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[TALKYdude]

Whoa, that's beautiful. That's just amazing. Talky, how on earth did you know that? Do you speak Arabic? One of my good friends was Jordanian/Saudi but I didn't manage to learn any Arabic from her. She did say that the various dialects in the Arab world can be a little difficult to follow. For example, one of her brothers married a Moroccan girl, and my friend had difficulty talking to her sister-in-law's family. They usually just spoke English or French, since it was often easier.

I do. In fact I'm Palestinian-American. Not the "I hate Jews" kind though. In fact I like Jews a lot :-) But yeah, I'm bilingual, I grew up speaking both English and Arabic.
It can be hard to understand Arabs with dramatically different accents, but not insurmountably so. It's kind of like how some Southern accents are impenetrable until something clicks in your mind, some tumbler turns over in just the right way and suddenly you can understand every word.
Various Arabic accents are analogous to American ones. For instance, Iraqis and gulf Arabs speak the cajun/louisiana version of Arabic. Egyptians speak the New Yorker accent. Nomadic bedouin tribes in Jordan and the peninsula (including Saudi) can probably be said to speak sort of an Appalachian dialect. Lebanese and Syrians speak the Valley Girl of Arabic. Urban Palestinians and Jordanians, being mostly sober merchant types, speak a flat, uninflected midwesterner's Arabic (this is what I speak but I can imitate any other accent convincingly. Funny, my English is a flat midwestern accent too). Algerians and Libyans speak a sort of clipped, rapid Arabic, that could be analogous to a Texan accent. This is all entirely subjective and impressionistic, of course. Ask another Arab and you might get a completely different set of comparisons. But my point is that the different Arabics are only as different from each other as accents in the continental US, they're not drastically different. If you understand classical Arabic, what the language was before all these regional dialects arose, you can easily both understand and make yourself understood to any Arab, because the Koran and Hadith, which pretty much every Arab learns as a child, are in classical Arabic. And dialect-inflected Arabic is only different from classical Arabic in that it's lazy and ignores various grammatical rules. The different dialects share a large portion of their vocabularies, they just say everything with different emphases, and drop different letters or pronounce them uniquely. A look at the letter qaf is instructive. For instance, Lebanese and Syrians often won't say the letter at all. So in maqlubeh (upside down rice cake, an Arab dish), a Lebanese or Syrian would say ma'lubeh and would be very nasal about it. A Palestinian would say maklubeh, weakening the qaf to a kaf. A Bedouin from Jordan or the Hijaz would say maglubeh with a velvety, emphasized l. An Egyptian might say maglubeh but she would take it easy on the l. An Iraqi or gulf Arab would not only say the qaf in maqlubeh, but would also thicken the l, and make it very throaty too.
But aside from this sort of stylistic difference, and maybe 500 words of unique vocabulary for each dialect, there isn't really a lot of difference.

[slink]

أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمان الرحيم اللهم يا مفتح الأبواب إفتح لنا خير البحر

Wow. Dude. That is so cool! Thanks.
Yea, now I'm even more tempted to get that one. But like I say, god knows where I'd have it done. Might have to use calligraphic Arabic to get some of the really long sections of text I would want tattooed on...

I really like the idea of the illustration from Finnegan's Wake, Andalucia. If I could remember my favourite equation I'd get a tat of that but I'd have to think...

[V-Adore]

I'm really not sure how much this thread has to do with tattoos anymore, but it remains very, very awesome nonetheless.

Personally, I've never been able to settle on a tattoo, and I doubt I ever will. I dislike pain a great deal, and I can't think of anything that I know I will want to be a permanent marking on my body for the rest of my life (or at least will not regret badly). That said, the "oed und leer das Meer" tattoo is very classy, and I rather like the Euler's formula one, too.

[linnea]

TALKYdude, word. That is a very informative discussion about Arabic. I wish  I knew more, but as of now I'm just content to nod my head and say, "wow".

OK, let's say my ankle...  Is it like getting a flu shot?  A splinter under a fingernail? A mosquito sting? A cat claw? A mole-rat bite? There must be something comparable.

Hmm... Pain is pretty subjective. I have a high pain tolerance (I've had about 10 body piercings, like a 10 gauge tongue piercing and 14 gauge nipple piercings) so the pain of the tattoo was very mild. You sound like you're kind of afraid of pain, though, so it might be worse for you.

[wombat]

AIIIIIIIEEE!!!

No, no, what I meant to say is, fear of pain is very evolutionarily sound.  We are all here today in large part because our distant ancestors were afraid of getting holes in their bodies, yes?  The ones who did not fear holes in their bodies did not live long enough to reproduce and pass on their fearless genes.

I seem to recall, although it was a long time ago, that getting my ears pierced hurt like hell.  I think you are right that I need tattoo advice from someone with a lot fewer body piercings.

[V-Adore]

The phrase "14 gauge nipple piercings" strikes fear and wonderment into my callow, craven heart. I do not even know how big 14 gauge is, and still it seems to have unfortunate connotations.

[linnea]

The phrase "14 gauge nipple piercings" strikes fear and wonderment into my callow, craven heart. I do not even know how big 14 gauge is, and still it seems to have unfortunate connotations.

