Halloween Special – Most Popular Horror Movie Tattoos
It’s that time of the year again – for ghosts and ghouls and all sorts of sorcery. No matter if you are the type to get all decked out with fangs and capes and carve pumpkins a la American, or you honour ancestors passed, or simply like to curl up in the sofa with a giant bowl of popcorn and a scary movie, Halloween is unlikely to pass anyone entirely by in our part of the world.
As we all know, tattoos and popculture go hand in hand. So, in honour of the festivities (or spookiness), we thought we’d take a look a some of the most popular horror movie characters to adorn the skin of ink-aficionados worldwide. How many of the ones on our list have you seen?
Jack Nicholson’s iconic ‘here’s Johnny’ 
One of the most recurring horror scenes in tattooing is definitely the classic ‘here’s Johnny’ by Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Steven King’s The Shining from 1980. The off-season caretaker of the isolated Colorado Overlook Hotel, Jack Torrance, and his family are cut out from the outside world following a winter storm.
The hotel is inhabited by supernatural forces, causing Jack’s psychological condition to deteriorate to the point of trying to murder his family – and making movie history at the same time.
Stephen King’s It
Hanging out in Stephen King’s weird and twisted (and ridiculously prolific) universe for a little while longer, let’s take a trip to Derry, Maine. Its sewer systems are home to the malevolent entity known as ‘It’, which most often appears as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It awakens roughly every 27 years, preys on unassuming children and eats them for a little over a year, and then disappears again.
While Pennywise’s face, especially as portrayed by Bill Skarsgård in the 2017 remake and It: Chapter Two from 2019, is one of the explicitly scariest images imaginable, some fans choose to tattoo simple… a red balloon floating off with a string, or perhaps a paper boat floating in the gutter. Who said minimalistic tattoos can’t evoke emotions?
Freddie’s glove
Talk to any horror movie fan and they are bound to have a special relationship to Wes Craven’s the A Nightmare on Elm Street series and Freddie Kruger. The franchises clawed dream invader is the spirit of a serial killer – the Springwood Slasher.
He is immediately recognisable due to his burned, disfigured face, fedora, and metal-clawed brown leather glove. His face is scarred due to the parents of his child-victims burning him to death upon his release from prison. When attacking his new victims in their dreams, they also die in real life. Hence the movie’s infamous and chill-inducing catch phrase – whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.
Ps – check out Vivid Ink’s Halloween Special Trailer, and get ready for the zombie apocalypse.
