49531

awesome stuff from Robert Ryan @ Electric in Asbury
good times good times

just passing through. thanks for looking





second one down is part of a split set in progress with my mentor curtis. apparently this weeks colours are silver grey and salmon pink

just passing through. thanks for looking





second one down is part of a split set in progress with my mentor curtis. apparently this weeks colours are silver grey and salmon pink

just passing through. thanks for looking





second one down is part of a split set in progress with my mentor curtis. apparently this weeks colours are silver grey and salmon pink

just passing through. thanks for looking





second one down is part of a split set in progress with my mentor curtis. apparently this weeks colours are silver grey and salmon pink

Wish I were nearby. Great stuff.

love your stuff @49351! been following you since tumblr. I cannot wait to be tattooed by you one day! Lemme know if you're ever on the west coast of the usa.

Got this done by Chad Koeplinger today!

piss poor excuse for a picture of the actual tattoo, I'll get you guys a better one when it's healed and not completely crusty.

Freddy Corbin, Temple Tattoo Oakland

meh ok here is a pic :)
from the amazing Steve Boltz
totally good time talking mostly golf
turns out Steve is an avid golfer and pretty good
I'm neither but I love stogies and beer with friends
and lets face it - thats more important than a decent backswing ;)
anyway - funky fish on my bicep...

For me when i was first getting into this industry it was Dave Fox who always made me drool, everything he did just had this perfect layer of TOUGH over it, with just the right amount of exagerration

I'm probably biased because he's a friend, but man, damn Dave Regan has been making stuff lately that makes me sit back and smile and then kicks me in the rear very hard because I feel so untalented.



Also, Gordon Combs. So good.

Showstoppers for sure.

Finally got to visit State of Grace and get my Molly Monmon Cat from Horitomo!
He did an amazing job. Just spectacular. I sent several pictures of her and some descriptions of her favorite things, her personality and her character. She *loved* shrimp sushi and got an entire order for her 16th birthday, right before we lost her to cancer. Horitomo created a picture of her in heaven with a halo and surrounded by her favorite things - including that she is surrounded by catnip! The face is perfect. I gave him a decent size square footage and told him he could expand beyond the cat and add other elements. Her face is perfect. When he showed me the sketch, my eyes just teared up.
It was neat to be tattooed on the platform in the shop. It is a little sanctuary with neat drawings, books and items on shelves. He is a quiet gentle soul.
I tried tebori for the whites and I probably would not do it again. For many areas, I didn't even feel the first 4-5 pokes. It just felt like a shoving pressure but there was *no* pain. Then the last several shoves were painful. But around my hip was bad all around. I'm glad I did it, though.
Crashing out now holed up in the hotel with mom. <3 <3 <3

little sum sum from Sheila Marcello @ Electric Tattoo in Asbury Park NJ

Got this Shishi Lion from Alix Ge at the London convention yesterday (pic nicked from her instagram):

When I arrived, Alix was still drawing. She told me we couldn't put the tattoo on the side of my thigh like I had asked for because for that I would have to lie down and she only had a chair. Well, alright then. When I came back from a short tour around the convention she had obviously done another drawing which was much bigger than the first. She thought the animal had to be rather large to be nice, good with me. But she didn't think we could fit peonies as well, would I be happy with cherry blossoms instead...? Bummer...what? Noooo...! Oh well, so we agreed to put on the lion stencil and see then. Stencil went on, peonies were added freehand. No problem, all fitted on there nicely....but...that was gonna be a looong session. If I was a strong woman, she asked. Ermmmmm, well, I bl**dy hoped so...what else could I say? She looked at me particularly sceptical after she found out it was only my second tattoo....
Obviously, we made it, yippie!!!
Six hours on a folding chair with two breaks. Even though I got some odd looks and remarks for running around with a pillow under my arm, I was well glad I had brought it because it made the chair way more comfortable! Apart from that, getting tattooed at the convention was actually surprisingly good as there was so much to watch and get distracted by. I could openly stare at all the tattoos walking by and quite a few people gave me encouraging smiles and words. That was really cool.
Alix is super lovely and I kinda felt a little bad for her having to sit on her small suitcase for hours. Towards the end she told me that she wouldn't be able to do what I did and that she'd never get a tattoo that takes more than one hour herself. I doubt that's actually true, but it was a sweet thing to say anyway.
Suffice to say I'm super chuffed but also glad it's over!
And this morning my 3 1/2 year old greeted me excitedly with "Mummy, I have a tattoo, too!". Turns out the entire family has tattoos now, some of them of the temporary type, some rather not ;-)

