21stNow

me too - wondering if anyone getting in on 4/13? be fun to meet an LSTer

What time is your tattoo? My job is about 10-15 minutes away, so I could meet you even if I don't get a tattoo!

I have a different take on this. First, it's a free country and you can do whatever you feel comfortable with in regards to this.

My experience with getting tattooed at a convention is that I didn't really care for the children staring at me while I was getting a naked pinup tattoo on the inside of my thigh. Couple that with the weird positions that the male artist had to get into to do the tattoo on me (female) and it was just weird. I know that no one was doing anything wrong but I wouldn't choose to have children watching while a man is working between my legs.

Hindsight is 20/20; I won't choose a tattoo with adult subject matter or in an intimate place if I ever get a tattoo at a convention again.

I just booked an appointment in March with Darnell Waine in Dallas for a back tattoo. It'll be a geisha-influenced portrait tattoo.

I admit that's one of the other things I worry about. I was told I can only see the design when I get there, which is... worrying. Really easy for me to get there and go "what the heck is this."

Okay, let's be honest, I have a lot of things I'm worrying about with this.

I suggest not to worry and just be prepared for either outcome. You could arrive and it turns out better than you expected or not at all what you expected. Don't be afraid to walk away; it's happened before and will happen again.

Most artists have some level of flexibility with the design so if there are minor changes that will make the tattoo better for you, it shouldn't be a problem to work those in to the drawing before the stencil is made. Be willing to talk (and listen!) to the artist about what you do and don't like about the design. Take some time; don't just go with your initial impression of the drawing, both good and bad.

I won't comment directly on the price of the tattoo. I will say that Bethesda is one of the most expensive places in Maryland for anything, from renting an apartment to parking a car.

@sora777 I'm not familiar with Dermalize, so I can't comment on how similar it is to Saniderm.

@LizBee You're welcome! Saniderm isn't stretchy or very flexible when you first apply it, but after it has been on and absorbed body heat, it is much more flexible. It did seem stretchy when I removed it in the shower.

To finish my review of Saniderm, I'm at 2.5 weeks from the tattoo and am completely healed now. I had minor peeling from the day that I removed the Saniderm until about the two week mark. I also had a lot more itching than I normally do, since I started using Hustle Butter. At two weeks, I was almost completely healed. The only thing that I noticed at that point was that my skin still felt a bit tender. I would say that the healing time was cut down by a week from my normal healing time.

What was unusual for me, both from my prior healing experiences with other methods and from what I have read in this thread, is that I did have scabs with this tattoo. I have never had scabs in a tattoo before. I did talk to my artist about it and we both thought that the scabs formed because the area bends and flexes (the area between my chest and shoulders). I don't have any other tattoos on areas that bend like this. Also, the scabs weren't bad and healed with no problems. Finally, the rash went away in about five days.

I still plan to try Tegaderm next time, but am open to using Saniderm again.

my birthday is on october 13th(I was born on a Tuesday)but I have been thinking lately I should get a 13 tattoo of some kind,maybe a "Lucky 13",etc,etc not sure right now.

I was another not-Friday-but-on-the-13th baby! I've thought about a Lucky 13 tattoo, but I don't think that I want to give the superstition any more attention than it already gets. I may change my mind on this soon, though.

I have em..kicks in after 20 minutes or so then about an hr in gets progressively worse with 4 hrs being about my max:(. On the note of the thread I've had my inner bicep inside elbow and all done and was ok but upper shoulder collar bone area and my back behind my shoulder hurt like hell..felt like he was tattooing inside my ear!

Aww, I want the backs of my shoulders tattooed. It's not good to hear that those are some of the most painful places!

I just did a partial chest tattoo and can agree that the sternum area is a hard one. I rank it as second worst behind lower back and slightly ahead of inner thigh. The pain on the sternum is compounded by the pressure from the artist making it hard to breathe while the artist is actually tattooing.

yep ! and we love endorphins !!!!!

I must be one of those rare people without endorphins. If anything, it gets more painful as the tattoo goes along for me.

I wanted to share my experience with using Saniderm (8"x11 yd. roll) while healing the tattoo shown above.

