tattoos from august in seattle!
sketches
in progress
sketches
side one
side two
life finds a way
Some more time in Eugene at HP!
- In you,
face healed, background fresh.
I didn’t do the yellow or the running dude, just the landscape and elbow.
healed, 3/4 sleeve from years ago. saw her today!
peacock healed, background fresh.
amber wearing her new amber ear weights. (I love her!)
the trouble with white.
in the process of setting up for a white ink tattoo.
White ink on the hands.
Plenty of tattooers won’t even do this. For good reason, too! White ink does not heal white. It heals slightly lighter than the skin tone, and often unevenly. It ends up looking a bit like a pale scar, nearly invisible.
Most tattoo artists who will do tattoos in white-ink-only, will not guarantee it, do a free touchup, after it heals. It’s acknowledged that it will not look right when it heals. There’s a very, very rare person for whom it heals and looks ok- but that person is truly rare. I’ve only ever met one, in 16 years of using white alone in tattoos.
All that said, I will do white-ink-only tattoos. And I’ll even do one free touchup, just like with any other tattoo. BUT, I try to make it really clear that it’ll never heal just right, never look perfect. That it’s going to fade into a pale hint of a tattoo, like a scar. Barely there, and that this is likely to happen unevenly, too.
Here are two matching tattoos, freshly tattooed with white-ink-only.
floral piece in progress
work in progress. This is our second sitting on these flowers! And no, I didn’t do the sharknado, sadly enough.
paper planes, baobabs, and poppy dreams.
healed.
detail
SO. MUCH. FUN.
fun stuff!
a repair, and a sun.
repair- during process, and after.
black and grey and white
on any given tuesday
Sometimes I like the small, simple tattoos the best.
I also did some more painting today.
Now I’m off for a week- I’ll be posting a few articles and some art, too.
tattooing on darker, or uneven, skin tones
I’ve been tattooing for a long time and I’ve worked on every conceivable shade of human skin. I’ve noticed that the most important thing isn’t usually how dark or light someone is (although that matters when you discuss tonal value and contrast) but the hue of a person, the underlying warmth or coolness of their skin.
Skin color is created by melanin, a pigment found in the upper layer of the epidermis. Tattoos lie beneath this layer, in the area between the epidermis and dermis. This placement of the ink prevents it from being shed with dead cells, by the top layer, and by being dispersed into the capillaries, in the bottom layer.
Since the ink itself lies beneath the epidermal melanin, looking at a tattoo is like looking through a tinted window. Except for albinos, everyone on earth has melanin in this skin layer. Some will have a ruddy skin tone, some a cold tone to their skin. Some will be dark, some light. Some freckled, and some smoothly pigmented.
healed palette test
Taking all of this into account when designing a tattoo is important. Tattoo ink is not opaque, but translucent, so you see through one tinted window, then through the ink itself. More than one factor has to be taken into account to make a great tattoo on uneven or darker skin tones.
