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i hate sleeves that go onto the hand. looks awful, ruins the whole thing.

my horror story is that i never apprenticed or tattooed out of my house. i lied about having years of experience and got hired at a shop and started tattooing the general public for money in a shop my very first day. it was awful, i couldn't ask for help because i didnt want to give away that i didnt know what to do. i didnt use rubber bands for my first couple of tattoos and even when i started using them i didnt know why i just saw that everyone else was using them. my first tattoo was "ranch industry" written in 1 inch old english and it took me almost 5 hours. every tattoo i did was lined with a 3 but looked like it had been tripled lined with a 14 round because i kept going over the lines thickining them in an attempt to "clean" them up. when asked why i was doing the outlines so thick i claimed that i was also a graff artist and that that was the style.

russ is way sexier lookin that i thought he would be

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. What's the rush? Who needs a large tattoo that quickly anyway? Is regular (shorter) sessions too much trouble? Even if you are traveling, I see no need to do 3 full consecutive days. I'm gonna stick my neck out here and say that every sleeve that I've seen (in person) completed in marathon sessions or super-close consecutive sessions heals pretty rough. I'd love someone to prove me wrong and i hope someone can but I don't see how you can heal a full arm while maintaining some sort of normal life (which includes moving your limbs, going to the toilet, moving food to your face etc.) without having some colour drop-out or whatever. I find healing larger tattoos to be miserable at the best of times, particularly around the ditch, elbow, armpit etc. For me, marathon consecutive sessions means another trip for touch ups, which negates the need to finish in a short space of time anyway. It usually takes just a little more thought from the tattooer to finish smaller sections of the tattoo with a mind to extending it later if the client doesn't want to live with an un-finished looking tattoo, or the manner CaptCanada described at the end of his post above. This can still be tough to heal, but is a more efficient use of time, particularly for people who travel long distances. But I guess you don't get so many bragging rights, just a solid, awesome tattoo. Please bear in mind that I have occasionally and begrudgingly, tattooed the same person on 2 consecutive days to finish a large tattoo before they leave the country/go to prison or whatever, so that probably discounts my opinion.

If you live in Arizona, you definitely know who Aaron Coleman is! He's doing my back/ass. I'm soooooo unbelievably stoked on it. He's a super mellow dude, and he tattoos retarded fast. Maybe one of these days I'll post some progress photos.

the t'aint for sure. hands down.

The outside of my elbow was the worst for me. If you extend your arm with your palm facing up, I'm talking about the part that faces out (the brachioradialis, if you're keeping score). That took forever to heal. When I was getting my arms tattooed, I cut the collar and sleeve off an old long-sleeved T-shirt and slept with that. It sounds goofy, but I put the shirt collar over my head so that the sleeve would stay on. That way, I didn't have to worry about it rubbing against the sheets (or my wife), and if my fresh tattoo stuck to the sleeve, I'd just run warm water over it and carefully remove it.

I saw this video recently of the 3-day sleeve. I was just trying to imagine how hard it is to sit for that long, and get tattooed so much in such a short amount of time. Does anybody here have any stories of a marathon session like this? http://vimeo.com/18984844

Since we've already got the Tiger Tattoos Thread and the Panther Tattoos Thread, I figured it's about time to round out the big cat trinity with a Lion Tattoos thread. Just came across this nice one by Chris Garver to start it off.

tmi Mario! tmi!

The ditch was definitely one of the the harder spots to heal. I basically didn't bend my arms for a few days each time. All arm movements were made from the shoulder, which as a bartender looked pretty silly.

I just did back to back days with Shige. I think two days is fine, three is crazy.

exactly! rob ryan told me he was playing a show with dan and dan spotted a group of bearded-tattooed dudes in the crowd. dan leans over to rob and whispers "they're here!"...hahaha these guys act like dan was lowered to earth from a ufo driven by jesus. he was a great tattooer, is a great artist and musician...they're turning him into a sid vicious type cartoon charecter to use as an icon to express your tribe and show how cool you are. what they don't realize is that shit is exactly what dan hated about tattooing. .

the indomitable Tim Lehi. Interesting to see an American image of an eagle with the Japanese background