grog

Got a new one from Ian Haight at Sideshow Alley Tattoo in Portland, OR. This was surprisingly more spicy than my bear knee tattoo. Who knew?

Speaking of forgetting about pain! Got these little piggies all done up about a month ago. They healed just fine, with no ink loss to speak of. There's a couple wobbly lines in there and some blowouts, but as I understand it, toes are fickle beasts to ink. Also, I have two tattoos in the books planned for May. One will be a color landscape of the Swiss Alps, from Bridget Larreau. The other will be a piece of severed snake head flash from Ian Haight, whose crazy color portfolio I just stumbled upon the other day. I'm still waiting on my sleeve to start and I keep telling myself to hold off on tattoos in the interim to save money, but here we are anyways. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm a bit in the same boat as you. I love big cohesive aesthetics, but I also have so many artists and styles that I admire. So my compromise is that I'm reserving my upper body for large scale cohesive stuff with my truly favorite artists, but I'm using my calves and thighs as my "collector's area," with smaller pieces of meaning, styles that I only want to dip my toe in, or specific artists' work. That way, I get some huge chunks of synergy up top, but still get to collect bits and pieces. Any approach has ups and downs. Whatever your plan is, at some point you just have to pick a direction and pull the trigger.

If both the clock and horse accomplish the themes and meanings you're going for, I think sticking with the horse might give you more animal-y cohesiveness with your previous butterfly wings. Just one dude's opinion.

Hey everybody! I recently put down a deposit for a full sleeve with Justin Hartman. It'll be a lady-head centric peice, based around Auri from the Kingkiller Chronicles book series. I'm super excited! I'm on a wait list for the first session and Hartman is currently traveling, so I'm not sure when or where we'll start, but I get to check out some new cities at the same time. It should be an excellent experience!