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When life gives you lemons... Andy Northup @ All Star Tattoo

It sounds like you've had this tattoo for at least 3 weeks now. It's past the stage of needing daily lotion, oil, washing, etc. It's pretty well healed and just needs more time to finish peeling and settle in. Leave it alone. Once it looks like "normal" skin again, you can incorporate it into a daily moisturizing routine if you want (I usually only regularly use body lotion in the winter, but some people do it year round). I'm a big advocate of doing as little as possible to heal tattoos and piercings, as little lotion as you can stand before the itching drives you insane (like one drop every couple days at the most). Your body knows what it's doing to heal itself and sometimes us trying to "help" it only makes it worse, so it's the least fussy method of healing.

The pictured leg has more negative space than your design does. They really look like separate tattoos that have been tied together with filler. Also, in the traditional style, people tend to get one or two tattoos and then build off of that with whatever negative space they're left with. Example: "I have this triangular shape in between these two tattoos, maybe I could fill it with a tiger head." I would say get one of the designs somewhere on your arm and then build it from there. It's more fun that way. If you do insist on planning a sleeve out, then go to an artist to help you plan out what should go where, because the composition of this doesn't work.

Changes to make the white background options better from a design perspective: simplify. Take out any extra elements, don't have so much overlap in your elements (for example, you've got places where there's a paint smudge, flag, skull and lettering together. Lights and darks need to be more pronounced (for example the black letters on red stripes are going to be hard to read, especially when they're blurry like the greek(?) or interspersed with white letters/white stripes. I don't care who your artist is, that many layers of transparency is tough for my printer to deal with much less your artist to reproduce. If you're sold on all those elements, take out the paint streaks and flag streaks. If you want the flag, add in like the other pic where it's separate. And make the lettering more cohesive. If you want paint smudges around the edge, let the artist add them in where it will best suit your design and body shape. The arm design has the simplicity I'm talking about, one central element with readable text, and assorted design bits for emphasis surrounding the central element. I'm not a huge fan of the trash polka style, but I can see the design which makes it better designed. Your skin, your choice, but you run a real risk of needing to cover with a black panther in a year or two if it doesn't work. (Sorry for the run-on! I'm relatively new to the world of tattoos but have been doing graphic design for years) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh man I've been there with every one of my tattoos. Only one of them I'm still (five years later) really meh about. I get serious buyer's remorse with everything so I knew to expect this. I say, before you make any changes or additions, live with it for awhile. This isn't the same as a poorly done tattoo. Yours looks great. That doesn't mean you shouldn't want to change it, but at least live with it a bit and see how you feel. I love the idea of adding birds and some leave, etc to fill it in. I think that would look amazing.