Compared to last blog’s bumper crop of photos, today I’m only showing you two pieces I’ve been working on.
One of my customers from the last two days doesn’t want her tattoo to be shared on the internet as it’s a personal voyage, this is of course a choice i completely accept. She is warming to the idea of maybe sharing a small section of it with everyone, but this is up to her and I’m not pushing for it.#
The other piece that I did that I didn’t photograph is the ongoing blackwork on Bill’s leg. We did another section of what will be his completely black knee, as this is a pretty slow process, done in short session, I’ve decided to wait a bit to show you an update.
I started a koi and flowers sleeve/ half sleeve/ three quarters sleeve on Bryan.
Bryan already has a full sleeve by me on his other arm, so I was surprised to see in the booking that he was now wanting the other side to ‘just below the elbow’. I asked him why this side was to be shorter than the other, as it turns out there was no specific reason, except that Bryan was a bit stuck on what else he wanted for the forearm.
I’m going to reveal my bossy side here, but in my experience if a person has one full sleeve, anything but another full sleeve on the other arm is just not going to cut it. Specially if the other side is just a few inches shorter than the full sleeve, it’s not going to take long before the customer is back in to get ‘something added’ to bring it down.
I’ve fallen for this a few times in my days, and ended up having to mix and match and stitch bits of design on to existing pieces, and have found that this approach tends to inhibit a decent flow from happening throughout the design.
The solution to this is to plan big, even if you only want to complete it in sections. Have a game plan for the overall direction you are heading and the overall look you are wanting to achieve, take into consideration that you might want to go for a bigger piece in the long run.
I’m aware that I have lost the odd customer in the consultation stage, who felt i was trying to con them into getting more work than they had planned. This is hopefully balanced by having rescued a few projects that were not thought out properly and may have ended up a cobbled together awkwardness.
In Bryan’s case I had a fair idea where we were going, as we had already completed his other arm, and the tone has been set so to speak.
I kept the new koi design to above the elbow, with just the tail flowing down a bit, leaving myself a nice bit of space for the next section to slot into, and I’ve got an idea for the flow and shape of the rest of the sleeve.
Charly’s sleeve is a completely different beastie, here i was provided with over 150 images of potential ingredients for his sleeve, the exercise here was to select the ones I felt worked 😆
Having said that, the same general rule applied here, and we constructed a general framework (the tree/ day into night) for the whole sleeve and flow of the piece before we even started to decide on the detailing. Now we are working our way up from the bottom, colouring in the outlines we did first.
Another couple of things I wanted to mention today…
We will be asking you to provide two means of contacting you if you have an appointment with us- phone number and email address. Sometimes something happens and we need to contact you about your appointment (specially if when booked months in advance) and we also like to contact you to confirm you appointment a few days before, so having up to date contact details is important.
If we are unable to confirm your appointment in advance, it may be on a shaky nail- so please let us have up to date contact details to avoid anxiety, tears and tantrums- mostly ours!
Another thing is our tribe Mafia- keeping it in the family! We are in the process of putting up notice boards in Tribe 1 and 2; if you are a Tribe customer and you have a business, offer a service or put on events, etc, give us your business card/ flyers…we will put it on the board!
By the same token, if you are looking for a service/ product/event/etc, check out the boards, you might find a like minded person who has just what you need.
I would love to see this work, so bring in you business cards on your next visit and become part of the mafia
😀
morag sangster 
