Custom temporary wedding tattoos

One favor idea that's totally punk rock or heavy metal is customized wedding temporary tattoos.

Yeah, you know the ones you used to get in the chewing gum wrappers? Just like them. How cool is THAT? Totally memorable, totally rad, and totally cost effective.

Most stockists offer a range of stock tattoos which you can customize with your own colours and words. Or if your wedding uses a motif or you want to copy one of your own inked designs, you can ask for a total custom order. I've included some of the stockists below.

Stray Tats

You can upload your own design or select from their gallery. An impressive array of cool Halloween, fairy, pin-up, celtic and dragon designs. You can add writing on any tat and order in any quantity you like. Prices range from $2 per unit upward, with discounts for bulk orders.

Australian Temporary Tattoo Shop

For the Southern Hemisphere couples. In-stock and custom designs (min order 50 of in-stock designs and 1000 custom designs). Prices start at 70c per tattoo with discounts if you order over 100.

FNR Temporary Tattoos

Large US stockist of custom and temporary tattoos. Huge selection available with prices starting around 7c per tattoo. orders begin at 50 tattoos for in-stock designs, 1000 for custom designs (but they say this is negotaible). Options for glitter and glow-in-the-dark tattoos. made from FDA-approved inks and safe for children.

Temp Tats

Special Wedding Design service package - 500 2inch tats for $79 - this includes adding your own custom design or using any design from their extensive range, with your own custom colours, names and date. Lots of cool pictures so you can see how they look.

Why I love wedding stuff

I must profess to being something of a Scrouge. I learned it off my dad - he would scoff at the idea of buying something himself, but he's the most generous gift giver in the world. I'm the same - I can't bear the idea of splashing out for a $2 chocolate bar for myself, but I'll shell out for presents, for nice food to bring to other people's parties, for anything CDH could possibly desire.

It didn't help that two years ago I achieved a rather impressive feat; after four years of university I graduated...with more money than I came in with. Several scholarships and some very sensible financial decisions gave me my degree and an awesome start to my adult life - financial security.

So when I hear brides worrying about their wedding budgets and trying to navigate their way through the plethora of wedding purchuses, I feel your pain. I see the shiny things, I imagine what it would all look like coming together, I look at the price tag, I change my mind.

Weddings are a consumer driven investment, and they shouldn't have to be. I say this, and I run what could only be described as a glorified shopping blog (I'll get to that in a second). Part of my reason for writing the Halloween Wedding Planner ebook was to challenge what people believe makes up a wedding, to strip the event right back to it's core.

And you may think your wedding is different because it's counter culture - punk or gothic or indie or steampunk - but it's not. Whether you spend hours searching for that perfect white meringue dress or drooling over FairyGothMother corsets, the result is the same - consumerism, adherence to cultural ideals, advertising, marketing ploys, mass-consumption. Shame on us all.

Or is it?


See, while I DO believe in the planning stages of your wedding you should strip the process back to it's barest parts - which I discuss at length in my book - and I DO believe you should disengage yourself from the 'wedding industry' and all its associated products, I also believe you shouldn't worry too much about your consumption habits. Hell, that's why I started this blog. Here's why:

• Buying a few things here and there, things you'll love, things that will make you smile when you think of your wedding day, things that you'll use again or decorate your home with, things which will bring you joy for many more years, aren't so much purchuses as they are investments.


• When you buy wedding things from craftspeople like the ones I feature on this blog, you support the people that keep counter-cultures alive. How would goth as a culture exist without corsetmakers? How would heavy metal survive without leather studded gauntlets and band patches? It's simple - they wouldn't. Goth and heavy metal and whichever subculture you subscribe to represents a state of mind, sure, but they're also about the stuff. You can deny it all you like, but it's true. And the more beautiful handmade goods exist in the world, the less mass-produced garbage there is, and the happier we all are.


• Stuff brings pleasure. So do lots of things: eating, travelling, some things I probably shouldn't talk about in graphic detail (ahem...) but owning and appreciating stuff is right up there. In the Grand Designs Handbook, Kevin McLeod admonishes people building new homes: 'Don't throw away your old furniture and buy everything new. Our possessions are our autobiographies'.
• We have to consume. We have to clothes ourselves, we have to eat, we have to entertain ourselves and celebrate. For these things we need stuff - often not as much or as expensive or as mass-produced stuff as we buy - but stuff is essential for our survival.

See, stuff isn't bad, stuff is good, in many instances. And here at Wedding Skulls - even though I do say weddings are so not about the 'stuff' - we do love us some awesome stuff. But more importantly I think, we love the craftspeople who make us these things - we love the new friends we make, the lessons we learn. We love our subcultures and the people that work behind the scenes, making our scenes brighter, vibrant and fun. These are people whose stuff we love gracing our weddings.

Gothic Wedding Soundtrack

The Gothic Wedding Collection, $12

I stumbled on this beauty while surfing the net for something totally unrelated. From Vitamin Records comes the Gothic Wedding Collection, 15 tracks of string quartet tributes to gothic love songs. Everything from Depeche Mode (Enjoy the Silence) to The Cure (Just Like Heaven) to HIM (Join Me in Death) on one CD.

Vitamin Records was formed in 1999 to provide music lovers with string quartet versions of their their favourite rock, metal, pop and electronica. From their first album release 'The String Quartet Tribute to Led Zeppelin' through to recent attempts at Outkast, Slayer and Tool, Vitamin has a string album for everyone amongst its 185 albums.

Skully Wedding: Steff's Heavy Metal Halloween Wedding

Steff and CDH outside the Freaky Forest, Spookers, Kingseat Hospital, Auckland

A new feature here on Wedding Skulls is the 'Skully Wedding of the Week' - this won't happen every week, but as often as I can manage. The Skully Wedding will be a feature-length blog post about a unique real-life wedding that draws it's inspiration from all the Wedding Skulls adores - gothic, punk, skulls and roses, heavy metal, rockabilly, dark elegance, and more. To kick off the series, I thought it might be appropriate to tell you about my recent wedding:

WHO BE YOU? We be Steff and CDH, from Auckland, New Zealand.

WHAT MAKES YOUR DAY A 'SKULLY WEDDING'? We decided on the theme 'heavy metal' which encapsulates everything we love - music, medieval and viking history, swords, horror films, gothic literature, skulls, and having fun with our friends - and the rest of the details fell into place. Our wedding venue was Spookers, an abandoned metal asylum turned haunted attraction. Our candlelit ceremony took place inside a multi-coloured circus tent, and we ate our banquet inside a blood-red hall, before we all romped through the haunted house!

The owner of Spookers made this hearse himself!


The 'Bogan' table in the banquet hall

An 'uninvited' guest

TELL US ABOUT YOUR FAVOURITE WEDDING DETAILS: My dress - from Dress Of Your Dreams - which cost only $500 and I felt like a fairy queen. CDH's sword and cloakpin from Wulflund, the groomsmens' velvet cloaks, make by my mum, our awesome cake (made by a friend) lego cake-topper, the bridesmaids' lanterns and our Battleaxe registry pen.

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT: When I walked down the aisle to meet CDH, he looked like a fierce warrior with his cloak sweeping at his feet. He took my hands and his face lit up in this HUGE smile and tears rolled down his cheeks - I fell in love all over again :)

ANY ADVICE FOR WEDDING SKULLS?: A wedding is two things and two things only - a ritual to mark your union, and a celebration. Don't let yourself get caught up in anything else. It should NOT be stressful or a chore or debt-inducing - it should be FUN.

For more photos see my full write-up on my website and my flickr steam. More photos and inside information buried within the pages of the Halloween Wedding Ebook!