Some things

Sometimes what looks like a bad day can turn into a good one in the blink of an eye. On the first day we were back at work in 2012 I had a full day of appointments cancel with less than 12 hours notice. It was kind of a bummer because I have many customers waiting for an appointment and when someone is a no-show with so little notice its hard to get one of those people in. It’s not really so unfair to me, but it is very unfair to the people who have been waiting to get in and can’t just take off work or rearrange their live to come in on such short notice.

Anyway through the magic of Facebook we put the word out that I had some time open and two great regulars were able to step in on short notice. Not only did I get a couple loyal regulars in, but I was really stoked on both tattoos I did!

First up was N. One of those clients who I just knew from the first tattoo was going to become heavily tattooed! Some people just get that sparkle in their eyes the minute they look in the mirror at their first lil tattoo and you know that they have fallen in love with tattoos. He is also one of those customers you can really have a conversation while you are tattooing, one of the great side benefits of being a tattooer is having one on one time with people from all walks of life and philosophies. So we started a squid about a year ago and due to his job was only able to get an occasional session here and there on it til yesterday when we finished this bad boy. . .

As we were working on this another long time shop buddy called and asked if I would have time to do a portrait of their dog. Now i do a lot of kinds of tattoo but portraits (and portraits of dogs especially) I don’t do, not because I don’t want to, but because it’s just not my thing and I can’t do an amazing version of it the way some other tattooers in Pittsburgh could. In this case though he insisted I could do it more “traditional-ish” and since he is a shop buddy I told him to come down and let me look at what he wanted. As soon as i saw the picture of this adorable little guy I was in! T’s dog is part corgi and part dachshund and if that isn’t a formula for the cutest dog in the world then his little smile surely makes him a contender for the prize! I wanted to get his lil tweaked paw (don’t worry, he apparently runs on it just fine) and smiley demeanor so I kept the background very simple and greywashy and put all the blacks and contrast into the pup itself. I was stoked to see it done!

So a day that started off looking like a wash-out turned into one of the more fun days I’ve had lately, yet again I’m grateful and conscious of how lucky I am!

 

New tattoos on old friends

The patron of martial arts, the bird-like Tengu is a skilled warrior and mischief maker, especially prone to playing tricks on arrogant and vainglorious Buddhist priests, and to punishing those who willfully misuse knowledge and authority to gain fame or position. In bygone days, they also inflicted their punishments on vain and arrogant samurai warriors. They dislike braggarts, and those who corrupt the Dharma (Buddhist Law”

Sometimes you get to do awesome tattoos, sometimes you get to tattoo good friends, and sometimes you get to do awesome tattoos on good friends. Josh is one of the sweetest people I know and when he asked for something Japanese-ish to go on his chest our friendship helped me pick the perfect subject. Josh has been involved in the martial arts for years and like most true devotees he feels a spiritual as well as a physical improvement that it brings to his life. The Tengu are a perfect example of that melding of the two aspects of martial arts into one. It doesn’t hurt that they look really cool and are seldom done as tattoos (at least seldom seen by me). So we had the plan to do the outline, a Tengu mask amid a rushing stream:

The red stamp is the Haku bun seal of Joshs wife, Erica, who passed away recently. Erica was a wonderful friend and a true tattoo aficionado who loved tattooing like few other people I have met in my 14 years of pushing the pins.  I had also done this same haku bun on Ericas sister and brother, and it seems truly fitting for Josh to have it over his heart. The sternum is probably the most painful part of the torso to get tattooed but you wouldn’t know it from Josh, no complaints as I ground away on his breastbone he just closed his eyes and kept chatting with Cara and I.

For some reason I have been getting much faster at this type of tattooing lately, apparently the muscle memory finally took hold and I have become very comfortable with my graywash recently. In tattooing confidence definitely translates into speed, and when you are tattooing someone who you feel a connection with its almost like time disappears. We got the outline done in record time and Josh felt good to get some shading in which also seemed to fly past. After a short deliberation and in recognition of the 5 hour drive Josh has to make to get another session we decided to push through and just get it finished:

The whole thing ended up being just shy of 5 hours and then we went out to eat and Josh stayed over to rest up for the drive home tomorrow. I believe that we will be doing the other side in April when Cara and I work at the Baltimore Convention near where Josh lives.

