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Shark slam back of neck this morning. Shithouse picture, and this is not complete. We need to back fill to tie in, dark water, blood pool and a little between the top fins, but anyway, here's the start.

Background complete. Did arm pit, lower back, butt, and touch ups on random spots. I prefer working one area after this session lol. Next session is stripes then color starts. It's so far from done but I couldn't be happier with the way it's coming out.

I'm posting my updated legs today. I've added a few since my last post in this thread. Visible tattoos: Cat, hot air balloon, hand of glory = Chad Koeplinger Skull with flowers = Bastien Jean Higgs flash, boxer, RCAF skull, Grimm reaper = Tim Pausinger Cowgirl, Higgs flash = Glennie Whittall Panther w/ dagger, bulldog, pineapple, Scorpion = Franz Stefanik Ankle band, Hot Stuff = Nathan Draper Dollar bill, fly = Kyle Hollingdrake Space torch = Mario Desa I think that's all of them. I've got a few more lined up that should appear in the next few weeks and months.

My latest was so much fun I had to write my first LST blog post about it.

Oh how my leg has changed in just a few short months. I think my next move will be to cap my other knee. Then I need to work on the back sides. I'm too front-heavy. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Don't over analyse the line work. Don't worry about the compass. Go with your tattooers recommendation using subtle colours. Don't look for any flaws, and especially raise any going by the line work. Kick back, cruise with it, enjoy the process, put trust in the tattooer and just say...yeah man, subtle colours sound the go, whatever you think will work best. Slam it in and make it solid. Take a couple of beers along for your next session too. One for you, one for them before you get underway. Looking forward to seeing the final touch. Good luck.

Got this one today from Bastien Jean at The Okey Doke in Toronto: - - - Updated - - - Got this one today from Bastien Jean at The Okey Doke in Toronto:

Quick appearance on the beach. Still a lot left to do and layers to add, but it's coming together. Back in the saddle on Friday. Dude asked me, "Please don't tell me you did that all in one sitting." :rolleyes:

I especially loved the cat photo-bomb! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I am LOVING everything Tony Nilsson is putting out at the moment, He is the front runner for doing my chest eagle... also a parrakeet(?) for good measure

I'm with you on that one - floating fish stickers! Looks cool - like the placement. Looking forward to the finished product!

+1 on love handles. holy fucking shit that hurt. started my back piece with kahlil rintye yesterday. about five hours of line work on a rad Nue he drew up for me. pretty much every part of the back sucks but it was very tolerable. when he got to my love handles, all i could do was hold my breath and clench every muscle in my body until he was done with that particle line. ass cheeks weren't too bad, but it did feel like there was shot of electricity going straight into my cornhole at times.

Everything can be fixed with a panther!

Not sure this qualifies as a "full" back piece, but here it is anyway. This is after my 3rd session with Chad Koeplinger and I'm pretty thrilled with it. I don't particularly enjoy sitting with Chad for super long sessions, or at least I don't think i'm capable to sit for very long sessions with him. With that factored in, he thinks we have about 3 more to go. Happy to break it up in small sessions, as that is more opportunities to spend time with Chad. I love that guy. some insanely stunning pieces on this thread. Rob

My never-ending front piece by Tomo...

