After my first tattoo, I decided to get more serious about learning how to tattoo. So I've been working with 2 people teaching me at a studio for a month now after close to a year long break from tattooing. I believe I've learned a lot and my fake skin work looks much much better compared to before. However I ran into some issues while doing this real tattoo that I'm not sure how to process. It was done on a random walk in that wanted a free tattoo from an apprentice and he didn't want any of my designs, just some random set of eyes he found on pinterest. I accepted it cause it's practice and I could learn from it regardless. My teachers have both said that the tattoo looks fine (I think they don't want to discourage me) and that the flaws I see will get better with practice. I kind of want more than that to be honest. I want to understand how I can fix these issues I've ran into. The tattoo (The lines that go up and down so drastically aren't me doing major fuck-ups just to be clear, it had some glitch effect in the reference)
The major issues I've had:
The major issues I've had:
- The tattoo was on the right back shoulder, slightly above the shoulder blade. This meant that I couldn't get a comfortable position no matter what I tried as my right arm would either be in a gap, or awkwardly on the shoulder where I can't put any weight on it for stability. Also it didn't help that a 2nd person was tattooing this guy's left arm simultaneously so I couldn't just move him around freely. Not sure where I'd put him if I could anyway. I eventually started to work on it while standing up, with my hand only supported with my pinkie lying on the guy's shoulder. My problem is, how am I even supposed to position my arm here? Or am I supposed to get better at tattooing while my hand hovers or has little support? My lines were so shaky even though my hands weren't shaky, because I had no stability. Would it work to practice on fake skin while purposefully in awkward poses?
- As I was packing in black and whip shading the eyelashes, he was so hurt I couldn't help but wonder if I was doing smth wrong. I ran my pen at 7 just so I don't mess him up, I was used to 8.5-9, with really not that much hang using a 1012RM. I would go in and draw circles to fill as I was shown. It worked fine with fake skin as I had all the time in the world doing them but had the opposite experience with real skin. Is there something I can do to reduce trauma to the skin when working on a piece like the one above? I could have gone more on this tattoo, there are so many lines that are still showing that I was planning to shade over but the client wanted to wrap it faster as he was hurt and in a hurry, very unlike fake skin.
- I had the uncertainty of whether I should pull a line with my shoulder, my elbow or my wrist as my position kept changing. I'm used to line with my elbow moving most of the way while my wrist is locked to keep things stable but I'm thinking that might not be right as I couldn't do that at all on real skin. If I try to move from my elbow, my hand needs to slide on the skin, even if I have vaseline on the side of my hand to make it slide easier, I still couldn't slide anywhere on the guy's shoulder as if I moved any further to right it's his face. It would have helped if I could prone mount the guy but we weren't there yet. So as a result I kept trying to line with my wrist only and it felt wrong. Am I supposed to use a combination of wrist, elbow, shoulder movements as necessary or should I focus on 1 and get better on that?