Another great friend is Bert, he not only makes awesome shirts for us but can sit like a rock and picks tattoos that are super fun to do. A couple of days ago he came in to get a traditional-ish lion on his stomach. Again we started off planning to just do the outline since the stomach hurts so much usually, but once the got the linework squared away he was feeling good so we just finished.

Later on we decided to add some red to the mouth and some bit of color to the eyes and fur but not much, after this bit heals it will take just a few minutes to add those parts.

It was a great week and we are really lucky and blessed to have such good friends.

Next week Cara and I will be working the Philadelphia Tattoo convention with the great fellas at Black Thorn gallery in Mechanicsburg. In past years Philly has been crazy busy (and occasionally just plain crazy) so we should have some cool pictures when we get back hopefully including one of the new tattoo Im scheduled to get!

Work in progress and new jonx.

almost finished with this koi sleeve/chest panel. I haven’t done a really big version of a Showa Koi before so I was a teeny bit apprehensive, but once we got the background on there I was more confident in the ability for it to pop.  The inner bicep (lotus and waves) and some cherry blossoms remain to be done, I’m really excited for how this one is coming together and the customer is super stoked coming in as often as I can make time for him.

I also did a fly reel on a great regular customer who already is wearing two Japanese sleeves I did on him and wanted to express his other passion, namely fly fishing. The reel is from a photo he brought in of a 1940s era piece of tackle that belonged to an uncle who passed away while my customer was still a toddler. But their shared love of fly fishing is something he wanted to do without it looking too much like a memorial piece. It’s on the side of his calf.

Lastly is a piece on shop friend/t-shirt printer extraordinaire Bert. He has a nautical sleeve going on his left arm and wanted to get a lighthouse to fill the vertical triceps area. I tried to keep it super simple, traditional, and scary. I lined this with a new machine that my good friend Robie made.

That’s it for now, I have at least 4 Japanese dragons in various stages of being finished and I have a feeling they will all end up done within a month of each other heh heh. More to come soon. . .

some new stuff

I like to think of this first one as a gypsy lady telling a lie. The customer is the brother of a friend of Cara and Myself and the preliminary work was done via email. For some reason there is always a bit more struggle with me getting the art in line with the customers ideas when we don’t meet face to face before I start drawing. Somehow, that personal meeting just helps cut through a lot of the grey area when a client is trying to describe their vision. We reworked a little bit of this and then tattooed it on. This guy was, like me, not a big fan of getting his leg tattooed, for some reason it sucks extra below the knees for me. Hopefully his will heal faster than my leg tattoos seem to.

the three flower types in this piece represent family members to this client. we discussed doing it a lot smaller, but she has tattoos and has learned that when it comes to tattoos bigger is almost always better. I do quite a number of flower tattoos and they never get tired, there is just too many ways to do them and too many type of flowers out there to run out of new and cool ways to lay them out. the hardest part of these guys is the white flowers, white is not so great in large doses on a tattoo, we used a dusty blue color to add some shading and hopefully hold up even if the white isn’t super bright on her skin.

Day of the dead tattoos are getting popular and I couldn’t be happier. there is something so fun about them and it was a pleasure to work on this piece. The general layout is based on a piece the client brought in from the internet. I eschewed the usual Sylvia Ji stuff (though it is amazing artwork) and instead used a Tamara Lempicka painting as the basis of the face.

here is stage one. As you can see a lot fo the lines are put in using light gray-wash and in the hair I didn’t stress about making the lines too perfect, more than 90% of those lines would be covered as we made the hair black. Also you can see how this piece curls around the arm, from the bicep down over the ditch of the elbow and onto the upper forearm. I like it when tattoos can reveal a little of themselves as the person moves, it makes getting a single picture of the stuff harder, but I think its way more fun and dynamic on the body if I don’t try to impose stiff framing just so I can see the piece all at once.

