Newness (shop and tattoos)

So the new shop is open. Its been about 3 weeks and already I feel like I’m settling in like we’ve always been there. In addition to Cara, myself, and Jesse, we hired our good friend and fellow new dad Matt Macri .  So while I have stopped doing walk in Thursdays, we still have at least one artist almost everyday who can handle walk ins, at least until they get booked up too! Another big change is that I am now taking thursday off to hang out with Luna and Cara is tattooing all day Thursdays. I feel so lucky that I get to spend so much time with my daughter and that I have such reliable friends working for me that I can give Luna all my attention and give her mom a much-needed break from baby duty, even it its only one day a week so far.

We had a great “grand opening” party, tons of friends showed up, Kevin Sousa provided the food and Full Pint Brewing donated beer and Cara and her good friend, local fine artist Thommy Conroy hung the crazy amount of art we moved over from the old shop.  I took a second out of the busy night to snap a couple of pictures which i stitched together to give you an idea of how much BIGGER the new place is compared to our Oakland locale..

I totally based the idea for the open floor plan and oak toolcarts that we tattoo off of my trips to get tattooed in New York, specifically on the Kings Ave. Bowery location. I really liked the open room idea, and it has already been conductive to a relaxed ability to exchange ideas and critiques as well as a more free flow of conversation between artists and customers. I’m a worrier by nature, and naturally moving across town into a building with a completely different format and with new people should have really set off my panic buttons, but this time I wasnt all that stressed out. I guess I knew that this was a step up for Cara and myself and I was confident that the new space would be a benefit to all of us in the Black Cat family.

I have been working on some really fun stuff and with a few more artists I have been able to focus more on the specific stuff I want to tattoo. It’s always tricky, because I don’t want to sound snobbish or picky, but at 42 years old I feel like its time for me to specialize in the kind of tattoos I can do a really good job on and let the ones that would be good but not spectacular go to people who would do a better job on them. I confess to feeling a little guilt because, if I’m being honest, I’m also a little burnt out on doing tattoos that are not in my area of enjoyment. I guess I have earned the right to pick and choose, others people certainly reassure me of this, but I still feel a little concern that by not taking any and all tattoos that I have somehow become a big-headed rock star. The mind is funny like that, as soon as you get what you want you either want something else or you feel guilty for getting it. Thats why Shunryu Suzuki called the untrained brain the “monkey mind”, jumping and running around this way and that, never stilled. One of the nice things about sitting for a few years is that I can see this monkey mind from a little distance, I still have the crazy running around thoughts, but these days I can watch them without having to pick them up and play with them, sometimes I start to go into that cycle and a little voice says , “ah, best not to go there, buddy” and I can back off.

Anyhow, here are a few recent things I’ve been working on.

A good friend and ray of sunshine in our lives has been talking about a back piece for some time. She has a special affinity for Ganesha but was torn between the elephant headed boy and a Medicine Buddha to honor her herbalist/holistic healer career. In the end we combined the two ideas doing a Ganesha but in the more Nepalese Buddhist style of art. Back-pieces are no fun for the customer 90% of the time, even folks with very heavy coverage and lots of years getting tattooed are surprised at how bad the pain can be. We ended up doing this outline in two sessions.

I finished this dragon on a long time customer and we blended the background a bit up into some tribal blackwork we did a few years ago. I think I am done doing tiny dragons on arms, this piece is a great size and allowed us to get a lot of detail and readability. I love doing traditional inspired tattoos like this nurse/gypsy, It might seem strange to do Japanese and traditional American t first glance, but in reality they are very similar in technique and graphic punch. They both have a long history of stories and meaning that a tattooer can draw on to add depth to a tattoo and if done correctly both will look good for the clients lifetime.

