Ducky15568

GAH! It feels like i haven't been on here in forever. Ive been busy with school, my wedding, and of course getting some more tattoos. Since summer started I got a chest piece and have about 6 hours remaining work for my right rib piece.

Hello everyone!
After reading peoples stories about who they are, I thought I should share with you Who I am.
Im not the best at talking about myself, as i find myself to be uninteresting and dumb.
My name is Derek, I am currently 21. I grew up in a small town (pop. around 3000) in Montana. As a kid i had never really seen tattoos or anything like that but when i did they were usually on old military guys, looking back those tattoos were some of the coolest. I loved playing football and snowboarding when I reached high school freshman, but by my sophomore year I had knee problems and had to have surgery on my left knee. After i healed and everything was gravy I started doing sports again, only to have problems in my right knee. Countless doctor visits later I found out i had a tumor in my right knee. summer before junior year is when I got another knee surgery to remove the tumor (it was in my bone) and get a bone graph. Junior year is also when I found out my mother had lung cancer and met the love of my life. So of course I started getting wasted every weekend to push away bad thoughts about cancer and my mom. During my senior year after about a year of Chemotherapy my moms cancer had spread to her liver. The doctor gave her a week to live. Me and my family were there till the end. I had never lost someone close to me before so I didn't know what to do. It was good to have support from my Girlfriend and family. After my brothers and sister left and things were going back to "normal" (like they ever could) my dad passed away 10 weeks after my mom from a heart attack.(enough talking about this stuff.) The summer after graduating high school i got my first tattoo as a memorial for my mother, I wish i had researched it more because im not too happy with how it turned out. I love it but it needs to be better. (ill have it redone with the artist who has done all my work since.) After the summer i moved out of my hometown (too many good memories to stay around and feel sad) to go to college. I will be starting my third year this fall to be a nurse. I just want to help people, on an emotional level as well as physical. Something doctors cant do as well as nurses. Since starting school I have had 24 plus hours of work done in two years. I finally had my chest piece finished, and have a 1/4 sleeve (idk what else to call it). Now i am as happy is i can ever be, im getting married in one week to the love of my life.
Sorry for the long post, like i said im not too interesting its hard to write about myself.
Here is a picture of me and my Fiance.

Hello everyone!
After reading peoples stories about who they are, I thought I should share with you Who I am.
Im not the best at talking about myself, as i find myself to be uninteresting and dumb.
My name is Derek, I am currently 21. I grew up in a small town (pop. around 3000) in Montana. As a kid i had never really seen tattoos or anything like that but when i did they were usually on old military guys, looking back those tattoos were some of the coolest. I loved playing football and snowboarding when I reached high school freshman, but by my sophomore year I had knee problems and had to have surgery on my left knee. After i healed and everything was gravy I started doing sports again, only to have problems in my right knee. Countless doctor visits later I found out i had a tumor in my right knee. summer before junior year is when I got another knee surgery to remove the tumor (it was in my bone) and get a bone graph. Junior year is also when I found out my mother had lung cancer and met the love of my life. So of course I started getting wasted every weekend to push away bad thoughts about cancer and my mom. During my senior year after about a year of Chemotherapy my moms cancer had spread to her liver. The doctor gave her a week to live. Me and my family were there till the end. I had never lost someone close to me before so I didn't know what to do. It was good to have support from my Girlfriend and family. After my brothers and sister left and things were going back to "normal" (like they ever could) my dad passed away 10 weeks after my mom from a heart attack.(enough talking about this stuff.) The summer after graduating high school i got my first tattoo as a memorial for my mother, I wish i had researched it more because im not too happy with how it turned out. I love it but it needs to be better. (ill have it redone with the artist who has done all my work since.) After the summer i moved out of my hometown (too many good memories to stay around and feel sad) to go to college. I will be starting my third year this fall to be a nurse. I just want to help people, on an emotional level as well as physical. Something doctors cant do as well as nurses. Since starting school I have had 24 plus hours of work done in two years. I finally had my chest piece finished, and have a 1/4 sleeve (idk what else to call it). Now i am as happy is i can ever be, im getting married in one week to the love of my life.
Sorry for the long post, like i said im not too interesting its hard to write about myself.
Here is a picture of me and my Fiance.

