Tattoo Ideas: Zombie Tattoos

My favorite movies in the entire world are zombie flicks. I'm not kidding. I like independent films, drama and psychological thrillers as well, but for me nothing beats a good zombie adventure. It all started when I saw "28 Days Later" in theaters one year. I was hooked instantly. I knew there had been classic zombie hits that had come years before, and thanks to Netflix I was able to see all of them, starting, of course with George Romero's ultimate thriller, "Night of the Living Dead". Later, I rented the original "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead", a crappy, campy 80's flick where scientists hiding out in an underground bunker at the end of days capture the zombies still wandering the earth and try to domesticate them. Don't worry, they fail miserably.

The remake of "Dawn of the Dead" further fueled my interest, followed by "28 Weeks Later" (although technically, the monsters in the "28" series are not zombies, they're infected by the rage virus). There hasn't been a good zombie flick released in years, as far as I know, and desperate times call for desperate measures, so in the recent past I've had to endure real winners like "Land of the Living Dead" starring John Leguizamo. Not only do I have a weird hunger for apocalyptic epics, but I find it fascinating that one bite can infect the masses. I won't get into the metaphors for life and society that zombies introduce, but I will say that I see zombies as a metaphor for a brainless wanderer who lacks a conscience as well as consciousness.

For those of you who don't already know, zombies are reanimated corpses who subsist solely on the tasty brains and flesh of humans. The concept has been around for ages, since Afro-Caribbean Voodoo teachings told of zombie-like workers being controlled by one all powerful sorcerer. In the definitive zombie film "Night of the Living Dead", zombies can be destroyed by being set on fire, but the only way to keep them down for good is to shoot 'em in the head, just shoot 'em in the head! Zombies move in groups like flocks of birds, generally at snail-slow pace that shouldn't seem very scary yet it definitely is. They are often the cause of modern civilizations undergoing complete collapse, resulting in a worldwide apocalypse.

Poor little flesh-eating zombies don't have names. You can't do a Google search for zombies like you can for Frankenstein or the Jigsaw bike-riding clown from the "Saw" empire. Zombie tattoos can only be based on nameless characters from zombie films. Of course, if you're really cool, you can get a lettering tattoo of a quote from a zombie movie. For example, "They're coming to get you, Barbara" would be particularly awesome. So the majority of zombie tattoos feature zombie heads or full bodies with their decaying flesh and bloodshot eyes. Some people opt for the logos of popular zombie movies, like the half-head, blood red face from "Dawn of the Dead", or get renderings of particular zombies shown in their favorite film. Still others conjure up an image of what a stereotypical zombie looks like in their mind--like the "Clown Zombie" pictured below--and get that tattooed on their flesh, which thankfully is still intact.