Some tattoos become popular and then fade never to come back, some are perennial favorites that have been around as long as tattooing and will still be getting done  generations hence. I have done owl tattoos for 16 years and they never seem to fade in popularity, like a lot of tattoos which have that kind of staying power, an owl tattoo has a visual power which affects everyone who sees it on a subconscious level, it goes beyond the simple image and into a symbol. When we see a heart we think of “love”, when we see a skull we think of “mortality, and when we see an owl we think of “wisdom“.

10 bits of Advice for beginning tattooers

I look back at my tattooing career and a couple of things are pretty clear. One is that I sucked for a really long time at tattooing and didn’t realize it, and two, that I could have had about 5000% less stress if I had sought out the advice and knowledge of people who had been tattooing for a lot longer than me. Instead,  I spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy worrying about shit that was, in hindsight,  the exact wrong things to be spending that energy on. I hate to see people making the same mistakes that I did and if my experience can help one person not bang their head against the same walls I did then I can feel that at least my learning the hard way was not completely in vain.

So, if you have already been tattooing for 10+ years what I’m about to write really wont come as much of a surprise to you,but these are the things that I wish someone would have shared with me in my first 5 years of tattooing, it would have saved me a lot of headaches!

1. Get critiqued!

Of all the things that we do to improve the most important might be to get critiqued on your tattoos. It hurts to hear that you are failing at certain aspects, but the amazing thing is that until you hear it you almost never see it! If you can take a critique without getting butthurt then your work will begin to improve immediately. I had been bumbling along for a couple of years turning out mediocre crap when I stumbled across an online tattooers forum where they were exchanging critiques, I blithely put a couple of my tattoos that I thought were pretty good and proceeded to get my balls so thoroughly busted that I seriously considered quitting tattooing (as several critiquers had suggested) It really hurt to hear how bad I was and yet that very hurt opened my eyes to several bad habits I had and were not even aware of. It also revealed that not only did I not do good tattoos, but that I didn’t even really know what a good tattoo looked like! The critique was the first step to opening my eyes, and as he years have gone on I still ask for critiques all the time, in person or online I find that knowing a fellow tattooer will be looking at my work keeps me from taking lazy shortcuts with my tattoos since I know a tattooer will spot them!

When getting critiqued sit down, open your ears, and shut the fuck up! A critique is a chance to see your work with a new pair of eyes not a place for you to defend your work! The tattoo you apply to a client will have to stand or fall on its own merit without you there to explain it for the rest of the client’s life, so if it needs to be defended or explained then you have failed to do it correctly. A fellow tattooer who takes the time and effort to give you a critique is giving you a gift, you should receive it that way, with humility and grace. If your fragile ego can’t take hearing someones opinion about your tattoo then you might be in the wrong line of work.

2. The secret to tattooing is repetition.

I have heard the old saying “art is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” hundreds of times before I finally actually understood it. The fact is that very few of us are such prodigies that we can draw everything a tattooer needs to on the first try.  I finally began to understand that the way to improve me work was repetition (practice). In order for our creative ideas to flow effortlessly from our minds to our hands we must have trained those muscles to the point where they can do what we ask of them without having to think about it! In martial arts the training is repetitive and ritualistic, musicians play scales and practice chords over and over, in both cases the reason is not so that they can be really good at practicing martial arts or playing chords, it is so that when the time comes to fight (or play) that the person will do so automatically without having to consciously decide what to do. If a jazz musician had to think about his next not he would never be able to play the improvisational music that he or she does, it is the result of muscle memory that lets them play so effortlessly.

The same holds true for tattooing, we must perform the same action over and over until our muscles respond to our imagination without having to go through the brain to do it! Years ago I wanted to learn to draw Japanese finger waves, every time I would try the image I saw in my head as beautiful graceful arching waves came out looking like shitty goo and no amount of trying seemed to help! I looked for shortcuts, asked other tattooers for “formulas” and tricks, I tried to figure out the “secret” of masterful Japanese tattooers like Filip Leu and Horiyoshi 3 all to no avail. Eventually I gave up and, like I had so many times before resigned myself to the fact that I just didn’t have the talent to do these fuckin’ waves like my heroes did. Instead, I began doodling waves every chance I got. little ones, big ones, when I was on the phone or eating lunch I would jot down a few sketchy finger-waves and an interesting thing began to happen. My waves began to  get better! Not immediately, and not in big leaps, but I began to notice that slowly I was beginning to make the waves on paper look like the ones in my head. I probably drew several hundred waves that year and these days I can freehand them onto the clients skin without thinking about it. All because of Practice, boring old tiresome practice.

