3.5 Hours
Right, I might as well just come out and admit I'm a full blown addict. I thought I could just do it a couple of times, keep it under control and it wouldn't be a problem. But the truth is once you try it there's no going back. Fortunately I'm not talking about crystal meth. No, I'm talking about something much more addictive. Tattoo's. Specifically large Japanese tattoo's in my case. So the inevitable has happened and I've started on a full back piece. This is going to be a pretty long term project as it's such a large area to cover, and will probably take years to fully complete as I want a full background eventually.
I'd discussed the design with Diego for a few months and had settled on a character called Monju Bosatsu who is one of the reincarnations of Buddha. She is depicted sat on top of a Foo Dog so that ties in nicely with my left sleeve too. I'd seen an initial drawing by Diego for this so I knew roughly what it would look like, but when I arrived for my session and saw the final drawing it looked even better than I had imagined.
Once the stencil was ready and applied to my back Diego tweaked, refined and added more details to the design by hand to complete it. This probably took about an hour an a half altogether. Then we were ready to start.
To say I was nervous about this one was a bit of an understatement. standing around in the studio with your arse out for long periods doesn't do much to calm the nerves, but apart from that I knew this was going to hurt more than my arms, a lot more. I've always found outlining quite painful anyway and due to the thickness of the lines (I think I heard Diego say it was an 18 needle) on this I knew I was in for a rough session. I assumed the worst would be going over the spine, but I was wrong. Very wrong. The worst pain of all was the ass cheeks. It felt like someone was using a power drill on my ass. It was brutal in that area and as that's where we started I thought I was only going to last about 5 minutes. After the initial shock, and due to the fact we were moving up the body I managed to zone out a bit and relax. Diego even commented how well I was coping once we got into it. This temporary bravery and Zen like outlook wasn't going to last forever though. After what seemed like forever laying face down on the table I new I'd done as much as I could for one day. All the adrenaline had worn off and I'd reached the limit of my pain threshold, so I did something I've never done before and threw in the towel.
We didn't get all the outlines done so I've got another session to look forward to of painful outlining, but I did as much as I could in one go. Anyway, here's what it looks like with all the unfinished bits still drawn in.
And here's what it looked like once all the sharpie was washed off. As you can see, we still need to add a lot of the detail to the foo dog and also the clouds and halo at the top of the piece.
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