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Finally finished. This one took about 25 hours. The artist asked me if I liked it. I told him yes. He said good, because you're stuck with it now. No panther is going to cover this thing. Ha! The colors are brighter than what I expected, but they are growing on me. Overall, I'm pleased with how it turned out. The coolest part about this experience, is that I feel like I can just go down to the shop and hang out and have some beer and pizza with these guys. It's a really fun place to hang out and I'm definitely going to get more work done by him. But the artist knows I'm also getting pieces done by others in the area. He recommended several to me.

The lady and I went down to Dedication Tattoo for their 2 year anniversary party yesterday, they had a huge sheet of designs to choose from drawn up by them and their guests for the day and we had a lot of fun just getting spontaneous tattoos and hanging out at the shop. Bryce Operandi put a rose on my elbow, and she got a butterfly girl head from CJ Fishburn. CJ talked her into doing black and gray and I think it looks rad. Elbow wasn't as miserable as I expected either so that's a bonus.

I still remember when this forum was devoted to promoting good tattooing.

this thread seems like a classic case of ''It's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission." if this thread started, "hey... i'm thinking of getting my first tattoo on my neck. what do you LSTers think?" the answer would be a overwhelming and resounding "OH HELL NO!!!" for some reason, folks have seemed to go easy on the fella and i guess it's because what's done is done... and was done with a certain naivete. if you haven't caught on @<a href="http://www.lastsparrowtattoo.com/forum/member.php?u=53505" target="_blank">TheAsian</a> , there are plenty of unwritten rules in the tattoo community and you just happened to break one of the big 'uns right off the bat. now that you're part of this great forum and dove neck first into the tattoo community, it might be good for you to peruse the rest of the site, read up on some neck and hand tattoo threads and watch some (or all) of the interview vids. there's plenty of information to absorb and growth and humbling to be had. we're (mostly) a nice bunch ;) and can provide guidance for how to handle this recent life change of yours and other tattoo related changes to come, if guidance is what you're looking for. as you've already found out, advice often comes whether solicited or not. don't take it the wrong way... there might be a few folks on here who are racecars in the red... https://youtu.be/QOBvGGaDnKQ?t=39s

I thought that getting lower leg tattoos at close to 30, with steady employment, was a bold step for me. Having read this thread, I guess I need to yolo harder.

Finally got around to taking decent pics. Sorry if this is posted in the wrong section.

I think also many people here take tattooing VERY seriously, so a situation like yours is a little insulting to the art form. Honestly I wouldn't go back to that artist, since he really should have advised you of all this and probably should have refused to do it at all.

In tonight's episode of Shitty Reality Check: You got face tats, you might get strong reactions!

Not baby related (but congrats, everyone)... Got this rainy dude from Tron last week when she was at Atlas in Portland. Awesome experience and glad to fill this weirdo spot on my leg.

If you think that a handful of people giving you a hard time on the Internet is the most adversity you're going to deal with now that you have a neck tattoo then...well...you probably shouldn't have tattooed your neck. YOLO, bro.

Good tattooing is "very clichéd"

Whatever happened to the good old arm

I think you may be a bit late with this message.

Eddy Deutsche cover/blastover from a couple of weeks ago in Oslo (Marius Meyer studio). It was such a fun day, so cool! Also met the legend Carson Vester. He told us some crazy stories! Who said he had lost it? New: Old:

8 months ago I took on a new position at work on a contract basis. Totally different from what I've been doing for the previous 16 years, but a great challenge and I really liked it. 3 weeks ago the position became available permanently. I applied, interviewed, and last week I found out I got it. I'm excited because the schedule fits my family better (no more shift work), and it does come with a modest raise (for more work). The best part has actually been the feedback from my co-workers, who have been telling me how much they appreciate me in the position and how well they think I've been doing. Now I just have to keep it up!

This holds true.

Call them. Their call nurse should know or find out if they have tattoo experience and their acceptance of them.