I got the tattoo on Saturday, finishing up on Saturday evening. The artist cleaned the area and applied the Saniderm at the shop. We used a piece on each shoulder, a piece in the middle and one piece on each side to connect the shoulder and middle areas. There were also cuts made to accommodate the curves of the skin in the middle of my chest. I left this bandage until Sunday evening (a little over 24 hours). There was some ink leakage. I immediately noticed that I barely felt any pain on Saturday night. Normally, I am sore in the tattooed area for about 30-36 hours after it is finished. I removed the first bandage in the shower. It was full of ink and came off as easier than I expected under warm running water.

I placed the second bandage on after I got out of the shower and patted the tattoo dry. I didn't use any ointments or moisturizers. Monday, I felt great. Tuesday, I started to notice a smell (like the beginning of mildew growth) and also started to itch under the bandage. Wednesday, I tried to take extra care to pat the bandage dry once I got out of the shower. The scent was still there, but not quite as strong as the day before. The itching was getting worse, however. Thursday morning, I removed the bandage in the shower under running water. This hurt a bit more than the Sunday removal hurt, but it wasn't a high level of pain. There had been a small amount of ink leakage just about every day for the second bandage.

I went on to use Hustle Butter three times on Thursday. I noticed around five small areas of peeling, but that was it. I feel some raised/somewhat hard areas in the outline of the flowers on my shoulders, but this is in line with what I normally feel on healing tattoos except when using normal methods, the raised areas are throughout the majority of the tattoo. I haven't had the flaking that I normally have during healing, so I think that I have skipped that stage. I have also noticed a rash (several bumps) in the middle of my chest. I hope that this heals soon!

It is Friday now and I am still using Hustle Butter on the tattoo. I normally don't itch when I use Hustle Butter and don't use numbing gel during the tattoo. However, I do have some itching even after I removed the bandage and started the Hustle Butter routine.

Overall, my pros would be that there was much less pain after the tattoo was over (big pro), I didn't have to tend to the tattoo throughout the first four days, and I didn't have to worry about ink stains on clothes. The cons would be the smell, the itch, the rash and how hard it is to get the edges to stay down on areas that bend or curve.

I plan to try Tegaderm next time. I have the 4"x4" sheets of this already. Depending on how the rash heals, I may try Saniderm again if I don't see much of a difference between Tegaderm and Saniderm. Even with the cons, so far I think that this is better than what I was doing before.

Greetings from Maryland and welcome to LST!

Typically the slang terms are coined by those who aren't tattooed in order to somehow make themselves feel better (superior?).

And from game show hosts like Ladyface Navarro...

The latest is "Under boob". It's called the sternum, idiot.

So my thigh tattoo is "under sack"?

I'm getting too old for this shit...

What if it extends all the way across the lower bra line? Would you not consider that "under boob"? I get that the phrase sounds kooky though.

Scott Marshall (season 4 winner), rest in peace. :(

Apparently, he was feeling bad at his studio and called his wife to say he was going to crash at the local hotel. He died in his sleep.

This was sad. My thoughts are with his family now.

http://www.lastsparrowtattoo.com/forum/tattoo-after-care/4795-tegaderm-saniderm-tatuderm-healing-process.html

Thanks for posting the link. It seems that people who use these products are doing it to have less scabbing. I don't scab with my tattoos as it is. Would the Tegaderm product still be advisable for me? It doesn't seem like it would cause someone who doesn't scab to start scabbing, but I don't know.

TEGADERM

For those of you who use Tegaderm, do you apply it after you get home (after removing the artist's bandage) or does your artist apply it when he/she finishes the tattoo?

the only thing I can think of is to keep it out of the sun, FOREVER ! either with clothing or sunblock.

Thanks. Most of my tattoos are hidden well by clothes, so I haven't had the sun concern for those. I use a wristband for my wrist tattoo even for driving or short walks to lunch.

With one exception, I haven't had color come out of my tattoos during the healing process. I was wondering if there were any truth to claims by some tattoo ointment companies (Tattoo Goo being one of them) that the colors would stay vibrant longer after using their products. I haven't used Tattoo Goo specifically because it has artificial color in it.

I don't have large complaints about the way that the color appears after my tattoos heal. Most colors outside of red are not going to show that well on my dark complexion. I just wanted to find out if there were any after care methods that can preserve color more than others.