Hee! Oh man. You poor kids, I did not mean to scare you. 14 gauge is pretty small for a piercing. I still have the crescent barbells somewhere, let me take a picture (obviously they are no longer in my nipples so it will be g-rated).

Okay, picture is here.

http://home.comcast.net/~linnea78/images/barbell.jpg

The two curved ones at the top of the photo are 14-gauge crescent barbells. Those were in my nipples. Yes, they were incredibly painful and I wouldn't recommend nipple piercing in general. Mine didn't heal (I suspect a nickel allergy) and kept getting caught on things. I kept both of them in for ten months or a year, and then took one out. The remaining one stayed for a few more months before I finally took it out.

The two larger barbells were in my tongue (not at once): I got it pierced with teh stainless steel one, which is a 10 gauge. I later put in the acrylic 8 gauge one, which is bigger.

The deal with wire gauges is that the higher the number, the skinnier the wire. An 8 gauge wire is pretty hefty. 14 gauge is pretty small. Yeah. There's a great link here at the BME Encyclopedia, aka Body Modification Ezine. This link is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

http://encyc.bmezine.com/?cmd=main

[Limmo]

I once considered getting the cover artwork from King Crimson's Discipline  ( see temp avatar )  on my left bicep.  For about a minute.  I remain unmarked.

[TALKYdude]

That's neat looking, Limmo. Presumably you would skip the whole pink thing.
Is there even a pink tattoo ink?

[Bozack]

Oh, body-modification! When I get back to New York, and I've got some cash, and my prospects look slim for the next 2 weeks, I'm totally taking the frenum plunge.

[slink]

I'm totally taking the frenum plunge.

Curse my memory, but that's the chin is it not?
If so I was so close to getting that done, but didn't. In the end I never got anythig pierced. Eyebrow was tempting too, but if it went nasty I'd hate it - so close to my eye and all.

[arkabee]

OK, let's say my ankle...  Is it like getting a flu shot?  A splinter under a fingernail? A mosquito sting? A cat claw? A mole-rat bite? There must be something comparable.

i've been told the closer to bone, the more it hurts.

i got mine on my left shoulder blade.

it's not an _intense_ shooting pain.  it's a low grade pain that keeps going on.  some places hurt more than others.

when the needle stops, the pain stops.  there is a low "ache" afterwards, but it was not bothersome at all.

additional: i have a deep, irrational fear of needles.  when i was around 8, i fainted down a flight of hospital stairs after getting blooddrawn.  i awoke to a sea of lab coats surrounding me.  some peppy young dr. said "you chose a good place to faint", it being a hospital.  i think this is the cause of my fear.

i got my ear pierced in college.  afterwards, as i was paying at the counter, i fainted, and fell into some shelving, hit my forehead ont he metal corner of a rack of hair-care products, it knocked me unconscious.

my fear stems from the thought of the needle going through the skin and into flesh.  the idea that it might hit a vein/artery and bloos spew forth is what get's me.  i flush as i type this, and am a bit light headed.  stupid, yes, real, yes.

that being said, a tatoo is NOTHING like a "needle".  it's not bloodwork, it's not an injection.

think of it as multiple layers of skin.  the tat-needle does not go all the way through.

at first i was getting light headed,  mainly thinking about the process, and assuming it was going deeper than it was.  once my body explained to my "rational" brain that the needle wasn't going that deep, i stopped getting light headed.

at certain points in time, i would say "stop", and he would stop, and we would take a break.  it was helpful that he is a friend of mine.

the main point of pain, came from HIM and not the needle.  in order to do good work, the artist must SPREAD the skin, much like the cloth is spread and kept taut in the hoop during needle point.  this can hurt, as in my case, a 6'4" ex-paratrooper used all his strength to stretch my skin as tautly as possible.

so, to answer your question, i would liken the needle feeling to be close to a cat's claw.  not scratching you, but if you were laying on your back, and the cat was standing on your bare back, and it started to stretch, and it let its claws out just a little bit, it kind of feels like that.

[wombat]

Ark, I love how your stories show how the thing we mainly have to fear is fear itself.  Fainting and hitting your head is so much more dangerous than the actual needles.

That is a nice clear and not so frightening description.  And the tattoo I have in mind is small and just an outline, so it wouldn't take nearly so long as yours must have.

Now I can move on to the task of deciding if the real problem is that it would be too undignified to do this at my age.  After all, now that Paul doesn't come around anymore I am the oldest fart here.

[linnea]

I'm totally taking the frenum plunge.

Curse my memory, but that's the chin is it not?

Heh! Try doing a Google image search for "frenum piercing" with safesearch OFF. *cackles*

The frenum is one of the many piercings available for men and their wangs.

[TALKYdude]

My wang and piercings: no way, no no no, I don't even have an ear pierced for crying out loud. I looked at your body modification link, Linnea. Terrifying, especially those split c*ckes (I forget the name). Those guys can't even pee standing up any more?! Urg. And words like "meatectomy". That just makes me want to hide. *pets c*ck through pantaloons, reassuringly* there, there, boy, don't be scared. If I ever shred you to ribbons it won't be on purpose.