First Blood

This is the first tattoo that I’ve done on living breathing skin. Out of concern for my learning curve I did this one on myself. It took me awhile to decide what I wanted to do for the design, but because I wanted to practice some shading techniques, and wasn’t really sure how different fruit and dried animal skins were going to be from the real thing, I chose a tribal design. Simple clean straight lines inside which I practiced shading then covered up my practice work with solid black. That way I got twice the practice on one piece of skin! Before I started I wanted to get a picture of the stencil, then the finished outline, and the completed piece, but I guess I got a little nervous and spaced it until I was about halfway done. Tattooing yourself is a pretty screwy process because when you hit a tender spot you have an instinctual tendency to want to pull away from whatever is causing the pain, but a minor jerk equals permanent evidence of a mistake. On one side of the fence you are causing the pain, on the other you are recieving it. I never thought of myself as much of a massochist and this first self imposed splatter eliminated any doubts I may have had.

 

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