Hi everybody!
I really like this thread :)
Well i am Nick And i live in Belgium, i am now 33 yrs old and before my 27 i had never thought of tattoos or ofcourse being a tattoo artist :) I studied nursery in 1998 but for me that was more being in the bar in front then actually in my courses because i guess it wasn't the correct choice for me. Then i started out in arts (illustrating) i spend 5 yrs there in stead of 4 because i couldn't draw for s**t. Then i met the nefew of my best friend who was creating shockwave games. That was so cool that spend 4 yrs in the game industry. After that i went independant but i thought i wasn' t good enough. Which brings me to the best choice EVER in my life, Return to school to study Digital arts and entertainment in Belgium where i really learned how to draw and to do some cool 3D stuff, programming, etc, Basicly everything that has to do with games and film industry. After i finished my studies over there they really wanted to keep me there for my drawing skills so to fill my financial gap i agreed with their proposal and went teaching. A big suprice to stand in front of 320 hungry students :) This i did for 3 yrs now. In my first yr teaching i had a demand from a tattoo artist to teach him more how to draw correctly and so i did. This was Rouslan Toumaniantz, a very serious and ambitious tattoo artist who was held back a bit by the girl with the stars on her face. After 2 lessons he told me i could draw quite nicely and he asked me if I wasn' t interested in learning how to tattoo. Like i said before, i have NEVER tought about tattoos so that was kinda new for me... I my eyes tattoos where oldschool or ugly drawings. (sorry for this but i didn't knew any better) SO he showed me some work of Dimitryi Samohin, Jesse Smith, Anil Gupta, Jack Ribeiro, and many many others... This got me really interested in the world of tattooing and inspired me to try to tattoo for myself.
At this point i am stopping to teach and going full time tattoo artist.
I must say for all the media i touched like aquarel, oil paint, photoshop, etc, Tattooing is BY FAR the most challenging media to put art...
I have my shop somewhere in Doornik Belgium atm, But i' m really dreaming one day to come to the states and work there together with my girlfriend who is doing now Animschool and her dream is to be animator in Pixar. So one day: San fransisco here we come :) :D (I really dont know if it would be possible but we can dream right ;) )

To break the tradtion of oldschool something realistic , a tattoo i did on somebody who didnt had a clue wat he wanted :) hope you all like it

I lived in Athens in 2008 and have fond memories of getting thrown out of the crumbling original Parthenon by about 50 security guards blowing whistles. It'll be fun to see the fake one without all the scaffolding/angry people! I'm really hoping I get to go inside so I can see the really really ugly statue of Athena:

ok,so the results of the surgery are 100% all bad stuff is gone. :)
I get freaked out in my way,like I said,fuckin' cancer has touched my life so many times. :mad:
finally one time it got beat !
thanks for all the support & good energy ,it worked !

art is the emulation of what is what was and what will be. sometimes you wanna test yourself against what pre exists. sometimes you want to test yourself and create something new. sometiimes you wanna test yourself and try to leave a legacy. and sometimes you have to pay the bills.
name one artist that has never copied something in there life time. try naming someone that has never made money from what preexists during their career.
this thread = moot point

I don't condone copying people's tattoos, but I am not really digging this thread. One it's not really any of my business to call out people for this kind of thing. Second, I would be hesistant to do so, because there is so much reference material outside of tattoo realm, that I couldn't be sure that two people weren't copying a piece of art from another genre as a tattoo. Third I have never gotten a tattoo that I expected to be or thought in any shape or form would be custom. I like running into people that have the same tattoos I do, I like the look of traditional tattoos and I am under no delusion that I am somehow "special" despite what my mother told me. I don't worry when someone tells me they are going to draw something for me, and they really just go trace it from the Ed hardy flash book and pass it off as their own, because I know most people aren't familiar with the design. Even is someone does copy the tattoo you have, it doesn't change the fact that you have a badass tattoo that most people would be jealous of and want to wear and you will get no sympathy from me, in fact i might make fun of you for complaining about it.

I really hope that nobody opens the copyright can of worms onto tattooing... imagine all of the published reference images or commercial imagery that's used in tattoos. Even if the suit is between two artists, I feel like it would set a precedent for larger entities to totally shit on the tattoo community.