Haha another reason to hold off, what if you want to do a massive backpiece down the road?! I've left my back and chest alone for that exact reason.

Back tattoos are bit hard to take care of? Yes they are. My wife and kids for the most part help me for the first 2 weeks or so and than I try to just do it my self. I bought two lotion back applicators to help me one) apply lotion on my own and two) I use the other stick to wash my back on my own. Other than that back tattoo's are awesome! :)

If you get it on your back you'll never see it! Not to mention I feel like between the shoulder blades would be a hard spot to take care of on your first tattoo; hard to wrap, hard to sleep on, hard to monitor and hard to apply lotion to. Then again, I have no ink on my back, so another member may know better. I think on one of your pecs would be the better of the two. As far as bicep goes, I hear ya on the scrawny arms. No one needs to ask me "do you even lift bro?". BUT, the nice thing about the arm is that you can make something that would look small on your back look big on it. The inside of your bicep is a nice flat area that can hold a big design if it goes from pit to elbow really well. Plus, it's way easier to sleep on, wrap, and keep clean and moisturized. But, it's just my .02. Good luck with whatever you go with!

I'd advise against getting the other side of your neck tattooed, especially if you're not actially interested in tattoos and not interested in how it will affect the rest of your life. There was a lot more rant here but lol yolo.

@Lance thank you so much re Chuck, you made my morning when I read that. :))) This snake is by Matt (Dr. Claw). I have my first session w Shad in a few weeks! 4/2-4/3. An early birthday present to myself! Has anyone been tattooed by Shad? Would love a little info if so!

I always look forward to the start of the month because it means another 3 hours of work on my back, and another step closer to completion. This session I just could not zone out at all. The whole thing just hurt. On the other hand we have now basically finished the background and I'm stoked with how it's looking.

Aah your nipple! No thank you.

this is a great quote: "I have two cats. I'm the furthest thing from a gang member."

Met with Carlos Torres in Paris after the convention to finish this little side piece. Fuck me this did really really hurt!

@Mark Bee you can't seem to go wrong at The Pearl! Love seeing your already impressive collection grow. - - - Updated - - - I can't believe I haven't posted these here! I got my butt snake colored in at the beg of feb. Basically I got home from my tattoo trip, and my dog had a big sudden health issue that had to be dealt with STAT! So I didn't even think about it. Pics attached. I'm booked for more at the beg of Apr too!

Here are a couple of pics from yesterday's session with Tim Pausinger at The Pearl.

I have a 2 year old high energy german shepherd and while I'm no dog trainer (not even close), I've been teaching her some fun things to keep life interesting in -25 weather. Also to help relieve my guilt over long work weeks, ha. We hike daily in the middle of nowhere. All my previous dogs have been rottweilers, so all new fun over here. We've been working on scent detection, hiding something the day before and retrieving it the next day on our hike, tracking followed by sit-stay, and random fun. All our hikes are mostly off leash, so obviously before we ventured to the harder stuff we had her basic off leash commands down (come, sit, heel, watch, stay, leave it, etc). Totally neat to see her react to scent and tracking in various temperatures and weather conditions. It's all I mostly post on IG, so apologies to anyone who started following me expecting tattoo related stuff. My lunatic.

Racking up thousands of kilometres [emoji4]

Tell me about it. I am into orchids and salt water reef tanks.....expensive to the max.

I've been discovering a new rabbit hole - Fountain pens and their associated ink. Just what I needed! Another expensive hobby!

Wow, amazing. I like that style of Gogue more than the stuff he is generally known for. Perfect example of less-is-more.

Hooray for new jobs! I just completed and submitted a 100 page manuscript to my publisher for inclusion as a chapter into the next (30th!) edition of a very famous engineering book. Publication later this year. I will be the very first woman contributor in the book's 100+ year history.

