I was talking to someone recently about inking a project for them, and to rummage up some sample inked pages, I did a Google search for the above words “Ty Templeton ink”. It seemed so much quicker than digging through my own files. The internet is my friend.

I got what I expected, a bunch of pages from my various inking jobs over the years that people had in their collections and have scanned and put online. All fine.

But I didn’t expect to find this:

That’s my cover to Gotham Adventures #1…or a version of it…burned into someone’s arm with needles and pain and the oh boy, sweet glavin! The arm belongs to Craig Kandiko, and this and the other images I’m going to show you are taken from his MySpace site which you can find here.

Craig is a Batman fan. A serious Batman fan, and he’s focused the meat and flesh of his fandom on the Gotham Adventures comic title as all of his tattoos are from covers of that series. This is an ongoing project for Craig, as he’s added to the Batman Animated gallery on his legs and other arms as the years have gone by. I’ll let you go to his site to see all his tattoos, some based on Bruce Timm, and some by Bob Smith – but since this is MY blog, I’m showing you the two other tats he has with my artwork on his largest organ!

This isn’t the first time someone has tattooed my artwork onto their body. I’ve been sent a couple of images of a Riddler tattoo that a girl put on her lower hip a few years ago, and another one that features a JOKER I drew that ended up on someone’s shoulder….and a friend of mine has a design between her shoulder blades that I designed for her. These are all small, singular tattoos that take up just a bit of someone’s body, and I’m flattered to see someone wanted my drawing or my character on them for life. Craig is clearly the biggest Batman Adventures fan on Earth from this level of dedication.

So Craig, I salute you, and feature you on my blog. I’ll just say this, I often erase and redraw my figures while I’m working on them. Next time, I’ll realize the importance to your very skin that I get every line right!

Ty the Guy

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