It may seem like common sense to you, dear reader, that practice makes perfect, but I really believed that if I tried to draw something and it came out badly the first time that I was simply not able to do it. Almost all of us artists act like we were born with the abilities we have now, but it is simply not true, we all got to wherever we are by repetition. And if you want to really excel at something the best way is to draw it over and over again til you are sick to death of that image, until you can see it in your sleep. Fortunately for us tattooers the act of drawing uses the same muscle-memory as the act of tattooing so that each minute spent drawing is almost the same as a minute spent tattooing.

3. There are trends in tattooing, and you will follow them.

There are years that owls are popular and there are years that fairies are popular and no matter how cool and unique you are, you will be doing these trends. You could be the most exclusive, visionary, custom tattooer in the history of tattooing and you will find yourself wanting to do a lighthouse tattoo because you saw 15 of them on people’s arms around town. The trick is not to try to force a client out of their idea, it is to bring your own signature into that image. Doing the 300th switch blade tattoo is only dumb if you are looking at the last guys version of it and doing the same thing instead of drawing your own. Which brings us to #4

4. Use reference.

When I say reference I’m not talking about tattoo magazines, instagram, or your buddies arm either. Other tattooers art can be a reference, but really should only be used to see how he or she solved a particular technical problem (like “how did they do the shading on that wing so it didn’t blend into the background?”) Far too often we see a tattoo that is a copy of another tattoo (which is a copy of a further tattoo etc.) The result of this is the same as taking an original painting and then photocopying it, then copying the copy, etc. After just a couple of generations the spark, the detail, and the structure of the original are lost and you are left with a play-dohy looking half assed version with little to no of the bits that made the original so appealing.

If you are going to draw a rose then look at pictures (or even a real one) of an actual flower not a tattoo of one. When you look at real reference, our brain picks out the subtle details it likes and these end up in your drawing making it unique and distinctive in a sea of copycat artwork. How many times do we have to see the same koi fish that has anime eyes, goofy kissy-lips, a dorsal fin that looks like a mowhawk plus an overall resemblance to a flaccid dick!? Just look at a real goddamn koi for 30 seconds and you will notice that most tattoos are missing half the fins, have tiny tails and giant hydrocephaly heads! And, no it is not just your “artistic interpretation”, it is laziness. There is an obvious difference when someone knows the correct way to draw an object and deliberately chooses to tweak it versus some goofball just half assing it because he or she is too lazy to go to a real reference point before beginning.  Even the most conceptual artists in the world , the Dalis and Picassos, had learned the basics of anatomy and rendering before they went off on their own trips, and without that fundamental grounding their work would not have looked “right” even at their most expressively unconventional. If you want to be an artistic innovator then first learn the fundamentals, and you do that with reference.  Do just 5 minutes of reference and your drawings will be improved dramatically almost instantly. With the internet at your fingertips you really have no excuse for not pulling up a picture of a real object before you draw it (even if you are not drawing it realistically!)

