Welcome to Think Before You Ink, a series where we show the worst of the worst when it comes to tattoos based off of famous works of art. We’re here to remind you that art is to be created, not replicated – especially if it will forever be on your body.
This week we have The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Salvador Dali, housed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. Specifically, we’re talking about elephants.
Dali incorporated leggy pachyderms into a lot of his work, and people are (unfortunately?) pretty cognizant of that. Wobbly mammoths are so much a part of Dali’s corpus that they’re basically a calling card. As much as melting clocks or a tusky moustache, elephants are both art and artist. And, as the examples below show, this motif transcribed onto flesh is both a personal mistake and a punishment to anyone with eyeballs.
Without further ado, send in the elephants.
Lord give me strength, someone’s brought a Bible verse to the party. I don’t have anything against the Bible, it’s a great work of fiction. But I do have grievances against both copperplate type and the inability to understand the benefits of subtlety.
This Bible verse, in a few words, is about how the 1-percenters that have it good now are going to regret being fat cats in the coming revolution. It has nothing to do with Dali’s elephants, other than elephants growing ivory from their mouths. In fact, I’m pretty confused whether the elephants are illustrating something about the verse or destroying it.
Granted, this level of decision making capability is definitive proof that this person stopped developing emotionally sometime in the summer between first and second grade. However, they think there’s something intellectual going on here, and anyone who knows them should punch them in the kidney until they understand that’s not the case.
1/5 elephants on his body look like they have diarrhea.
Go to the hospital. Just… go to the hospital Craig (it’s a guess, but that body part looks like it’s on a Craig). Christ, that tattoo looks like MRSA. It looks like something you’d move away from if it sat next to you on the bus.
And the elephant is grinning like a pervert. Something in the communication between the tip of the trunk and smile makes me really uncomfortable. Then there’s the way one leg’s stroking the other… Craig needs to get this amputated. Laser removal isn’t enough this time.
1/5 police sketch artists have drawn this elephant’s face on the job.
“Doop doop doop, just taking a Sunday stroll ‘cross your shoulder,” SAID NO COOL TATTOO EVER.
1/5 people that show off their bad tattoos by wearing tanktops deserve to die alone.
Oh good, a mash-up. Are you serious, tattoo consumer? You could have donated this money to curing cancer, natural disaster relief, to whatever branch of medical science could keep more people like you from being born. But no.
You wanted a Dali/Star Wars mash-up with the world’s worst and most nonsensical Death Star. For real. How is the Death Star dripping on this AT-AT? It looks like the tattoo artist was blind and the only description this guy gave for the Death Star was mumbling out, “Dripper. Dripper. Dripper.”
1/5 perverts get off on the world staring at their bad tattoos.
Excellent, there’s more from this slackjawed, mumbling goon. What’s worse is THESE AREN’T EVEN IN THE SAME MOVIE. None… none of this is in the same movie.
Also, the shadows are the wrong way. Congratulations, you unique twinkling snowflake. You’re so original and interesting that the laws of physics literally reverse in your presence. Welp, you aren’t getting away with this on my watch. The only options are that you either thought no one would notice, or you actually believe that shadows grow like creeping vines toward light. Either way, that godawful slab of Pizza Hut colored vomit you pass off as a tattoo is as welcome around here as a malignant tumor.
Staring at this is like breathing carbon monoxide. Except I only get light headed and never finally die. The bittersweet thing is I can keep despising the decisions of this cud spitting mooncalf.
5/5 people that pretend to have watched Star Wars can’t sneeze without farting.
That’s it for this week, and remember: Leave the masterpieces to the masters!
By Clayton
Sr. Contributor