This is the second session with the shading beginning to go in. Most of the time I don’t do a whole lot of this kind of layering, but if something is supposed to have very subtle gradations I will do a gray ‘under painting’ on some parts, let that heal and then come back with color. Once healed this will make the shading seem to have some depth and translucent effect. Once, again the drawback for me is that I don’t get a fully realized picture until the piece is totally healed and sometimes customers don’t come back until they have spent 5 years on a tanning bed.

So here is the finished piece the day we got done.   I wanted the halo and outer shading to have a rough, almost folkarty feel since all the inner stuff was a clean and smooth as I could make it.  Both  the customer and Christal were thrilled with it and so was I.

What i done did

Just a quick update with some work ive gotten finished this month.  First some roy lichtenstein art done on a customers tricep area. We left off the word bubble that the original had and punched up the color a bit to keep the contrast up on skin. Pop art (like catholic and hindu imagery) is easy to tattoo and always looks striking on skin.

Next up we have an owl among roses on a great customer, she has a bunch of traditional stuff that this needed to fit in to so we kept the color palette simple and old-schoolish.

My first Black Cat tattoo done at Black Cat tattoo. J had the blue waves and purple clouds alreadty on a previous tattoo that this one had to tie into but the connection was no problem.

This lovely lilly is on the inner bicep of a customer who (along with her boyfriend) get tattoos from me when they are in town to visit family from michigan. Theres a lot of talented tattooers in Michigan so im flattered thart they wait til they visit pittsburgh to get tattooed.

The shop is coming along and Im sore as a motherfucker. Real work is HARD. heh heh. . . . .

Who’s crazy? We are.

But we love it. So we are doing it again. its fun, its hectic, its financially unrewarding but its some of the most fun i have had tattooing in years. SO. . .

Lucky Friday the 13th! Valentines Day Action! Stabbing Tigers in their fucking HEADS!

So, the last 3 days in a chronological nutshell. . . .

As some of you may already know, This Friday the 13th we had a special day where we tattooed folks on a walk-in basis for only $13 dollars. A lot of towns have a shop that does this, Friday the 13th being a sort of informal tattoo shop holiday, but no one in Pittsburgh did. Til Now.

Cara and i drew up a sheet of traditional little designs, known in the old days as “porkchop flash”. I’m not sure why but one theory i heard states that the designs were so small that you wouldn’t make enough to afford steak, but you could do enough to afford porkchops. I kinda like that idea.

Anyhow we put out the word quietly on facebook, myspace, and here along with a few other selected forums like tattoodles.com. We wanted a fun crowd not a gang of riff-raff or people looking for a deal. And we got what we wanted! By 2 pm the waiting room was overflowing and the 2 dozen donuts I brought in were going quickly.

The waiting room at 2pm

The crowd was an awesome mix of old friends, repeat customers, new folks and people who used the day (as we hoped) to check out the new shop! It got pretty fun and noisy, we banged them out one after another, by 4 pm we closed off the waiting list to new arrivals and were still tattooing folks til past 8 pm! We ran out of tubes, we ran out of paper towels (and one of those waiting went and fetched them for us!) Caras co-worker Chris had volunteered to work the floor for us and did an amazing job of juggling the waiting list, getting everyones forms filled out and ID checked, answering the phone, dealing with questions and keeping everyone laughing and patient as some of these folks waited 3 hours for a 20 minute tattoo! Chris kicked ass and will definitely be manning the helm for us during next months Friday the 13th!

Oh yes i said it bitches! March has yet another Friday the 13th and plan to do it all again! New flash will be drawn, more donuts will be acquired, and a bunch of disposable tubes will be bought ahead of time hee hee! We had a blast, the new shop got some exposure, and we ended up making 25 folks a lil bit prettier with some new ink.

