I'd like to share some tips on what kind of hack not to get tattooed by. As you can probably guess, I got a couple of bad tattoos before realizing it. I wasn't drunk or high, just uninformed. Hopefully, what follows might help somebody not make the mistakes that I made. But then there's some people who just have to get burned before they can learn, and to those people, this will be useless.
At A Glance Author himeeg When Ten years ago or more Artist Mike Location Milledgeville, GA Anyways, I am now a seasoned tattoo collector with a whole lot of experience under the needle. I've been getting tattooed for about 9 years now and I have been worked on by some really great artists who have given me some beautiful tats to show off. I must tell you however, that the first tattoo that I got was terrible. And the what follow will explain why.
The first tattoo I ever got was a word which has great deal of significance to me - the word 'CRUCIFIED'. I got it tattooed on my left upper arm, just below my shoulder. I had been wanting to get a tattoo for some months, but wanting one was as far as I had gotten. So, one day while I was driving around in the town where I went to college, I saw a small sign that said 'TATTOO' with a phone number. So I stopped, went in and talked to the guy a little bit and looked at some of his work. Now, I had never been into a tattoo shop before, plus I had no friends with tats, and this was in the days before the Internet was big, (like 1996).
So there I was, having no idea what to expect and having nothing to compare the experience to. I didn't know a good tat from a bad one. I kind of thought they were all the same. 'A tattoo's a tattoo,' I thought. Right? No way! When I asked the guy how long he'd been tattooing, he said, 'A couple of months.' Hello! Big huge red flag, which I didn't see (like I said). Now if anybody ever says that to you, turn yourself immediately around, open the door, and run like the devil himself was chasing you. What a moron I was to let this guy get near me! This guy was a total scratcher with no experience who had just scraped enough money together to rent this office space and put up this 12" x 18" sign with 'TATTOO' on it.
So I asked him about pricing and all that and he quoted me some price, I think it was like $60. Now that was a waste of money, considering the result, but at the same time it taught me a good lesson. I told him I'd come back in a few days once I worked up some artwork. When I came back after a few days, I brought him the artwork. Now at this point, a good artist would make a stencil and do a transfer and all that. But this guy, instead of making a stencil like a quality artist would, he draws it freehand on my arm. He says something to me like, 'I'll just look at this and draw it on there freehand,' almost bragging that he was good or something whereas he was really about to mess me up with his sorry excuse for art. Another big red flag no no. Like I said, if you go to any reputable artist, even if they do some custom art for you that they draw themselves, they will do a stencil transfer, expect for the rare occasion when the artist is really amazing or doing some kind of freehand tribal thing.
So he put it to me and it hurt, like it always does. But then, this guy didn't have the ability to be gentle (I actually had one artist who almost put me to sleep because he had such a great touch with the needle, almost like a massage; this guy was not even close to that). But anyways, he did it and I said, 'That is great!' like the uninformed idiot that I really was. So then he goes into the bandaging process and starts giving me the instructions for healing it. And this is the part that I get to in the story where the hate I have for this guy REALLY rises. The instructions he gave me for healing it were terrible (to put it mildly) and my tat got all jacked up because it didn't heal right. He told me to put a mixture of Ben-Gay and Flex-All 454 on it! He told me it was some new innovative way to heal tattoos. What an idiot! And I mean myself as much (or more) as I mean that stupid guy. I'll describe briefly how it healed: these really huge scabs developed and little by little, they came off leaving behind nothing but the outline. So, after it healed, for the longest time I had this stupid looking tattoo, which was really nothing but the outline and you could hardly even tell what it said. And the bad part was that I didn't really know any better.
Now, when he did it, he told me that if it needed touching up, I could come back and he would do it for free. So I went back after some time tried to find him. So here comes the next sign of a hack: he'd lost his shop. I had to track him down to get him to fix his work. I tracked him down only because I happened to be driving around one day and saw this house with the same little 12" x 18" sign with 'TATTOO' on it that had drawn me to him the first time. By then, he was working out of the back room of his house. Then when I went to get my 'free' touch up, he hit me up for money and gave me this hard luck story and stuff like that. Now he was a really nice guy and all that (nice doesn't do anything for the sucky tattoo I got), but he had almost no experience and plus I had no clue. I was so ignorant and uninformed that it wasn't funny.
My advice for anyone wanting to get tattooed for the first time would be to ask around. First, ask anyone you know who has a tattoo where they got tattooed and ask about their experience. If an artist is good, you'll know (and the same thing is true if he sucks). If you don't know someone personally who is tattooed, do some research on the web. The best piece of research that you can do though is just to go to the shop and ask lots of questions like: 1) how long have they been at it 2) can I see your portfolio. If they say they've been at it for a number of years, that's great. That's exactly what you want, someone with experience. And also, if their portfolio is not attractive to you, then don't let them touch you. Know also that a reputable artist will not mind answering any of your questions because they have tattoos and understand how costly and difficult it is to fix a bad piece of work.
Although I still have that first tattoo, I have had it completely redone because it healed so poorly, and I've had more added to it. It looks now like it would've looked had I done it right the first time. I spent more money and time than I should have, but oh well, live and learn. So yeah, I did have a bad first tattoo experience, but I have gotten many many more tattoos since then from reputable artists who do wonderful work that is well worth the money. Don't be afraid to get it done; just be careful where you get it done!