tattoo ideas

i sat across from a guy and a group of his friends last week bar, and we started talking about tattoos. he said he had always imagined himself with a full sleeve, but he didn’t know what to get.

i asked his girlfriend, when you see tattoos on a man and they look hot, what do they look like?

she said, “tattoos are hot when they look like something i haven’t seen before or they’re done in a unique style. it makes me want to ask what it is and who did it.”

this is a problem a lot of people have. they know they want tattoos, but they don’t know what to get.

a tattooer i respect once said that the desire to get a tattoo always comes first. then we find the image, the artist, and the story that we tell ourselves about why we are getting tattooed.

when i started tattooing it was important to me that the tattoo had a reason and a story. i was very into doing illustrations.

i approached an artist to design a thigh tattoo for me. i had a tattoo on my opposite thigh, and i wanted the designs to complement each other.

the artist said, “why not extend the tattoo onto your lower leg and stomach too?”

i thought about it for a while and realized that i was so attached to the idea of symmetry. why is it so common for tattoos to be symmetrical? why is it so common to isolate an arm, a leg, a chest, etc. when there are so many other compositions that are possible?

during one of our sessions, i watched him enter a flow state and fill in a large area of the tattoo without drawing or transferring a stencil in advance. this is known as freehanding, which is something that tattoo collectors and artists get very excited about because it takes a lot of confidence.

we finished the tattoo in 40 hours, and it won an award at a convention.

my experience of getting this tattoo made me realize that what interested me the most about tattooing was activating the body, and i wanted to make bigger tattoos.

about a year later, it was the dead of winter, and i found myself very unhappy with my tattooing practice. i kept taking any project that came my way, even if i wasn’t passionate about it. i was burnt out.

i walked in the dark and the snow to an art supply store and bought a 3ft-wide roll of glassine.

a friend came to visit, and i said, let’s try something. i rolled out the glassine and asked him to lay down on it.

i traced out his silhouette.

the next day i painted an abstract form on the roll of glassine that cut down through the center of his body.