Tattoos fixed: 1 of 4
A long time ago, someone told me how you can make your own tattoo machine using a mechanical pencil, some guitar string, an electric motor, and some other shit. I went to town with it, inscribing my body in four different places with what’s colloquially known as a “prison scratcher” before my autistic hyperfocus led me off somewhere else. I was never cut out to be a tattoo artist, as I’m not artistic in the slightest, I just had a new toy and a body that was a blank canvas.
Fast forward nearly two decades, and they’ve held up okay, but it’s time to start thinking about getting them fixed. A few years back, when we didn’t really have the money to do anything about it, there was a place in town with some really talented artists, and they closed up before we had sufficient fun-money. There’s two other studios in town at the time of writing, but neither of them really “wow"ed me with photos of their work. Then about a year ago, Sabriena found Ararat Tattoo company on Instagram, and I really liked how Rick’s work looked.
I sat on this for ages before messaging him, and then we quickly set up an appointment for several months out. That was this week, but due to scheduling conflicts ended up being rescheduled on Saturday. He was super cool about it - a lot of artists start out by just dicking about on their own skin, and that’s cool, but I’m not an artist, I was just poor white trash with zero impulse control. I showed him what I had, what I didn’t like about it, what I wanted, and he smashed it. He drew up a fresh template, printed it out, it came out perfect sized the first go.
We talked about how I applied it originally with my leg bent, so when my leg is straight it’s distorted (as it’s on my calf muscle), so he made it a tiny bit bigger and essentially did a cover up on part of it, to fix the distortion, and used the extra part out the top as part of what’s basically a drop shadow. The shading work came out better than I could have imagined, and it was incredible watching him work through a bunch of ink then just wipe it away and the shading is just there. What a difference a professional makes!
Drove home uneventfully, showed Sabriena through the “second skin” stuff, and we’ll see how it heals.
No pictures, because this one’s a tired old inside joke that probably hasn’t aged as well as the pelican ink did. It makes me chuckle, but it’s not for popular consumption.
Update: 2023-11-25: Kept an eye out for any issues with the second skin, or with reactions to the ink, and absolutely nothing. A bunch of ink wept out of it after a few days, which looked pretty grotty, but it survived showering and everything and I took it off on day 7 as scheduled. Fuck me, taking it off hurt worse than the tattoo machine!
I washed it daily, and after day 8 started using a very, very small amount of pawpaw ointment on it, and it’s healed up fine. Minor itchiness from the hair growing back.
Now to think about what I wanna do next! I’m actually leaning towards starting on my arms instead of moving on to fixing up the others, but we’ll see.
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