I feel like LST is the perfect place to get this started, so here goes. It looks like I'm going to put together a fundraiser in early December for the Wounded Knee School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I've been talking with Chris who runs the Friends of Pine Ridge website and I've talked to Principal Alice Phelps from the school who is totally behind the idea. Some of you may know about the levels of poverty, unemployment, and suicide, some of you may not. Some of you may remember the name being associated with Russell Means and the American Indian Movement in the 60s and 70s. Some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. What I don't want to do is get on a soapbox and go on a tirade about our government's systematic failure and attempt at extermination (woops, just did it), but instead I just want to get these kids fed. The Wounded Knee School needs help. All of the students qualify for free meals in school but the problem is when they get home. Principal Phelps has made arrangements with Feeding America in Rapid City to come out once a month and do a food distribution for all of the families but the need is more than they can fill. Because there is only a single convenience store on the reservation and the nearest grocery store is 60 miles away in Rapid City, Alice has started a food pantry that she operates out of the school. That's what we're looking to fill. My good friend Dave Wallin has agreed to use his shop, Eight of Swords Tattoo, here in Williamsburg for the event. You might remember the name from last year's Ladies! Ladies! art show, or other shows and events he's had there before. We're still in the early planning stages, still trying to lock down a date and a timeline, but I wanted to post this up here first to start to get the word out. I've reached out to a couple people initially to sort of gauge interest and everyone seems eager to help. The idea is pretty simple: get a bunch of rad tattoo artists to donate pieces, do a silent auction, and then send that money to pack the food pantry at the school. We're looking at early December, possibly the first Friday or Saturday. I haven't even sent out real emails or made phone calls yet but I'm meeting with Dave on Monday to iron out some of the details. So expect me to bother everyone even more! Feel free to pass along the info. to anyone that might be interested and in the meantime, I'll try not to fuck this up. Also, MSNBC did a pretty decent three-part article on Pine Ridge a few months ago. Worth a read: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/failing-americas-most-forgotten-children Thanks everyone!

Thats what I'm wondering as well. The oldest one I found was a couple years old and still looked ok, but im guessing 10, 20, 30 years in it may start to fade to black as the color fades. Then its just time for a new layer! Its like a tattoo dry erase board!!

@Graeme. I got that cold pack back of neck as we speak. Mate, this is so fkn awesome. I was dreading the burned out headache. Not even. Soothing as fuck. [emoji106]

Panther or perhaps Japanese wind bars or clouds. The dark solid style. I'm thinking Horitoshi family style of dark. A different condition, but I have a long scar running up my forearm. While never meant to be a cover up, a wind bar goes right over it. No one ever notices it now. Of course since you like the tattoo, you could chalk it up to lessons learned, and as @CABS says, put random other things around it too. It may not be so glaring in the future. Unrelated but regarding blacked out stuff. Is it just me or has anyone noticed more people with blacked out work beginning to get designs tattooed over it with white ink. Pretty crazy.

@SeeSea - lookin' good!!!!!

Solid as fuck. [emoji106]

This is pretty rad. I would have such a hard time finding more people that would be down to get back pieces with me. I have a hard time finding people that want to just get regular one shot bro tattoos, let alone full on back pieces.

@Rob I that qualifies as "full" to me! There's so much power there, Chad's tattoos are so fucking strong. I need to get tattooed by Chad again because the couple of hours I spent with him wasn't nearly enough. He's such a fun guy to get tattooed by.

Me mate just returned from 12 months in Canada. Home for a week, back on a Road King, today was catch up belting through the hills, across to the Coast, smashing fuck out of gears, riding hard,tight side by side. Yeah, still buzzing.

Vybz Kartel did a really rad song with Missy Elliott and M.I.A.

HA! You found a loophole.

I'm a Leonard Peltier supporter. Very cool @gougetheeyes Thanks for sharing.

yeah I suck at this. check my gallery

I had one of the best tattoo experiences today and officially crossed the line into weird territory with this by Mando Rascon today. Immaculate tattoo is definitely the best shop I've been in so far and Mando is honestly the best dude I've met, after the tattoo they shouted me lunch and he took me on a tour around Mesa and Tempe and then drove me all the way home to my hostel!!. what a dude.

Third session on my back today, with my friend Iain Mullen. Rudy Fritsch does the next one at the London Convention, mid day on the 27:th. Come say hello.

My peony I got from Glennie at the Pearl Harbor Gift Shop yesterday. It is really fn hard to take a picture of the back of your arm. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here's my Valerie eagle

Too excited about how cool this looks to not share it. Please excuse the redness and peeling. This was the progress from my second session with Henning. About 11.5 hours total now. One more short session needed to color the tiger and the last few leaves.

