While I was extremely pleased with the ambigram I came up with for my name earlier, there was one “limitation” it had as far as “tattoo eligibility” went; its [horizontal] length.

It makes a perfect candidate for putting on the back or front of the torso ¹ Upper back, or below the belly area … or pretty much anywhere you could put it horizontally.

However, I intended to have my arm tattooed… specifically the inner forearm – which you would think was no problem – since any part of the arm had a nice length to accommodate such a design. And for the most part, you’d be right.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple for my tastes; I’ll mention some problems I foresee with putting the long ambigram in the various places of the arm.

Ambigram Restrictions

One [major] thing to remember is that this is an ambigram; so to “experience” its full effect, you’d have to put it in a place where you can easily show its “magic.” While it will look perfect center on the body composition-wise, you’d have to rely on cameras to show the piece by shooting in different angles. This obviously is great for documentation purposes, but certainly not for practical showing. ² That’s another thing, if it’s in your torso, it’s impossible to show unless you take your shirt off Putting it in the most movable part of the body, to me, is a better fit for an ambigram; the idea is to simply be able to move your arms to show them.

This is the reason why I like the idea of the inner forearm. While standing up, you can expose it when you stretch out your arms, and you can flip it by putting your hands behind your back – a very practical manner to show the piece for cameras, or people in person.

The trouble with this is the inner forearm is the easiest to get distorted when you twist your wrists or have your hands/arms in different positions. So even my example of putting your hands behind your back will distort it drastically to the point that the latter half (nearing your elbow) will still be “hidden” – since that part would be aligned with the fold of your elbow… practically facing down, while your wrist is facing forward.

The parts of the arm I can imagine with the least distortion would be either any area above the elbow… or the outer part of your forearm (elbow-facing) The trouble with these areas is while you will minimize the distortion, you’ll once again find yourself lacking the practical means to flip the ambigram. ³ Try marking those areas and imagine you’re trying to show someone how it looks flipped – it’s not as easy as you imagined, is it?

So I’m left with the dilemma of compromising either way because of the length of the piece. So I thought I’d try coming up with a different solution: If I’m able to trim the length down to fit a square-ish area right above the wrist, I think I’ll be able to minimize ⁴ NOT eliminate entirely the distortion due to twisting.

Solution: Dual ambigram

The mission here was to minimize the length of the piece as much as possible; ideally into a square – but obviously that’s not going to happen with my first design. The most obvious solution was to break up my nickname and surname and put them in two separate rows.

But it was unacceptable to have independent ambigrams of “Carlo” and “Santos” – since when you flip those, it would also swap their vertical position (“Santos” would now be above “Carlo”). What I needed to do was make an ambigram that would show “Carlo” on one orientation, but have that very same ambigram show “Santos” when flipped.

From my brainstorming above you can see that thankfully, I already had a bunch of letters figured out from the previous attempt: C flipping to an S, A/O and it was no problem figuring out a flip between an O and S. That deals with CARLO and SANTOS

Because the number of letters my nickname had didn’t line up with my surname, I had to figure out a way to get RL to flip into a ANT while maintaining legibility and sensible kerning

So after much tweaking of the traced glyphs, this was the solution I ended up with:

Granted, it’s not as legible as the older design but hopefully people can still see the Carlo and Santos based on its orientation.

This will now allow me to put the ambigram in two rows, which brings us much closer to the goal of getting close to a square:

If I were to force a square design, I’d have to add embellishments like patterns and shit, but I’ll play it by ear.

In the meantime, I programmed 3 “variations” off the top of my head into an application (requires [Adobe Flash]()) Toggle between variants by clicking on one of the three “ambigram layouts” on the lower left.

If all goes well, I could have this tattooed on my inner forearm near the wrist… then have my earlier design on my back.

The only concern now is if the tattoo artist I end up with could fit the details with the size required. I’ll cross the bridge when I get there.