Graeme

Here are a couple of threads about this: http://www.lastsparrowtattoo.com/forum/tattoo-advice/6370-tradjapometric-another-mixing-tattoo-styles-thread.html#post110467 http://www.lastsparrowtattoo.com/forum/tattoo-advice/6329-considering-mixing-black-out-japanese.htmlY

Come on man, spend a little time lurking here before posting. This isn't the place for what you want.

I got my calf tattooed last summer while I was on holiday and I was totally fine and still walked a lot. The biggest problem with it was that it was July in Barcelona and so I had to wear pants instead of shorts so it got a little warm but I had no problems at all with healing or mobility.

Read the forum rules. We don't talk equipment or technique here.

I got a bunch of little tattoos on my legs before I got some larger pieces and while I love my tattoos and the process of getting them, I kinda wish that I'd done it the other way around and started with the big pieces and worked smaller fillers around them. Oh well, that's tattoos.

Welcome Brittany! I think both of those are good ideas. For placement for the anchor I think your ribs would be better than your thigh for the simple reason that thighs are a nice, big space and if you decide to get more tattoos later on, it's better to keep these big spaces for large tattoos. Ribs hurt, yes, but the pain is by no means unbearable and complaining later about how much it hurt is part of the process. Have you thought of an artist yet?

Welcome! Who is going to be doing your tattoo?

If by "agreeing" you mean "getting paid a lot of money for" then sure.

Welcome Ryan! Now let's see that Valerie Vargas tattoo!

If you still have the Greg Irons book available in probably two or three months when I'm done my backpiece and have money to spare I am certainly interested, but I imagine you'll find a buyer well before then.

I have been tattooed by a lot of different people and so the only thing I'll say with any certainty about tattoos is that everybody works differently. I will also say that the only time I've seen a drawing in advance was with my backpiece, and I know that plenty of my tattoos were drawn the night before or the day of, some right there on the spot, because that's how those artists work. I have great tattoos. If he's going to draw for you on your appointment day, I am guessing that's how he normally structures his work flow and that all the tattoos you've seen by him that you've loved and made you want to get tattooed by this guy were done in the same way. As long as you trust the guy and you feel like you "clicked" I wouldn't worry about it at all.

Flyrite is a block or so away from Saved in W'Burg. Both are excellent shops. There's also Three Kings, Daredevil, Fun City, Invisible, Smith Street, Greenpoint, Bound for Glory, North Star, too many to name really. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that NYC is one of the best cities in the world for tattoos at the moment. For watercolor tattoos I agree with @bongsau but if you want to spend way too much money on a tattoo that is going to fall apart really quickly, you have Amanda Wachob and Gene Coffey, and probably others who are also "good" but really you should read this thread before you think about something like that. Welcome!

I only know his tattoos from Instagram which doesn't count for much but Johan Svahn in Malmo looks good.

Because people bring attention to them?

Welcome! I haven't been to Hobo's but Congress Street is such a great shop. I think you'll fit in well here.

Welcome Danielle! Really nice tattoos, who did them?

Dude, you want a Fujin/Raijin tattoo, which totally rules.

Halo is a good bet. I haven't been tattooed there personally but DJ Rose worked the Rochester convention when I was there a couple of years ago and he does really nice looking tattoos. I know there's at least one poster here who is a big Rick Lohm fan. You'll get a nice tattoo from Halo.

Actually, what about looking to Thomas Woodruff for inspiration here? I don't know why I didn't think of him earlier, but there are some of his paintings in the Art From The Heart Tattootime and he does these really great, refined oil paintings of traditional tattoo themes and imagery and while they don't look like tattoos they get the feel of them right. I could see those working well for you.

I like the idea a lot. Are you planning on having the tattoos stand alone or will you have some background tying them together? For designs, I'd suggest looking in books. There are so many good ones out there: the Sailor Jerry books, that Zeis book (the Scott Harrison page in there is something else), the Flash From the Bowery book, the Dietzel and Burchett books, Flash From the Past/Revisited...there's so much out there. Lucky's Tattoo Museum has a bunch of flash you can look at online to give you inspiration. There's so much neat stuff out there and there's probably a lot more variety and diversity in classic flash than most of us imagine. I think the biggest challenge with this idea would be doing traditional tattoos in a realistic style while still keeping the feel of traditional tattoos. If that's what you're going for. There's a bit in that Brian Bruno and Mike Rennie interview that really sticks out where Brian is talking about advice that Ed Hardy gave him about drawing: if you're drawing a tiger, you don't want to replicate a photo of it, you want to draw it how it makes you feel. I think that idea basically encapsulates one of the main differences between realism and traditional (loosely defined here) tattoos, and I wonder how bridging the gap between the two will work. Sometimes the most exciting things that happen in tattoos come from pushing boundaries and trying things to see how they'll work, so yeah, I love the idea.

Tattoos hurt. Some spots are worse than others, sure, but they're all going to hurt. The good thing is that as much as it might suck in the moment, tattoo pain is bearable and chances are if you grit your teeth, focus your mind, and breathe deeply, you'll be able to get through even the worst of it. The point I'm trying to make here is don't let your perceptions of how much it's going to hurt influence where you get tattooed. Get it in the spot where it's going to look best.

@Shaggy I completely agree with you. I can't speak for anybody else here, but I spend way too much time tapping away at this damned phone and one of the things I really enjoy about tattoo time is that it's me, the artist, the machine buzzing away, some good conversation, stories shared, laughs had, and all that. I will admit that during my ass/back of thighs lining session that I played dumb phone games to distract me because breathing and trying to focus mentally wasn't quite cutting it, but I felt pretty ridiculous doing that. Your back looks fantastic, by the way.

Like @exume said above, neither of those pictures you posted initially look like an ocean to me. I can see how they're supposed to represent an ocean, but they could equally be a desert, some kind of topographical map, a visual representation of radio pulses, probably many other things. That kind of abstraction and ambiguity is maybe fine for some things, I don't personally believe that it belongs in tattoos, but if you want something that is clearly and unmistakably an ocean, those ideas won't work. The thing about tattoos is that they tend to look a certain way for a reason. I'm not saying that you need to go out and get Western traditional or Japanese tattoos if those kinds of tattoos don't fundamentally move you and get you excited, but there are very fundamental design principles in those kinds of tattoos (and in other kinds as well, but we don't tend to talk that much about, say, tribal or black and grey here) that should be respected if you want a tattoo that is going to last. A couple that are relevant here is that 1) lines will thicken over time so if you have a lot of dense linework like in the reference images above chances are that they're going to bleed together over the course of your life; 2) the nature of skin is that it is going to age, your muscles will slacken, your skin will sag, etc., etc., and this is all going to impact how your tattoo will look. A well-designed tattoo is going to be drawn and placed in a way that will, to an extent, take this into account. I am not convinced that a design based only on very precise linework is going to age well. Stubbornness is your enemy when it comes to tattoos. We all get the tattoos we deserve.

If you think that a handful of people giving you a hard time on the Internet is the most adversity you're going to deal with now that you have a neck tattoo then...well...you probably shouldn't have tattooed your neck. YOLO, bro.

I still remember when this forum was devoted to promoting good tattooing.