Today I was supposed to meet up with Jen G and of course I was running late. I ended up meeting up with her a half hour later luckily and we headed down to Five Two Tattoo on the way weI ran into Sean of The Transit (oddly enough today I was wearing my The Transit shirt that has the red airplane on it) then we made a quick detour to The Capital Music Hall so I could get some new posters from Scallen. Then it was back on track. As soon as I talked to Joel in the shop I realized I had forgotten my cash and exclaimed "Crap! I forgot to go to the bank. I'll be right back." Jen was nice enough to make jokes that made me even more nervous about getting inked. So I we get back to the shop and Joel tells me he's setting up. So after a little while he says we can go on back. Craig was tattooing {url=http://suicidegirls.com/girls/Noelle]Sucide Girl Noelle. Joel popped the stencil on me and had me check it in the mirror. So after positioning my arm he said he would try a small black line first so I could get used to the feeling. It was definitely not what I was expecting, I could barely feel the needle poking my skin.
He did all the outline work and I really was not feeling much pain at all. I was having a problem with a being twitchy. I think Joel was getting a little frustrated with me for twitching so much but it was a totally involuntary thing. He and Craig teased me a bit calling me "Captain McTwitchy" and threatening to knock me out. It was enough to put me at more ease. I just kept doing the rythmic breathing I learned back when I did martial arts and focused on one point in the room. That point happened to the be a painting of Yoda.
Here is the completed line work
Then the shading started. Well that was even less painfull that the line work...for a little while. When Joel was working higher up on my shoulder I made this face a lot.
Here is the finished shading. The pictures are a little blurry unfortunately.
The colour work was a little more painful than anything else, but it was all bearable.
After about 3 hours of having needles poked in and out of my skin the tattoo was finished. Here is some left over blue ink that makes me look like one of those Gatorade commercials, but more importantly it shows how the tattoo wraps around my arm.
Here is a fairly blury, fairly dark, and fairly bloody shot of the finished product.
Joel cleaned it up and put a bandage on it. He then gave me my aftercare instructions. He told me to come back in a week for a checkup and to schedule a touch-up and the finger project.
When I think about it the two most painful things were when he swabbed the tattoo with soap and when my ass fell asleep and went numb in the chair
Tomorrow I can take off the bandage and I have to do a serious washing of the tattoo, expect more pictures tomorrow.