Rad Kelham

OK good to know. I'm going to see what responses I get before ordering some. Pig skin...kind of grosses me out. I don't know if I'd even be allowed to bring that into the shop. But I'm open to it.

Crappy tattoos get upvoted, good ones downvoted, and the mods think they are gods.

If you think that's bad, try hanging out on Redditt tattoos.

The mentor has me working on grapefruits now - which is challenging! He said there are some practice skins on amazon but that he doesn't know if they are any good. Can anyone vouch for them? PS I know this fruit tattoo was a pathetic disaster.

A super famous tattooer that did a piece one me told me to wash it 8 times in a row on that first wash. That seems like overkill. Can you damage the thing from soaping it up too many times per cleaning?

I'm about 3 months into my apprenticeship. Last week my mentor says "Set up a machine and draw up some small designs right now, I have someone coming in for you to tattoo in about 30 minutes." "Are you sure this is a good idea? Who is coming in?" I asked. "Just some big biker guy I know." I was shaking so bad that I could hardly get the machine set up. Hell I hadn't yet been taught how to use a machine. I wasn't sure if this was for real or a joke, but this is definitely the kind of thing he would line up just for the sake of fucking with me. I imagined some gnarly big dude he met at the local dive bar. I'm sitting at my station frantically drawing a spider and a skull and I hear the back door ring and my mentor say "Hey man come on in, he's just finishing up your drawing." I walk over to the station shaking and see a grapefruit sitting on the chair.

Do you ever have a first wash where you've lathered and rinsed 3 or more times and you can still feel lymph on the surface? Do you continue lathering and rinsing until it's all gone, or just call it done and get out of the shower? I tend to have extra slimy tattoos (even with the hot shower or bath method) and have a hard time finding a happy place between overwashing and oozing.

Yeah Voltaire got that all wrong.

Hands down the most painful place to get tattooed is the fingertips and finger joints on the palm side. Armpits, feet, ankles, ribs, head...are all nothing compared to the palm. The feeling of getting your finger tendons tattooed is bat shit crazy. Like legitimate torture. And I say tendons because to make it stick you have to drill right into the innards of the palm/fingers.

Here goes. Head tattoo by Jesse Roberts. 3 sessions about 3-4 hours each, then one quick touchup session. Completed in about 2 months.

Heck no that's just crazy talk! Although I did see a video of someone getting their navel tattooed. The artist filled it with black as his ink cup and just tattooed everywhere inside there.

Here is my dome by Jesse Roberts - whether or not this is a face tattoo I don't know. I'm the farthest thing from hardcore and would say nothing has changed since getting it. No big deal! I really liked the cover of the finger wave book so that's why I went to Jesse, as he painted it. I fully endorse people getting their head and face tattooed.

I'm considering trying this on my ass, which was a real weeper last session. Has anyone used this right down the crack?

Good point. Anyway I'll report back on my results with it. Just a little baffled by the dry wash instructions. A couple puffs of foam rubbed in dry and then rinsed off seems pretty ineffective. But for the sake of science I'll be the guinea pig.

Well sure, but does the product work any better or worse than other methods? If H2Ocean is so rich they can pay all those tattooers, have they also put money into clinical trials before it went on the market? Would Jack Rudy and Horiyoshi III endorse a belt sander for aftercare if they were paid enough?

I hear you. But so many top tattooers endorse the stuff. If it were a few greedy folks that would be one thing...but 20+ of the best in the biz agreeing to endorse it. I don't know.

Next week I have Derek Noble working on my t-rex leg sleeve. The areas to do are the ass crack and inside the inner thigh (sigh). And this week my mentor Dave Richmond is working on a Hanya mask on my knee.

No kidding I love the stuff of his we have at the shop. Sadly a couple sheets were ruined when a pipe broke in the suite above us a month the ago, including the one I traced above and am going to repaint. And curious, do repaints have any place in a portfolio? Assuming you say that it's a repaint of course. I did a few Amund Dietzel repaints and have them framed at my station but feel a little weird about it.

Yes it is.

Your buddy perhaps is more connected to the tattoo community? My buddy is just a regular dude with no other tattoos. Who knows.

So I decided to try their full kit out of curiosity. Pretty much it's a soap, an ointment, and a lotion - nothing monumental. What I find strange is the soap instructions. They say to take a couple pumps of the foam soap and rub it into the tattoo with DRY hands and then give it a rinse. How can this possibly remove all the slime after a big tattoo session? I've always had to take a super hot shower and lather and rinse aggressively multiple times. What do you all think of this product?

Thanks! Steve Moore in British Columbia.

Great points. Thanks!

If you shoot your own reference photos to trace and collage into your designs, is that cheating? Obviously tracing other peoples work exactly is cheating. What about if you take a google image photo of a real skull and trace that? I'm not talking about tracing always and never learning to draw, but rather using this as a time saving technique occasionally, like Rockwell did.

Wow, your first tattoo is a Jess Yen neck to knee backpiece. Wow. Wow. How the heck do you have saniderm on that whole thing?