers I've talked to are all about how you design a street so that it stays as static as possible--that's what those black outlines in tattoos are for (and erosion measures on streets).

I want time/physics/life to be my collaborator.

Like tattoo artists will advise on where to tattoo (accidentally typed "build" there) based on how the body predictably shifts with time, but it's about staying as static as possible. Not about the tattoo being remade and reformed by the body.

My uncle, who died in the mid 2000s when he was in his late 80s, had a tattoo on his upper arm that he'd gotten as a young man. It fascinated me for how beautiful it was--wrinkled waved of tattoo-blue across his arm, totally unintelligible as the Virgin Mary (I think?).

He wasn't fully comfortable with it--he kept in his wallet a photo of himself as a ripped young man in the CCC during the Depression, walking towards the camera out of a cold Lake Superior, half-hugging himself.

I thought his wrinkly tattoo was the most beautiful one ever.

I almost got my first tattoo a month ago tomorrow, from a friend at a cabin. I had a graphite point on my palm from jabbing myself accidentally with a sharp pencil as a kid--it was there for years and I thought it would be there my whole life, but then, one day, it wasn't.

I almost got myself re-marked there--I miss it, somehow. But then I thought that maybe I wanted to make the ink myself (can you?) out of oak galls and iron and then I got stuck.

A secret: one goal with my oak gall ink plans is to use it for sidewalk graffiti.

I was very intrigued by white ink tattoos--there's a place near me that won't do them because they fade, but how is that a bug, not a feature?

Why are tattoos about permanency when almost every person I've ever talked to about theirs sees it as relational with their body/heart?

This is like the engineer who looked at me funny when I told him that, aside from ADA/safety concerns, I didn't want a street reconstructed, even if the best-condition pavers were relaid. The way they settle and wear is what gives "scope for the imagination," I said to him.

(Yes. I quoted Anne of Green Gables at a traffic engineer to defend the beauty of literal potholes and my only regret is that he's among the most unlikely to appreciate either my quote or my views on street design.)

I'm not entirely sure what either streets or tattoos would look like if designed in partnership with entropy. I think, for streets, it would mean a lot more pavers, and a gentle education of a city's population in the not-terribly-complicated art of laying them flat.

Unlike asphalt/concrete, pavers are resilient. You make them out of local materials, with local labor. You lay them in your road. As they settle, you take up sections, care for the underlayers, and re-place them. Not replace them.

It's a resource-lite form of infrastructure.

One of my current goals for the City of Mpls (feel free to steal it for your city too) is having a community-owned brick foundry as part of our local resiliency.

Concrete is really CO2e intense. Asphalt is oil. We need to do better than either.

I realize that pavers are not ideal for biking or using wheelchairs--but I also realize that in the US, when we see pavers, they're virtually never properly installed/maintained. I assume they have limitations in ADA accessibility, but I also assume we can do them much better.

Also, they work for sewers. They're actually way better for sewers from a resiliency standpoint, because they allow for local fixes without major flow disruptions and even if supply chains are disrupted.

I really like having a functional sewage system, friends.

The only reason sewers have switched away from bricks in the US (they're still being installed and used in other cities--look at the gorgeous ones in Prague) is because of tech-fetishization and the price of labor (heaven forbid we invest in people).

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8_uRyCgzxF/ 

Anyhow, this thread was supposed to just be about how tattoos and streets could be designed with more grace and forgiveness and even a collaborative spirit extended towards time, especially in light of climate breakdown (more streets than tattoos in that bit).