Cara kicked ass all day, coming in after starting her morning opening Starbucks at 5AM!!! She is a trooper and continually amazes me with how quickly and thoroughly she is becoming a solid tattooer. My dumb ass decided to wait til the night before to paint the flash. . .and then in a fit of monumental stupidity stayed up until 3am before waking up at 7 am to get everything ready for the days event. But the energy and fun was so cool that I didn’t sag one bit all day.

So, If you don’t get your butts down to Black Cat in March for the 13th then you will have to wait til 2010 for the next $13 tattoo day!

The next day was, of course, Valentines day, and the first customer of the $13 day, Adam, returned for his appointment with his lovely lady Elena. It was to be her very first tattoo, a Japanese inspired falcon on the inside of her bicep. She was very nervous but still game and even during some of the more ouchy bits stuck to her guns and came back again and again til it was all finished. Now fully a bad assed tattoo person she watched as one of my favorite customers ever, Adam, got an amazing traditional dagger going through a tiger head! Behold!

Tiger? Check. Dagger? Check. Bad assness? Oh hell fucking check.

Adam sat, as always, like a rock. He is a true aficionado of traditional style work and lately has been my bike question answerer while I grind away on his poor arms. Lots of my customer begin to feel like my friends after a few tattoos, He is definitely one of them. Tattooing is slow, often painful and expensive, and yet we do our best to make the experience (and result) fun and worth the effort our customer put forth. Trust me on this one, fellow tattooers, if you show some  love to your clients they will show you some love right back.

Cara came in after her Starbucks gig and immediately got to work on an appointment, and right after that did a walk in. Both tattoos came out clean and stylish, i foresee some serious repeat clients in her future.

Still exhausted from the Friday the 13th gala we decided to just go eat and go home. We hit up Sushi Too in Shadyside which was surprisingly uncrowded and exchanged gifts and smooches. After that we got some coffee and looked through Kat von D’s new book. Love her or hate her that lady knows how to make a neat product, be it a tv show, tattoo, make up, or book she definitely knows how to bring real substance into some very flashy style. Anyhow, looking at well done tattoos gave us a great idea!

We decided to head back to the shop and tattoo each others names on each other! Its an idea we had been kicking around for some time and what better time than valentines day!? Is it dangerous to get someones name on you? is it dumb? will you regret it? Maybe. but its also one of the most romantic things I can think  to do and life is too short to always play it safe.

Mines is on my wrist, hers is right above the inner elbow.

We drew them up for each other and I did my very best to fancy the hell out of some script and Cara hooked me up with some old school tattoo letters that make a big softy like me look like a hard ass. We even brought Eddie with us, I know it might not be the most sane thing in the world to bring a crazy dog onto your lap while getting tattooed, but family is family.

For some time now I have been planning to ask Cara to marry me. Ive wanted it to be every romantic dream she has come true. Ive shopped for rings, Ive plotted where, when and how I would ask, Pondered whether I should go old school and ask her dad for her hand. But in the end I went with my gut and my heart and I asked her to be my wife as I was tattooing my name on her arm. I wasnt scared, I wasn’t even really thinking of it five minutes before I asked. The moment simply came up and at the perfect time I asked the person I adore more than anything in the world if she would do me the honor of being my wife.

She said no.

IM KIDDING! Of course, she said yes! We’ll get around to a ring at some point, but as far as Im concerned her name on me and mine on her arm is worth more than anything else in the world.

YAY!

If you havent already. . .

. . . Check out the Black Cat tattoos page. For reals we got everything squared away and looking pretty.

www.blackcattattoos.net

The shop is shaping up, ive already thrown about 40 tons of crap into the black hole i call the shop basement and we are slowly, but surely, beginning to remodel and spruce the place up. Ive already gotten one big wish and that is to have natural light, after a decade under flourescents I cant tell you what a mental difference that makes! Plus my mutant bamboo plant is exploding with new shoots, I think its the vegetable equivelent of a boner.

Coming soon, Pictures of the shop in all its ghetto fabulousness!