Is there anything that can be done differently during healing to preserve the color in a tattoo? I know that there are products that claim to preserve color, but I'm wondering if there is anything special that can be done that really works. I would think that you would just want the healing process to be as normal as possible and to not have scabs that could come off and let the ink out of your skin. I wanted to see if I was missing anything and am looking for thoughts and opinions in this thread.

I liked episode 13 because it showed some of the challenges in tattooing dark skin. It was still kind of disappointing because in just over 40 minutes, there wasn't a lot of discussion as to what should be done differently before a design, size, color and placement is chosen because the skin is dark as opposed to the choices that would be made with lighter skin.

As a person with dark skin that likes tattoos, it is hard to find information on design choices that would work better for dark skin. There is one blog that I have found that is dedicated to getting information out about what to look for. However, the blog's advice tends to be "find an artist that is used to tattooing dark skin". That doesn't go far enough. I live in an area that has a high concentration of black people. For the most part, any tattoo shop that is in the city or inner suburbs has a high number of customers that have dark skin. However, practice doesn't always make perfect. Just because a shop has tattooed customers with dark skin for 10 years doesn't mean that they are "good" at it.

The nature of the art of tattooing has a lot of secrecy in it. I can respect that, but it can reduce the amount of information that is available to the client to make an informed decision. We have to trust the artists that we do find that have experience with tattooing darker skin. That smaller number of artists limits our choices in the first place; we, as customers, don't know if the information and suggestions that we are receiving are good or not.

The other facet of the tattoo industry that hinders us is that portfolio pictures are usually taken as soon as the tattoo is done. This really doesn't help dark-skinned clients in the search for a good tattoo artist for two reasons. One is that even with artists that have a high number of dark-skinned clients, the portfolio pictures tend to skew more toward the clients with lighter skin tones. The second is that tattoos look different once they are healed. This difference is even more pronounced on clients with dark skin.

I meet many dark-skinned people with tattoos and get a chance to ask questions. However, it leaves me with more questions than I started with! I see designs that I wouldn't have been interested in in the first place. There are other factors that I find that would be different between what I would choose and what the person that I talk to chose. If I went by what I saw in the general public, I probably would have never gotten a tattoo.

I would like to see more discussion on tattooing dark skin in the industry in general. It seems like people are scared to talk about it because they may be perceived as being racist. However, the difference is real and should be discussed.

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To bring my long-winded discussion back around to this episode of Ink Master, I thought that Kruseman was unfairly criticized for keeping it simple with his tattoo. It is often recommended to keep tattoos simple on dark skin and I thought that Kruseman's tattoo showed up the best now and probably will in the future. I get that people don't think that guys want rose tattoos, but that is a myth that is proven wrong on a daily basis.

Chris' portrait tattoo also looked like it would hold up pretty well. While I agreed with the judges that the mouth was different from the photo and that the hands weren't great, I thought that those were minor details that didn't affect the overall tattoo and how it shows up now and will show up in the future.

Matt's tattoo was one that I thought that should not have been done on a client with dark skin. The eagle was too dark, detailed and cramped in the body in order to be able to discern what you are looking at if you see this tattoo from a distance. This showed the challenge that even if the tattoo is large, it still doesn't need to be as detailed as it would be on a client with lighter skin because the contrast isn't great enough for the eye to see that detail from a distance.

Craig's tattoo actually didn't seem as bad as what the judges made it out to be. The scribbles did distract me, but I thought that the use of gray to get a 3-D effect came out better than I thought that it would. I've seen designs like that that were done with all black that end up looking more like scars or cover-ups rather than tattoos. Visually, I think that Craig's may hold up better over time and if not, was one of the easier designs to touch-up in the future.

I don't know what to say about Duffy's tattoo. I couldn't tell what that was from a distance and would probably struggle if I were up close to it. This tattoo shows why I think the overall concept of a tattoo competition show is a bad idea because there needed to be more consultation with the client. The client initially wanted 5-6 different things. Duffy did talk him down to three things. However, the area where that tattoo was placed still doesn't allow for all of that to fit and show up well. Even just the Detroit skyline would have been difficult to show and contrast in such a relatively small space. I think that Duffy's tattoo would have been better with less black and more gray, but that's just my guess. She had a hard client to work with that just needed more time than what the show allows for.