5. Your style will come on its own.

I used to really worry that my work didn’t look unique enough, or that it just looked like “everybody else “. Like most of us in the western world I wanted to start making masterpieces and monuments to myself on day one. The fact is that I didn’t even have a basic handle on the technical aspects of tattooing and here I was wanting to be someone who people would recognize from my “style”.  Like a person who wants to sound like they are from Britain affecting a fake accent, there is something clearly phony which always comes through when you are trying too hard to be unique. It was only when I began to study Japanese tattooing that I understood that style is something that develops rather than being created. In the ShuHaRi method is a concept which also shows up in martial arts,  Zen training and now, tattoos as well. It’s deceptively simple, first you learn the tradition the way you are taught (SHU or “Obey”), Second you perfect that method until it becomes your second nature (or to put it in modern terms, until it is in your “muscle memory”) when you can then begin to do your own version and this is “HA” (or “break”) and finally you go beyond both your tradition and your own style into something transcendent of what came before (“RI” or “leaving”) . Put into tattoo terms I realized that I was trying to transcend before I had even learned the traditions, trying to run before I even knew how to walk. As you practice your artwork your effort should be in perfecting your drawings first, your own personal “style” will be there naturally, but only when you quit trying to have it! Otherwise it is like someone telling you to “act naturally”, as soon as you try, you end up being awkward and stilted. Even worse is copying another, better, tattooers signature moves. We are all influenced by the best in this art form, but it is painfully obvious when someone is trying to consciously emulate one of the greats.

Style is something that comes when your mind and hand work in unison effortlessly and the natural variations your unique mind comes up with can show up in your work, it takes time, but by working on the fundamentals it does come on its own.

6. Progress seems to be connected to humility.

In short, the point where a tattooer begins to get cocky, to feel that he or she knows what is the “right” kind of tattooing or when they decide that the customers are impediments to their creative genius is the point where they seem to stop growing. I’ve seen young tattooers who were getting really good very quickly suddenly plateau and stop improving and it was always that moment when they decided they were king shit on the turdpile. It’s sad to see because any tattooer with a pair of eyes can recognize that the very best tattooers in the world are also some of the humblest, and the rest of the guys who are “almost there” are the arrogant dicks. Humbleness and hard work are worth more than all the talent in the world in tattooing.

7. Dont chase money

Very few of us had any sort of success immediately. I had about 10 years of barely making ends meet and every winter was a terrifying balancing act of living on one or two tattoos a week and trying to make up the difference with the meager savings I had from summers (relatively) busier times. However if you can build a reputation as a good artist without being a dick and without being hard to find then eventually you will find yourself with a clientage who love your work and support you. Its like starting off at the bottom of the ladder in the normal working world and eventually making your way to being a CEO, it doesn’t happen quickly, but if you don’t sabotage yourself it does happen. One thing that helps is to stick around the same area for a while, traveling is fun and builds experience that is invaluable, but it makes it hard to build a name for yourself with the folks in your area who will come to see you as “their” artist.

8. “Keep your head down, do your best, don’t worry what the other guy is doing.”

I read those words in the excellent Sailor Jerry letters book published by Hardy Marks. Like many tattooers I spent a lot of time and energy worrying about, being mad at, and bitching about what other people were doing. I complained that tattooing was being ruined, that this or that guy was making “us” look bad, that this or that new trend was not “real” tattooing. In short I was a bitchy tattooer like 80% of tattooer still are. Every second I spent writing angry cry-baby shit online or sitting around belly-aching is time and energy I should have been putting into my goddamn art! I am convinced that I would be a year ahead of where I am today if I had spent all that effort on what really matters, namely,  getting better at tattooing. The fact is that tattooing will never look like we think it “ought” to, if you really want tattooing to be a certain way the ONLY thing you can actually Do about it (and bitching is not doing anything about it) is to do your very best to make your little corner of tattooing “right”. Believe it or not, you putting effort into your own tattooing changes the whole thing more than a years worth of gripe sessions and online rants can.

9. That “AHA!” moment will happen to you.

One year I was at a convention and was crying to a fellow tattooer (who had much more experience) that I felt like I still didn’t get “it”. I still felt technically inadequate, I didn’t really understand tattoo machines, and I couldn’t really draw the way I saw in my mind and I had been doing tattoos for a whole 5 years at that point! He just smirked and said “fuck man, none of us knew what we were doing at 5 years!” and it hit me! Here I had been thinking 5 years was a long time to be tattooing and to this guy that was just getting started! From that day on I relaxed a little bit and began to realize that tattooing was going to be a looooong road, the rest of my life! There were other Ah ha! moments as well, like the day I realized I was no longer afraid of any tattoo on any part of the body, the day I realized that drawing a sleeve or back piece was no more intimidating than drawing a small piece, the day I realized I rarely fiddled with my machines looking for that “perfect” tuning anymore, and the day I told a customer I wouldn’t do their tattoo and they thanked me for being honest.