Its clearly ethically wrong to tattoo someone else's tattoo art....
What needs to happen is some lawsuits. The 1976 Copyright Act states that any work for hire belongs to the person who commissioned it.
Sorry to use Kristel as an example but since she is ripped off so often i find it appropritate:
Let's say , hypothetically, Kristel Oreto tattoos somebody and we see the exact same tattoo on a reality show, her client can sue the artist who copied it.
In my interpretation of this law, ( i am not a lawyer btw but I took copyright law in art school) the client owns all copyright rights to an original commissioned piece of art installed on their body and retains the right to sue anyone who uses it without permission.
Now if the ripoff artist contacts Kristel's client and gains permission, then they should have legal right to reproduce it.
Obviously that will never happen but according to the law, the tattoo artist does not own any rights at all unless the copyright is expressly written as belonging to the original tattoo artist, or if the tattoo was free it would not qualify as "Art for Hire"
Now the copyright office in congress does not mention tattoos at all, but it is art and should qualify. ( in my mind =p )

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those shots were not so much about the tattoos,but was about the process of being tattooed :)
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here are some shots from about 6 weeks ago shortly after some work on the ankle bands & iron cross so they are still healing & not touched up yet,these shots don't include the additional clouds work I got this week,
as you can see,except for the niner piece,it's all "island/Polynesian" themed.
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I know they are not "world class by world class artists" but they're mine & I like 'em.

I will get this going. Here is my dropping the F bomb tattoo done by Cory Norris from Classic Tattoo Grass Valley CA.

So this tattoo is on day 4 in the picture. I was advised to leave the wrap on for the whole night, this time being the first I've been told to do so.
I must say I'm pretty amazed. No scabs at all, and no ink even in the peels!!

100% waste of time.

Just to be clear, Paco and his buddy weren't being shitty about it, they were specifically talking about how it's kinda cool but also adds extra pressure when they're tattooing a collector. They didn't mean it in any kind of negative way at all.
I was just a little taken aback. Although tattoo collectors are something I'm aware of, I had never even considered putting myself in that category... really, just a person who is into getting tattoos!!!
The getting them from a bunch of different people is as much a consequence of my work as it is a choice, I move every couple months or so, it would be impossible for me to stick with only one or two tattooers...

Why does it bother you? I find it kind of endearing, as it usually means that said client gets tattooed by the same person consistently. We don't own our friends or our coworkers or our dentist, but we still say "my friend, my coworker, my dentist."
I don't see much of a difference?

I feel physical discomfort when I hear the word Aficionado...it gives me the douche chills.

And heres a link for all the different types of hipster: The 21 Types Of Hipster You Encounter In London

finished,
before: http://s1.directupload.net/images/130523/ihg3gsoj.jpg
after: http://s1.directupload.net/images/130523/n8hyhstm.jpg

Hi and welcome to the board. Please take the time to watch the artist interviews, read and learn from old and new threads, and appreciate that this is a community that is pretty unique on the internet. To quote a poster from this forum who I have a tremendous amount of respect for:

I havent had a chance to speak to him. He doesnt have any tattoos as of yet so I still have time

Yeah I just find it hard to lie to my mom these days. I use to try to hide it for a couple weeks but eventually I'll just walk around the house with my shirt off and let her see it. When I was 18 and got my first tattoo I let her see a full half-sleeve immediately after I got it. It was just too bothersome to try and hide it. Plus I hate wearing a shirt when I'm the house. That and me and my mom/family have been through so much in the recent past it's just hard for me to lie. I'm even contemplating telling her I don't believe in God anymore but I don't want to give the poor woman an early death. Maybe I can last a couple more years til I graduate and move out. I mean I have my chest and right arm completely covered it's just way too bothersome to hide it from someone you live with. I'm me and she has to accept that.

Just booked an appointment for me and my Fiance, Im getting a lantern on my chest that im having him freehand. This will be my first experience with freehand and im excited as can be. I cant wait to see how his style come out!

Just booked an appointment for me and my Fiance, Im getting a lantern on my chest that im having him freehand. This will be my first experience with freehand and im excited as can be. I cant wait to see how his style come out!