Tyler's tattoo went the other direction, with too much gray and not enough black. There was too much detail for it to show up well on the client's skin, as well. The white ink probably won't be visible in less than two months, so the accents that we saw today will be gone soon. While I understood the judges' criticism of being unable to discern whether that was a bear or a canine, I could still tell that it was an animal of some sort. This gave his a leg up over Duffy's because I couldn't tell what her design was at all if I hadn't seen the consultation that led up to it.

Overall, I liked the episode because it forced the artists to deal with the challenge of tattooing dark skin. I have seen episodes of this show and other shows that show one or two clients with dark skin that all of the artists try to avoid. This brought the challenge to the forefront as these artists could not avoid dark skin at all.

21stNow is a username that I use on the forums about cell phones that I participate in. I've had a smartphone since 2007, but didn't feel like I had arrived in the 21st century until I got my iPhone 4. I started on the forums then and picked a shortened version of "I'm in the 21st Century now" as my username.

Oh, you know all the nails shops are going to be bombarded with people wanted nail tattoos. My artist has been bombarded with koi fish lately.

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I'm not in love with Chris because I know where he comes from. He co-founded the most egotistic shop in Omaha. Great artists there, but I can't handle the egos.

I don't understand the blow outs he had with he first client and the issue he had with the neck tattoo not taking the ink. I am not an artist. I am a collector. Do artists really come across skin that is untattooable(if that's even a word)? My freckled friend has a few tattoos and her linework always sucks. Kind of broken in to dots. Her artists always blame it in her freckled skin. But then she has never gone to a quality artist for her tattoos.

I have a spot on the top of my left foot that has skin that is thicker or of a different texture from the rest of the skin on my foot. I plan to let my artist know about it whenever I get a foot tattoo. I don't know that it will make a difference, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. That area doesn't absorb lotion in the same way as the skin around it, so it isn't far-fetched to think that ink could go in differently.

What is a blowout?

Blowouts are the hazy ink that show around line work, from my understanding. There are images of blowouts here: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+a+blowout+in+a+tattoo&sa=G&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ved=0CCsQsARqFQoTCNOHvZ24-scCFUYoHgodrA4GBQ

I've gotten one tattoo at a convention. I would say that the cleanliness was in line with what I see in a shop, but I'm not a health inspector so don't quote me! :D

I also agree that you have to consider the atmosphere of the convention. If you don't want a lot of people staring at you while you are getting the tattoo, getting a tattoo at a convention may not be for you. Consider this especially if you are getting an area covered that may be normally covered by clothes, as most artists don't bring privacy screens.

When I got my tattoo, my artist was at the first booth as you entered the convention. There were tons of people who stopped to look at what my artist was creating. I mostly didn't mind being stared at while getting the tattoo. However, it did bother me that children were staring as the tattoo that I got was more "adult" in nature. I didn't expect as many children at the convention, but there was another convention in the same building that attracted a lot of young kids. It seemed like they all came to the tattoo convention after their convention was over.

I finally got my fans!

Think you will see that alot of the apprentices have better tattoos than their masters. I would like to see some different judges though as they are heavily biased toward traditional. The reality as that most magazines and social media accounts servicing cool tattoos have been leaning more toward servicing multiple styles. With the improvement in machines, technique, ink, I think the whole bold will hold is a bit over played. I personally would rather have a highly detail piece that may need to be reworked in 10 years than a simple tattoo lacking detail and looking cartoonish and lacking detail. They look the same in 10-20 years because they never had the detail to begin with. I respect traditional, but other styles not given the same respect, while from a popularity standpoint, has clearly shifted to a broader range of styles.

This is just a theory, but I think that "bold will hold" is becoming more prevalent as more people with dark skin actually get "into" tattoos. I agree with you in that I like detailed designs. However, I have to admit that my best looking tattoo is the one that fits the "bold will hold" mantra well. All of my tattoos are less than one year old, but I'm realizing that I will have to go with bolder, simpler designs so that you can tell what you're looking at when you see my tattoos.