First tattoo?
Let me tell you how it works! This is just my advice, there are so many different artists, shops, and opinions out there, the only way to figure out what works for you is to start getting tattooed! But here is all the information I wish I had when I was getting started:
Choose your idea- it doesn’t have to be fully thought out, or drawn, or designed, just a basic idea.
Gather a few reference photos- more than one, less than 10 please haha. Take note of what you like and don’t like about each.
Research artists in your area- not shops, individual artists! Shops are basically collections of individual businesses and there can be HUGE differences in style, quality, and professionalism. (Everyone at One Drop is a great person and family to me, but our art styles are often vastly different from each other!)
Look for artists that already make and post things that look like what you want! Just because they are highly skilled in one area doesn’t mean they will excel in another.
Next!
Submit your inquiry- include as much detail and info as possible.
Book online- once I approve your project, you’ll be given a link to my booking calendar.
Pay your deposit and book- there are more details about the deposit under FAQs, but it comes off the price of your tattoo at the end. Be sure before you book though, as deposits are non-refundable.
Show up to get tattooed! When you arrive I will have a design ready to show you based on everything you’ve sent. If you’ve given all the relevant info and chosen an artist whose work you love, you should be stoked to see what the collaboration looks like! If there are changes we need to make no problem, it’s your tattoo and you get the last word on what you like and don’t like, small adjustments can easily be made, or changes to fit the body better.
In the event that the design is WAY off base, it’s possible a new appointment will have to be made. (To date this has only happened once, but I’d rather reschedule than make a tattoo you aren’t excited about.)
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I get it, it’s stressful. But I promise it’s generally industry standard not to see designs ahead of time. There is the risk of design theft where the art is taken to a cheaper tattooer, there’s the endless changes as you show the design to 20 different people all with different opinions, and the time I can reasonably dedicate to each appointment. Artists are often working on designs right up to the appointment, sometimes the night before or morning of. This is partly because of our busy schedules, but I also like to have the tattoo fresh in my mind.
It is your tattoo at the end of the day but it is also a collaboration: you give me your ideas, thoughts, and reference pics, I pass it all through my own artistic filter and give you my version of your idea.
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It’s important before you start getting tattoos to have realistic expectations of what is possible. Look around at tattoos you see in real life, on real people, not just what’s online. Online tattoos are almost always fresh, not healed or aged, and are not representative of what’s possible in skin. If you’ve never seen a tattoo in real life that looks like what you are wanting, it’s probably not possible. Tattoos have been around for centuries, it’s an ancient art, you aren’t going to come up with something “new“ and that’s ok! You have to love how tattoos look in all stages, not just the healed look in the first few weeks.
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Can you get one? Absolutely. But you should know that with tattoos the bigger the better, always! Ink will always spread over time, so the larger a design is, the less it will affect the design and the better it will age. When the lines on a back piece spread it makes almost no difference to the overall look, when the lines spread on a quarter sized tattoo it can become a blob. Imagine any tattoo you have traced over with a sharpie as a good idea of how to imagine the spreading when considering a tattoo design.