Well, looks like I'm on my way to being employed again! Yay! This means I can start getting tattooed again at my snail's pace of 1-2x/year. ;)

I've been holding out on posting pics online of my Shaolin backpiece progress. But now the 'blackground' is just about complete and the time felt right to share my progress. This is 5 sessions deep, about 19hrs and we are getting some wicked momentum. Tattoo is being made by Steve Batt in Edmonton, AB. Thank you all for your LST kinship through this experience!

It's been a while, but I just recently got back to reading the forum and looking at what other people are posting as far as new work. By way of jumping back in, it seemed like posting what I've been up to since I last participated in this thread is the right way to go. This might be a bit of a long one. Sorry. Sometimes you're in New Orleans. Sometimes you end up with a butterfly. Brent at Uptown Tattoo did this one: Jake Miller from Cathedral Tattoo in Salt Lake did this little ditch guy for me: I did a bit of a run of appointments at Great Lakes Tattoo. Erik did this one: Nick did this one: And Matt did this one on my calf: Javier Rodriguez at LTW in Barcelona made this crazy tiger head for me: John Raftery, who is also at Cathedral in Salt Lake now, did this snake while he was still in New York at Fun City: Ben Haft at Fun City did the tops of both of my thighs with a sinking ship and a rose of no man's land: And finally, Mike Suarez at Hand of Glory in Brooklyn was able to squeeze me in on Saturday and do this on my shin: I picked up a few little bits of filler here and there, too. Next up is getting my left knee done, I think. All of this has really just motivated me to start thinking about back/chestpieces. Further down the rabbit hole.

Had my 2nd session with Thomas Hooper yesterday. Mostly dot shading and mostly sat okay for it. Much easier than the line work during our first session.

I feel like I'm doing a double post because I already submit my last tattoo for the February contest but I guess it would fit here too! ^^ So here it is! Done by Valerie Vargas at her shop Modern Classic Tattoo in London. So Stoked of this one, it's more awesome than I was expecting (I knew it would be massive but for me it reach the perfection!) Here a video to show how it fit on my knee: Video by Valerie Vargas(valeriemodernclassic): Manu came to @modernclassictattoo a... | iPhoneogram

Super stoked that I finally got tattooed by Eddy Deutsche!

Whew. Side of knee done yesterday by Kevin Collins at Vanness & Fellows in Raleigh. I can't say enough about Kevin, Mark, and AJ. One of the nicest tattoo experiences I have ever had.

Today I capped my other knee with a demon head by Franz Stefanik at The Okey Doke in Toronto. Its always a great experience with Franz. Interesting conversations with a great guy who also does amazing work. I'll have to update my legs in the Squidpants thread soon. I'm really looking to forward to getting some filler work around some of the larger pieces on my right leg now.