There will come a time when you are confident in your knowledge and abilities. It will be the result of years of hard work, tiny bits of knowledge piling up, and of all the lessons that setbacks and mistakes have taught you. The coolest part is that if you keep your head out of your ass, that upward path never needs to stop.

10. Have fun

tattooing is fun, hard work, but still fun. Take a moment now and then to stop, smell the green-soap and take it all in. The years begin to fly by as we get older and those shitty, stressful, early years begin to look  pretty sweet in hindsight.

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.

Bodies

Day of the Dead skull on Ribs

Flops body hammer and file tattoo finished

Added a whole lotta cherry blossom to a chinese charicter

Stepping it up

Ive been tattooing for a long time now, and if i have learned anything it’s that I havent learned very much. Tattooing has always been pretty cyclical for me, there are times i really feel like I am growing and expanding and then there are times that i feel like Im just treading water, trying to keep my head above the waves. Sometimes im fully aware of the state im currently in but recently I feel like ive been in a bit of a rut and hadn’t realised it. Whatever the reason i feel like i havent been pushing myself as much as i would like to, ive been doing what the clients ask for but i havent been pushing for even more and i feel like it’s about time that i got to doing that.

In part ive been wasting a lot of time playing video games. This has long been a problem of mine and acquiring an x box for my birthday has just exacerbated it with Oblivion and Fallout taking up way too much of my brainspace. I suppose everyone has something they do to waste time now and then, but for me this has been a little too much and now that a couple months have gone by I dont think its going to taper off any more until i sell the goddamn thing. I would hate to do it, it’s really fun, but like having a giant plate of cookies on the counter all the time the temptation to fuck off for 4 or 5 hours in la-la land is too great for me to pass up.

Second ive settled into a comfortable patter of business where Im booked for a few weeks so Im comfortable. Comfortable is bad sometimes, I need a kick in the ass. Fortuneatly i know where to get it, looking at other tattooers work online and posting my own work for critique. I havent done either for some time and just the other day Cara was looking at some of Valerie Vargas work and it blew me away at how she took very simple themes and tricked them the fuck out. I need to start doing this more. Any tattoo that comes in i need to give the full on treatment to the best of my abilities, I know that I have it in me, i just need to kick the old grey dog in the ass enough times to get him motivated to try harder.

Stay tuned, I hope to be putting some next level stuff up in the future.

In other news i have finally begun the lasering of my left arm in earnest. A friend i have tattooed for years recently started to do laser removal and i had all the black from my shoulder to elbow zapped this past sunday. I hope to be going in monthly and if all goes according to plan (when does it ever?) I would like to be getting my sleeve started sometime next year. ideally i would like someone like Dana Helmuth or Mike Rubendall to do it (well ideally it would be Shige but I dont see that happening too terribly soon). I have lived with tattoos I only half like for a really long time, Im ready to love my sleeves from this point on.

We recently attended the Meeting of the Marked, Pittsburghs tattoo convention and i did a few pieces there like this one

I have also finished some japanese work i am waiting to get pictures of and am damn close to finishing a sleeve Im very proud of.I finished a set of traditional flash in black only and am within days of finishing my japanese sketchbook. I feel like im finally back on the good foot, now its time to get stomping.

Ive been riding quite a bit too and after another month or so I feel like Ill be able to write a review of the Giant Bowery/mashup. In related news a friend is convinced he saw some kid riding my stolen Trek around the hood. Im not sure what to do with this news, Im over it but if I see that in person it will be real hard not to double foot dropkick that fucker.

