Graeme

Sombres Forêts and Gris both have new albums coming out soon, the released previews sound great: I love the way both of those bands are really pushing black metal into this really pretty and nuanced direction. I love the raw and ugly stuff too, but there are only so many Darkthrone and Ildjarn clones I can handle.

Awesome! When you record something be sure to post it here!

I was booked for a huge rib piece that I unfortunately had to put off because I didn't have the finances to do it and my sleeve simultaneously but the artist recommended taking a muscle relaxant before sessions I think not so much for pain management, but more to counter the body's natural impulse to tense up. And yeah, if that's going to help me to sit and will allow the tattooer to do a better job and result in a better tattoo, then I'm all for it.

It isn't an unfair thing to assume!

You have a hand of glory and a wizard tattoo, I like you a lot already. Welcome aboard!

Anxiety about healing tattoos is totally normal but as you get more tattoos and begin to better understand how your body deals with them and heals them it will get less stressful. Healing will still be as annoying as shit though. Welcome to LST.

Rose Hardy is in NYC often enough isn't she, like once a year or so? Get one now and get the other on her next trip over. That way you don't really have to decide between two equally great ideas.

That means one of two things to me, both of which are awesome.

Welcome! What are you getting and who is doing it?

Healing the ditch is pretty serious business, huh? Glad I only have to do it once more.

John Sultana does killer tattoos and he seems like a super nice dude too.

I have a tattoo that is probably fairly similar to what you're thinking of: This is Seth Wood's interpretation of the Necronomicon and it goes from my shoulder to about an inch or so above my elbow. He initially did it without the illustrations in the book, but when I was at the shop at a later date he saw it and said that it needed that little bit extra so we booked that and he put those in. I wanted the 20-sided die, the other things were his idea and freehanded in. I am especially stoked on the tiny little Baphomet. It could be covered by a quarter, total fine line madness there. Because they're so detailed, I'm not sure how well the book illustrations will age, but they're a little bonus and even when they fade and blur together they aren't going to greatly change the integrity of the tattoo. So yeah, it can be totally workable though I think you'd need to find the right artist to be able to pull it off properly.

Thank you for that clarification.

But isn't the traditional way of getting a Japanese tattoo to do it in short sessions? If you look on Horiyoshi 3's instagram there's a lot of 50 minute sessions and what not.

There's some great advice here, to which I'll add that you should be treated respectfully and courteously by a tattoo artist and that if one is making you feel like a douche or that you don't belong there, then you should be looking for somebody else to do the tattoo.

Let me tell you, it looks so great now all bruised and red and swollen.

I agree with a lot of this, and a lot of what I find uninteresting with everybody trying to do this "style" now is that it becomes too much about putting a certain technique up on a pedestal instead of using that technique, and many others besides, to create a powerful tattoo. It's the same thing with these guys I see on Instagram who are all about doing super whipshaded traditional. Technique is there to serve the art, not the other way around. And that said, you'll never get tattooed by somebody if you don't ask them because they "seem" busy.

I really admire your commitment to getting tattooed like that. It looks so amazing so far.

Sadly, we haven't done this as much as we should be doing it, though last summer when we were passing through New England, @Pugilist made me a surprise appointment with Ron Henry Wells at Congress St Tattoo in Portsmouth NH and I got a rad little bear head on my collarbone to balance a wolf head I have on my other collarbone. We have matching tattoos though, and next year is our fifth wedding anniversary and we have something super cool planned for that. Also, I finished by sleeve today. Some of you saw some gory in progress pictures.

They sent an email yesterday saying that a free edition will be available in 2-3 weeks, but the $3.99 one will have about double the amount of pages and content and is for "die-hard, true tattoo collectors".

I have a friend who got "No Regets" or some variation on it, though I've only seen the pictures on Facebook. She got the intentional misspelling because it was supposed to be clever, because she's a writer, though I think she actually works in a coffee shop.

Do you mean like Thomas Hooper style? Just go to Thomas Hooper, he does it far better than all his imitators. There's not really anybody in Montreal who does that style adequately. The only person I can think of who might, though I've never seen him do anything like that, is Jean-Michel Manutea at Imago though he seems to do more straightforward tribal. He is amazing though. Cory Ferguson in Oakville, Ontario does really nice blackwork/dotwork and I think he'll be at the Montreal convention. Mikel in Victoria, BC, same thing.

Hi Lynne and welcome to LST. A week after a tattoo is too soon to tell how it's going to look once it's fully healed so give it some time to settle into the skin and see how it looks then.

Too much joking on here about this, somebody needs to pony up and soon.

All of that, I should add, are things that I've actually done in craft brewing so these super industrial processes aren't just for the huge macrobreweries. All that stuff about lovingly handcrafting small batches comes from the marketing people. As for making beer, have you watched that Chad Koeplinger interview on here where he talks about that at the end of the day tattooing, regardless of what you are actually tattooing, comes down to lining and shading? I more or less feel that way about brewing. In the day to day work of brewing, the process for making an imperial stout that's going to be aged for months on oak is in reality not very different than making an adjunct-filled lager. I get more satisfaction out of doing my skilfully than out of brewing one particular style of beer. I will always happily drink a Harpoon IPA.