I love that, @cookietruck. So rad that you got an Irons design from Bob, too. I got this from Ben Grillo yesterday: He applied it with a single needle and a shoehorn. The photo does it no justice; this is far and away my most detailed tattoo. I can wait to see it healed.

wow - very nice

Trophy Tattoo (Hamilton, ont) is having their grand opening on the 21st and will be doing walk-ins all day. Super happy to have excellent tattooers more accessible to me, and so I'm going to celebrate by heading on down there to get a blue bird and love letter hopefully by Handsome Mike. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Session two on my back. Mercifully we stuck to lining and shading the background on my upper back. Next time I think we're hitting the lower back, ass, and thighs, which I'm sure is going to be a lot of fun. Can't wait.

Bethenny, if you really want your back done then do it. We all might whinge about how bad a backpiece can be while getting but i promise that all who have finished a backpiece would do it again. I myself am about 1/2 way through mine and although it sucks getting the work and healing it the satisfaction of seeing perhaps the biggest piece of art you can do on your body is awesome. I dont look forward to my fortnightly sessions but once they are done I cannot wait to get home and see the progress. The end result is well and truely worth it. Btw @Cork love the work, great detail and colours. I wish I was that far advanced with mine. - - - Updated - - - This fortnights update. Most of work was done on right side arse cheek and thigh but shows how he merged the original 3/4 sleeve into the backpiece.

My poor butt! You can see the beads of blood already forming on the lotus on the left side. Butt is finished. Not much left! I swear this towel was clean before we started. And I got to add a new color to my stained fundoshi. Purple!

signature line

Slightly off-topic, but is "bikie" actually strine slang for "biker"? Because that is adorable. Also, I'm with @Mick Weder when it comes to hands and neck tattoos. Not to sound like an old guy (too late!), but there used to be rules to this shit.

I agree with @Mick Weder and @SeeSea here and with regard to copyright, looking at pictures of Jun Cha's tattoos it looks like a lot of them draw on reference from Renaissance sculpture. Of course there's interpretation there, composing it to work as a tattoo, actually tattooing it, etc., but regardless it isn't like his tattoos spring purely from his imagination. When contracts and the possibility of lawyers is involved, it isn't really tattooing anymore to me.

QUOTE]rather than some bikie who couldn't give two fucks about the tattoo's just wants to collect his $$$ This, my friend... is a very bold statement. Some of the most honourable men I know may meet this judgemental opinion. I wouldn't walk into an art gallery if you paid me. It would bore me to tears. It appears very apparent that tattooing for you & I hold two completely different cultural origins. And with that, for respect to this forum, I shall leave this at that. Enjoy your art collection champ.

Credit should go where credit is due, this idea actually came from @BrianH Anyway, here's my legs, or the start of them anyway. You can't actually see most of what I have on them. The panther rose was done by Chad Koeplinger, the ship is by Ron Henry Wells, you can see a bit of a swallow done by Bert (I don't know his last name but he goes as "Bert Monster") who worked at Tattoomania in Montreal when I got that tattoo, but now works out of a private studio, I believe. You can also see tiny bits of a rose and a snake done by Tony D'Annessa, and a tiger-faced hannya done by Danny at Tatouage Artistique. More towards the back of my right leg, and totally out of view is a piece of Doc Forbes flash done by Chris Hold who tattoos at Sacred Heart in Vancouver. Not everything on them goes together, but I like my legs because it's been a lot of fun getting those tattoos. I'm waiting to hear on some time off I requested from work to go to Barcelona, so hopefully I'll manage to add something else to my legs from El Monga or another one of those Aloha guys in July.

I survived! We got no where near the amount done I thought we would, but it's amazing what did get done. I have to keep my bandage on for a while longer, but I'll snap pics after that. Here's a preview...