I probably wont, mostly because ive gotten back onto the meditation tip lately, Cara and our buddy kevin just went to a small sitting group this morning at the Mattress Factory art gallery. And i do mean early, that shit was at 7 am! Thats early for a tattoo artist goddammnit! But it felt great and so has just sitting regularly again. So hopefully im getting back on track and pulling my head out of my ass (yet again, what is this like the 12th time? 44th?).

 

An open letter to tattooers on the internet.

This appeared on my favorite tattoo forum recently in a thread about ‘biting’, its a stupid topic where tattooers all cluck like hens over the evils of a tattooer copying someone elses work.

“Searching old antique stores for books almost doesn’t happen anymore with tatters.”

this is a great example of making the “evil them”. its a dangerous and stupid thing for us tattooers to do but we do it all the time.  We create a legion of made-up lousy tattooers who dont do things the way “we” (in our infinite superiority) think is right. Once we have this mythical straw man ‘bad’ tattooer we can assign him all sorts of bad behaviour and habits (like his unwillingness to work as hard as we do for reference) and then we can all sit in a big circle and pat ourselves on our back for how superior and blue collar we are for our workmanlike habits.

There isnt a single one of us tattooers who doesnt need improvement because there isnt a single human on earth who doesnt need improvement. The fact this that ever single second we spend worrying about what a mythical “them” is doing is valuable, essential, priceless seconds we could be working on the ONE person in the whole world we can fix.  Ourselves.

Its a lot easier to decry junkies, bad tattooers, races we dont feel comfortable around, political stripes that scare us and people who dont agree with us than it is to sit down, look inward for even a second and take an honest inventory of what we see. How many times have you gone a whole day without a single bad thing to say about anyone else? have you ever done it? I havent and Im making a special fucking effort not to do that shit! Its hard. Its hard because its clear to US what everyone else ought to do and nearly impossible to put ANY of it into practice for ourselves.

There is no bottom to the moral superiority spiral. ANYONE can find something about a another that makes them feel superior and that person can do the same. No one perfect in mind and action so the effort to decide what “They” are doing wrong is stupid and pointless. Every single one of us on here has done or is doing something that everyone else would find fault with.  Talking tough about what someone else does is like talking about punching the moon, it doesnt mean shit in reality. The only thing that does is what you actually do.

I like internet tattoo forums a lot, I have (and continue to ) learn amazing things daily and the knowledge that is shared is priceless. however Im having to wade through more and more chest thumping, cool club bullshit to get to it and its sickening to watch a bunch of people I admire and learn from flush themselves down a toilet of self-righteous negativity. True strength is doing what you do without needing to judge what someone else is doing. its not talking tough, its being tough enough to look at the real problem, us.

Update line

Lest you think I quit doing tattoos, heres some stuff I have been doing lately. . .

We based the tattoo on that their art piece by Jeremy Fish. I did redraw it to put my fingerprints on it a little bit, but the customer did request that we keep the sepia type look. i was a little nervous, I wanted to give it a shot but you never know how translatable this kind of thing is til you try it. We tried it.

the chef piece was a memorial of sorts for the clients bother who was also in the chef biz and was a fan of the band that the quote is from. there is the added layer of meaning to the quote when you remember that saturday night is when restaurants get slammed with customers and you better have a damn good reason if you cant show up for work. . .

these were also memorial tattoos. in this case the clients father had been a collector of firearms. I much prefer to do memorial tattoos like this instead of the more typical “rest in peace”. I fully respect why those kind of tattoos are important and how they can help the wearer to move on, but a tattoo like these leaves you with a piece of art not just a sad reminder.

Finally, we finished this dragon 1/2 sleeve in only 3 sessions. For me doing Japanese work that is really fast, but with only two colors it was pretty simply and straight forward. Also the client wanted to keep the piece pretty high on the arm so its not really a shoulder to elbow half sleeve.

Ive got a PILE of cool big stuff in the process fo being finished and more on the horizon. Updates soon!