Pete - I breeze through the site frequently but don't pay attention to all the forums. Or rather, I tend to get overwhelmed by all the forums and end up skipping most of the ones in the "Geekin' Out" section. I read the first (or as I like to call it, the Larry) section, then the third section, then maybe the second and never the fourth. That's just habit I guess. Or laziness.
Still, I tried to approach it from an artistic POV, going more for mood, with unusual poses and lighting, thereby getting not only a sense of the tattoos, but the subjects themselves.
I think your goals are good, but I was struck by the lighting and unusual poses. My dad used to play jazz and always said a good drummer was someone you'd only notice when he wasn't playing, the counter of that being if you noticed the drummer and he wasn't playing a solo, then he was too loud. I wonder if lighting and posing aren't the same sort of thing. I think there may be a fine line between unusual poses and unnatural poses, but I don't think that unusual poses necessarily look unnatural. A few of these here look unnatural in a way that attracts the eye to that unnatural/unusual aspect and distracts from the focal point of the image, which I would assume would be the tattoos. Also my first reaction to the lighting is that it is very bright. That again seems counter perhaps to the atmosphere created by the tattoos themselves.
I think you could have very white light used in a tattoo shoot, but the sort of light you might see in a tattoo parlor - white on white rather than white on black - might work better. I don't know. Just a gut reaction. White on white might highlight the graphic (i.e. drawing) of the tattoos better as well.
I always think that the best poses, even if contorted, look as if the body is going somewhere. By that, I mean that the pose is the product of a movement before the photo was taken and precedes a movement that will come after the photo is completed. Not that the body IS moving, but that movement would be possible.
To use a NSFW example, bondage photos (I know someone who does this for a living so have had this conversation and these are basically her words not mine) work when it looks like the body could move IF the ropes were removed. If the person either looks like they could move even with the ropes or could easily escape the ropes or if the movement that is restricted isn't important (tape an ear to one's head so no ear wiggling - ho hum) then it doesn't work. But if the ropes mean the person can't run away, sit down, stand up, talk, eat, etc. then the pose works no matter how contorted or unusual the pose. It's the implication that possible movement has been made impossible is the key. Which to me suggests that even poses that don't involve ropes still need this possibility of movement aspect. Hope that makes sense.
But technically, the photos look very good. And I bet, given the darkness of the blacks and the whiteness of the whites, these would look a lot better on silver-based photo paper than they do in digital version. Which would be in keeping with your goal of showing these on a gallery wall somewhere.
The tightest whitest most uptight towns are always the ones with the biggest appetites for decadence. You just have to turn over the right rocks to find out where they are all hiding. After all, demographics don't lie. The south consumes more pornography than any region in the nation.