Got this lil lady from Shawn VanOven! Thanks for lookinh

Finished my back on Friday night (well, Saturday at 5:30 am). It was a hell of a ride - it took almost exactly a year of sessions every 2-3 weeks. We'll do a final session after this heals to tie the bow on it. This tattoo was made by Sean Zee out of Brick, NJ from pictures I've taken while scuba diving. I gave him 50-some pictures and a wish list, and he selected about 15 shots to create this scene. These pics were taken on 4 continents from 1998 through 2013 using (mostly) a Nikonos V underwater camera with an SB-105 strobe, UW Nikkor 35mm, 28mm, and 15mm f2.8 fisheye lenses, Sea & Sea (no relation) macro kit and Nikonos closeup kit. Sean is a great guy, dedicated and amazingly creative. It boggles my mind how artists just "see" stuff like this and make it happen. He put up with a lot of questions and "what ifs" and "why nots" from this nearly virgin canvas (as he likes to say, "this woman only had lil kitty paw prints on her shoulder before this"), explaining to me all the ways this tattoo would NOT work, and ended up just putting it on the table that it really needed to be a full back if I wanted so many references. And to prove it, he designed the whole thing superimposed on a picture of my bare back and emailed it to me. I remember the moment I saw it for the first time and it shorted out my brain. I committed to the full back about 20 minutes after I got the email. (And I admit at the time I did not understand in the least what I was in for...) Kinda funny, thinking back on it, how all the chatter and uncertainty and 14 years of wanting some sort of tattoo with my eagle rays were completely silenced and resolved in a heart beat. Anyway... So, the critters making appearances, starting at the top right and going clockwise are: two moon jellyfish, two Moorish idols, two clownfish and anemone, a batwing coral crab and mustard tube sponges just behind him, a leopard moray eel, two squirrelfish hiding in red sea fans that cross my lower back, a sea snake in lettuce coral (very poisonous, which I didn't realize until after I'd crawled up in his face to take the picture and then been admonished by the divemaster after the picture was developed), a queen angelfish and a hammerhead shark. In the center are two spotted eagle rays and the broken mast of the Nippo Maru, a Japanese supply ship sunk during WWII by US forces in Truk Lagoon, Micronesia. When I look at this, I don't just see a tattoo of fish. It's a diary of my favorite diving experiences. Each part has such different memories of the location, the people I was with, and the experience on that dive. (Yeah, poisonous sea snake. Whoopsie on that one. And the clownfish was actually guarding a little ring of day-old eggs. And trying to photograph moon jellies in a surge without being hit is like playing a 3D video game. And that I really really wanted my spotted moray eels but Sean said the pattern wouldn't age well, so with resigned sadness, my handsome spotted moray had to morph into a leopard moray. Sniff Sniff.) All of this flooding my brain at the same time. And then I get this goofy grin on my face thinking about walking around with this huge awesome back piece that anyone I know would be shocked to learn I have. He put up a little video where you can see the ribs, too: Video of SeeSea's Back. Healed pics coming to an LST contest near you. I want a T-shirt, dammit :D

Little bit of knee action

Thanks! I don't have a lot of photos of my tattoos to share with you all, but I have managed to finde a couple, diggin' through Instagram: Done in 2012 by Filip Henningsson from Red Dragon Tattoo in Umeå, Sweden. Photo is borrowed from his Instagram, which can be found here: Instagram Done in 2011 by Tim Pausinger from The Pearl Harbour Gift Shop in Toronto, Canada. Done when he was doing a guest-spot The Sailors Grave in Copenhagen. Photo is borrowed from his Instagram, which can be found here: Instagram

While waiting for a couple of tattoo appointments coming up I decided to get a tattoo while I wait. This one was by Nathan Draper at The Pearl. He did a great job and is a really nice guy, too. A good experience all around. Update: Please ignore my disgusting sock!

Got a couple of filler tattoos last night on my right arm. Both done by James Clements at Fortune and Glory in Shreveport, LA.

About 7 weeks ago, I got my first tattoo, which was the words "Love will tear us apart again" written down the centre of my forearm. Almost four weeks ago I got my second tattoo, the reading of the first discovered pulsar, also the cover of Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures," completing the piece. A little background on the piece: when I was 16, quite a few serious events unfolded in my life. I was a foster child at the time, and I had some mental health issues that resulted in me being volleyed about from hospital to hospital as psychiatrists picked apart my brain and my behavioural problems. At some point I ended up at a hospital in up-state New York, where I saw the movie "Donnie Darko" for the first time. To cut the story down to size, I identified with the movie. One song in it particularly caught me: Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart." I listened to it daily. Fast forward a year, give or take, and while living in a group home, one of the boys I lived with gave me the "Unknown Pleasures" CD for Secret Santa. He never got the help he needed, or the family he needed, and wasn't as fortunate as I was. So while this piece is also a tribute to one of my favourite bands, it is mainly a reminder of a time in my life, and of how lucky I am. I've already had several kids in big glasses and flannel come up to me in New York and complain that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" isn't on "Unknown Pleasures." Having to deal with them is probably my only regret about this tattoo. EDIT: Sorry about the huge pictures. Is there any way to resize them so they don't punch everyone in the face with how big they are?