At A Glance
Author	Shannon
IAM	glider
When	Five years ago
Artist	Shane Faulkner
Studio	King of Fools
Location	Toronto

At the point in my life that this story takes place, I was working as a body jeweller, and occasionally working the counter at a tattoo shop. After work one day we were sitting out in the back room talking and eating. The conversation moved to the few people back then that were getting very heavy all-black work. By all-black, I mean large expanses of nothing but black, not just a "tribal" tattoo. Shane, my tattoo artist turned to me and said, "Shannon, I dare you to tattoo your arms all black."

Little did he know this was a dare that he would regret, not I!

I of course agreed -- you can't turn down a dare and still be a man after all*. We agreed that we would start the next day. That night I drew a fractal look that would serve as a negative space band, and decided vaguely where I'd like the black space to start and end. My decision wasn't really that creative; I'd just capped it at the wrist and elbow, with a couple of triangles knocked out of it as negative space.

The next day Shane checked out what I'd drawn, and we came to the conclusion that my fractal design probably wouldn't translate that well into a tattoo... At least not without more work that I wanted to put into it -- it was my intention to get a huge tattoo that day, even if it meant compromising the design. More seriously though, I trusted Shane's judgement as an artist and knew that the two of us would be able to make as good a design in fifteen minutes as we could in a week. Drawing a set of Tibetan- style flames that vaguely matched the shape of the band I'd designed took about five minutes, but actually mirroring it so the two arms would match took much longer.

That first day we managed to get the outline of each arm in place. Every few days after that we put another hour into in, filling it an eighth at a time. Once we'd hit the second arm though, the spaces between appointments was getting longer -- it's not as if tattooing solid black is particularly fun for a tattoo artist, and Shane was beginning to dread our appointments. He told me he'd been waking up with cold sweats after having nightmares about tattooing me -- his dreams consisted of him waking up late at night, hearing my voice calling him. When he'd get up, he'd look out his window and see me standing in the dark, illuminated by a streetlight, pointing at the untattooed parts of my arm.

Luckily we finished the tattoos not long after that, and with minimal psychological damage. They were monstrous... Absolutely the most imposing tattoo any of us had ever seen. They were overwhelming, but I still somehow managed to hide them from my parents for two years or so... I'm sure they wondered why I was wearing long sleeves every time I saw them, but nothing was ever said about it.

Anyway, eventually I decided I wanted to take the step of pulling the tattoos down onto my hands -- long before I was even tattooed, I'd always wanted hand tattoos. I constantly drew them on myself and found watching them move mesmerizing. I held back on tattooing my hands because I knew that especially because I was doing heavy solid black, there really was "no going back". The design I'd worked out was basically an extension of the negative space triangles down onto my hands. It called for the four triangles, as well as a second smaller band around the wrist.

Pounding in the black on my arms had been a relatively pain-free procedure as tattoos go, but my hands were far more painful than I'd expected... However, I found the whole "transition" from a person who could still hide their mods to a person who had made a permanent public statement quite nervewracking and terrifying. That sensation is probably what I remember most from getting my hands tattooed.

Doing the lines on my knuckles and on the insides of my wrists took a few hits to get the ink in, but overall the lines are strong and solid. We did tattoo over some script on the insides of my wrists, but because it was in white ink, it's faded enough over time that it's not a big deal.

The problem with getting the hands done is that I have pretty big hands. As such, the size of the new work radically changed the look of the whole piece. I loved the forearms on their own, and I love the hands on their own, but to be honest, together each one took away from the other... There just wasn't enough black "bulk" in the tattoo any more. It had overnight gone from being huge to being tiny.

Eventually I corrected this as much as I could by extending the tops of the black up my arms, bringing the mass I'd been looking for back into the tattoo. I'm not sure that it looks as big as it did when I first got it, but I'm still very happy with it.

I'm sure I'll expand this work as well... I'm thinking about bringing more black down onto the hands and bulking that up. As with all things in my life, it's an evolving process, and I'm learning about myself as I go.

Finally, I should let people know that Shane Faulkner who did the tattoo can be found online at www.kingoffools.com

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* If you are humor-impaired, that was a joke. The real reason I went ahead with it is that one lesson life has taught me is that if you're honest with yourself, it's often your first instictual decision that's the best one. This is certainly true for me for all things creative and artistic.