If You Tattoo Them Across Your Entire Back, They Will Come

Mike McWain of Pasco, Washington, has what the Tri-City Herald refers to as “a field of dreams tattooed across his back, shoulders and arms”, and whether or not you think it’s a little light on the Moonlight Graham and a little heavy on the “God literally holding dead baseball players”, you’ll be happy to know he spent 11 years and $10,000 on the project.

“There were a lot of reasons I waited so long to finish this,” he said. “At the time I got the first tattoo done, my son was born. I had a family to support and that had to come first, plus I wasn’t making a lot of money back then to justify the expense.”

He also wanted the portraits to look like the real players, so the tattoo artist needed to be accomplished enough to meet McWain’s expectations.

Two years ago, he met Tri-City tattoo artist Jesse Walsh at the Three Rivers Tattoo Convention. Walsh, who owns Asylum Tattoo in Pasco, found the project challenging as well as stimulating.

I like the wording of “I had a family to support and that had to come first”, and now it’s 11 years later and I guess his kids are 11 and he doesn’t have to support them anymore so it’s time to sink whatever constituted a college fund into making Ty Cobb’s face look as accurate as possible on his back.

Of course, Mike is an amateur when compared to the living, organic canvas that is Chicago Bears Tattoo Guy Glenn Timmerman. I don’t see Glenn wasting valuable forearm space with images of his kids.

Be sure to head over to Tri-City Herald dot com and watch the video interview with Mike, which features him hilariously stating that in his opinion, Babe Ruth was one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

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