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THE DIG TATTOO PHENOMENON

About nine years ago, Dig co-conspirator Ed Docherty xeroxed a simple black and white image of a chainwheel out of a BMX annual. Ed sent the xeroxed piece of paper from to Dig editor Will Smyth, who then used the image in issue five of Dig for a quarter page ‘Subscribe to Dig!’ ad.
During the summer of 1997, as Will was busy doing layout for issue six of Dig, he altered the image, placing a piece of clip art within the chainwheel. The clip art that Will fitted into the chainwheel was four interlocked arms. He used three thumbnail size images of the chainwheel-in-arms logo in Dig This of issue six, not really thinking too much about the logo he had just created.
Something strange happened not long afterwards. The image seemed to resonate with a lot of people that rode BMX, and oddly enough, a lot of people thought it would make a good tattoo. One of the first people to commit was our own Sandy Carson, who got the image tattooed on the inside of his arm sometime in 1998. And from there, the phenomenon just snowballed. For the past few years, we’ve been spotting the Dig sprocket logo tattoo all over the world, from Eastern Europe to the nether regions of MySpace, and e-mail requests for the sprocket logo art hasn’t slowed down one bit. In fact, we get at least one request per week from someone looking to get their body permanently scarred with the Dig logo.
This section of the Web site is devoted to the many readers whom have branded themselves with the Dig logo and shared the results with us. If, like them, you find yourself getting a Dig tattoo, we encourage you to snap a photo of the results and e-mail it over to us at . We’ll post your photos on this section of the Web site. Be weary though; tattoos are for life and we’re not here to get you into arguments or battles with your parents or employers. Only proceed if you’re truly committed.....
  • Shine
  • Belfast, N.Ireland