5th & 6th Session

Friday 15th November & Tuesday 3rd December 2013
8 Hours

Reference for the clothing

I've done another two sessions in fairly quick succession again so I've combined my blog posts again. It feels like we've achieved quite a lot in these last two sessions and it's all coming together quite well now. 

Session five involved putting all the outlines for the background in which is great because I can now see what the whole thing will look like as one coherent piece. I say it's great now, but at the time I must admit to being slightly filled with dread at the return of the outliner. There's something about the sound of an outliner buzzing away that just makes me nervous! I'll admit that outlines hurt me a lot, particularly on my back as the lines are quite thick so it was a relief when that bit was completed! Actually this whole session turned out to be quite a painful one. For some reason all areas seemed to be particularly sensitive on this occasion, but I got through it.

We also started colouring the clothing on the character. Diego suggested using a palette of blues for this based on a really nice old image he had. I really like the colours we chose and think it will look great when done. We talked about adding a pattern to the clothing in a darker blue at a later date which should be cool.

Session six seems to have made a big difference to the overall look. We did the halo behind the head, connected the background on my shoulders to my sleeves, coloured the jewellery and did some of the hair on the foo dog. Thankfully this session seemed a lot easier to deal with in terms of pain. I can't help think this might be partly to do with the fact we were chatting for the whole time. This is what I enjoy more than anything else about sessions with Diego.

It's going to be a while until I can do any more on this now as Diego is moving back to Argentina in about a week. He'll be coming back to the UK to carry on with projects every six months so it'll be some time in May before I can get any more done. I'm not sure how I'll cope without a tattoo session for six months. I think it's the longest period of time without a session since I started getting tattooed two years ago! I hope I don't get withdrawal symptoms. One thing I won't miss however is getting my butt tattooed. Having to sit down for the first few days after the session is pretty unpleasant! 

5th Session on my Shishi Sleeve

Tuesday 5th February 2013

2.5 hours

I knew things weren't destined to go plan this session, not because of any problems with the actual tattoo, but because when I saw the weather forecast the night before it was due for snow. I rather foolishly underestimated just how bad the driving conditions would be getting over to Leeds and with the best of intentions I left earlier than usual assuming I would still be there in plenty of time. I was wrong. The traffic was horrendous and the driving conditions downright dangerous at times! I called Diego on the way to say I'd be a little bit late due to the weather. I ended up being about half an hor late but Diego was cool and we cracked straight on with things.

We decided to finish all the colour in the flowers in this session. I knew I wanted a yellow peony on my forearm, but I left the rest up to Diego. He suggested varying shades of red and orange to tie them all together rather than having all different colours and that was fine with me so we cracked on.

As usual the session was good fun and we chatted the whole time about tattoo's which I always enjoy. Anyway, here's some pictures.

4th Session on my Shishi Sleeve

Tuesday 4th December 2012

3 hours

This session we concentrated on putting colour into the Shishi. I was pretty sure I wanted a dark blue sort of colour for the body as I'd found some really nice reference images using this colour on the animal. After talking with Diego about this we decided on a beautiful looking turquoise blue colour. I was really happy with this colour and was raring to go.

This day was a particularly cold day, and even though the heating was on full blast, due to it being a morning session the room wasn't yet very warm. This coupled with the fact I had to sit there topless meant that I was feeling a bit chilly! I soon realised that getting tattooed when the temperature is less than ideal makes you tense up more, which means it hurts more. I was very much feeling like I was paying back some tattoo karma from the previous two relatively painless sessions. Maybe it was also some of the spots Diego was hitting, especially the part near the collar bone that was making it hurt more as I know from previous experience some areas certainly hurt more than others.

Anyway, we got the colour on the animal done and a small flower too. I was really happy with the outcome and I really love the colours so far.

Final Photo's

Here's the final photo's of my first tattoo sleeve courtesy of my friend Adam Lloyd.

5th Session

8th June 2012

2 Hours

Today's session was a short one, under two hours. All that was left to do was the two small chrysanthemums, the two leaves and the yellow highlights on the koi. I decided I would have the two remaining chrysanthemums the same colour so I didn't have too many different colours in the piece. We went for a really nice light blue colour for the flowers. The blue is actually 3 different shades blended together and looks great. 

As usual, the area around the head of the koi was pretty painful, but there wasn't much to do there as it was just the yellow highlights left to do. The colour seemed to be going in really easily and quickly and the whole session went very fast. 

And that was that, before I knew it it was all finished. I got up to look at the finished piece in the mirror and I thought it looked great. I'm really happy with the end result. It really works with the contours of my arm and I love it! It's been worth all the pain, scabby and flaky skin, bleeding and rubbing in of cream to end up with a really beautiful Japanese piece by a really great artist. 

I'll get some final photo's taken soon to properly show off the tattoo once it's all fully healed. I'm going to get my other arm tattooed by Diego starting at the end of July so I'll continue this blog and document the progress of that.

New Photo's from 4th Session

As promised here are some better pictures from my fourth session.

4th Session

8th May 2012
3 Hours

So today was the day to finally get some colour in. This felt sort of strange as I'm so used to seeing just black, so I was nervously excited to see the results. I knew I wanted red for this flower but Diego also suggested using a second colour on the inside of the petals so I thought why not! 

One thing I've learnt over these few months of getting tattooed, is to let go and trust Diego and know that he'll do it really nicely, rather than try to dictate how I think it should be done. Before starting to get tattooed I had spent so long looking at reference images and trying to piece together the perfect tattoo like a jigsaw, that I imagined choosing every little detail of the tattoo myself. So it was really nice to get things rolling with an artist and build confidence and trust with that person, and just let that person develop things naturally in their own style.

He also finished most of the koi. Hopefully there will be some yellow highlights going on the koi, but we'll wait until all the flowers are coloured and see if it needs it. So far I'm really happy with the results. Hopefully we should be able to get this finished in the next session.

Anyway, just a couple of quick snap shot of the results are above. Better pics, as always, will follow.