Tomo's new studio, Silk Needle, continues the Yellow Blaze tradition of being somewhat hard to find without GPS / phone map.
The sign is 'blink and you'll miss it'.
Nagaoka is a morning shinkansen's ride from Tokyo... 1.5 hours. The new studio is super comfy and Tomo seems to be planning a lot of conventions in Europe and Canada soon, he's energised.
We did 5 hours, which finished off my front after (I think) 4 years and about six sessions? All in Japan bar one. My bank account is glad that's done.
Drank some awesome Echigo beer on the way home and zoned out till I ate a restorative giant ramen. I lived on ramen this trip: All kinds! Soya base, extra fatty pork base, fish base... Cheap, tasty and hydrating.
Flying home tomorrow but this morning I had a consult with Shige and, all going well, getting a small piece from him at a convention in Europe in next while.

From Saturday... Bottom of shin/top of foot

Jeff Zuck @ Name Brand
Saturday night, went to see Motorhead for probably the last time. Fun and sad at the same time as Lem seems every bit of his hard lived 69 years of age. I've seen them almost 20 times and this was kind of a teary goodbye for me.......

One more session on this Martin Hildebrandt tribute, by Rich Hardy. Damn did that lower torso session suck.

Kneecap fully healed by Danny Rossiter at Rain City Manchester - Bonus healed monmon cat!

i got my elbow tattooed yesterday by ivan soyars @ old soul tattoo; canonsburg, pa.

My latest from Mike Aul from when I was in Michigan a few weeks ago.

I have a tattoos on my upper arms, and it works just fine! In fact, I've said it before elsewhere (maybe even in this thread, but I'm too lazy to look), but tattooing made me finally feel comfortable in t-shirts. My weight has been terrible the last couple of years, and though I made a lot of headway with my recent training, I'm still overweight. I used to be tiny, so my awareness of my extra weight sticks with me throughout the day. T-shirts used to make that worse. It's very draining to be constantly aware throughout the day of something about yourself that makes you uncomfortable, so I avoided them a lot.
I don't do that anymore, though, because all of my feelings about my arms are positive now. I mean...I'm not guaranteeing that everybody will instantly feel comfortable with themselves after getting a tattoo, but for me personally, it has helped. It was like planting a flag on my own body, or something. Hard to describe.
Tattooing has me appreciating my physique. It's more real estate to put beautiful tattoos on. Haha! :o (This is actually a thing, though. Having more room to work with can mean having even more concepts for tattoos open to you on certain body parts!

Yup. I never really planned how it would all turn out and placement would have been different if I did. When I started I just wanted to be able to get tattooed by my favourite artists (and didn't want to go below the elbow) I do plan getting some backgrounds added though.


Sorry for the crappy picture quality.

To be honest, I like your tattoos more than I like that Cripwell body suit. Your arms are fantastic, there are so many good pieces on them from great artists, everything sits really well, the stars and dots filler is great, and they're these perfect traditional arms that don't feel forced or overly deliberate. Maybe part of it is because I've seen your arms mainly through spending time with you instead of seeing pictures of them on the Internet, but I feel that I get a sense of you from them.
I guess it all comes down to different ways of getting tattooed and people wanting different thing out of tattoos. For me, how I get tattooed has been this fairly gradual process of learning through experience. What I wanted before I first got tattooed is very different than what I want now both in terms of extent of coverage, and what styles and designs I want, and I think that while this inevitably means that I'm going to reach a point where I'll wish that I did things differently, left more spaces open, got fewer little things until I'd gotten more large pieces down, or the thousand other ways I might have done things if only I had the knowledge or foresight, I think there's something cool about tattoos being this record of a process of learning and understanding, even if the results are sometimes less than something that looks incredible in a photo. Japanese tattooing aside, I guess I don't really understand the motivation of somebody who goes from no tattoos to a deliberately planned out (and kind of anachronistic) bodysuit, it almost seems like a fashion statement.
Anyway, different strokes and all.

Alright folks, here ya go