dnfm

Yep, that may very well be how it goes.

To be fair, I've been emailing around since November. I've found a few that've responded finally... something about Vegas seems to add a lot of price to tattoos, so it looks like our idea will probably end up in something small in a walk in. It sucks, but such is life.

I live 2000 miles away from Las Vegas, and I want to book time to make sure there's time to get what I want done. Hence the attempts at contact beforehand. :) This forum/thread was my attempt at perservering. I've come up with a few leads via posts like these in various places; we'll see where they get me.

Getting something else may end up having to be what I do; though at this point, I'm not sure it'd help -- getting a response from *anyone* seems to be difficult. (And I know good work costs money, but the only quote I've received was north of $400/h, and came with vague handwaving that basically said, 'you can work it out with the artist when you get here'.)

*taps mic* Is this thing on?

So I came here mostly to post a question, which I'll get to at the end of this post, since the rules suggest I do that. But first, a bit about me. I'm a 33 year old car, computer, and fitness nerd, who like most here I'm sure, is addicted to tattoos. I currently have 4, and am trying to plan my 5th. I'll have been married for 10 years in May. My wife and I like to get tattoos in the places we visit. We sort of treat our bodies like those old steamer trunks people have with stickers of various destinations. The tattoos aren't relevant to the destination, just memories of those places. My right forearm has a dragon (always been obsessed with them) over my Irish family name crest, my left forearm has Auron from Final Fantasy X. My left shoulder has a skull with cross wrenches, and below that is an 8-bit black mage from the Final Fantasy series. The Auron was done in St John's, Newfoundland, the 8 bit black mage was done in Ottawa, ON, and the skull/cross wrenches was done in New Orleans, LA. The plan is for the mage to have a new 8 bit character added beside him every so often until it's an arm band of 8 bit characters. I'll then have someone add in some sort of background (probably free-hand, pixelated waves or something..) I write software for a living, live in southern Ontario, Canada, I own 6 cars and a motorcycle, I have 2 kids (14, and 4), and I'm a loud, opinionated asshole. Usually though, I'm just trying to make people laugh. Now, onto my question. I'm looking for a tattoo artist (or artists) to do my wife and my next tattoos when we are in Vegas in May for our 10 year wedding anniversary. I've already been looking for months, but I'm having a hard time finding artists who even bother to respond to me, much less go from there. What I'm looking for is a suggestion for an artist who can do a bio-mechanical-style inside of an engine on my upper right arm, my wife wants a flower-skull on her right calf. We have photos of our ideas, and are very open to artistic interpretation (we're pretty easy going, as long as it looks good), but out of the dozen or so shops we've contacted, 3 have responded. 1 is still looking into it for us, 1 has said, "we don't do that", and 1 has quoted me > $300/hr. I've tried yelp, I've tried twitter, this is my new avenue. So the short question is: does anyone have any recommendations for a tattoo artist in Vegas that would be willing to chat with me over email (I have some photos for ideas, and locations for the tattoos) in Vegas who may be able to help? We are happy to talk via phone or video chat, or whatever helps the artist the most, and will absolutely place a deposit to hold our time and not waste anyone else's.