Things have been a little hectic between a busy work schedule and having a baby at home, so I kinda forgot to post an update after my 103rd appointment. Fortunately for us all, appointment 104 was on a different area of my body, so I was able to get a clean shot of the work done during 103. Overall I’m not sure there is much to say for either of these appointments. Of course, it’s always a pleasure to just be engaged in the process. Tebori is also always so much more pleasant to experience than machine tattooing. We’ve been bouncing back and forth between outline and shading a little bit more than usual over the last few months which has also been nice. I am eager to see the outline finished, but even as I consider that, the pictures of the shading remind me of how much this tattoo will change as the shading and color are complete. It’s all very exciting! Horizakura asked to cancel my next appointment because of a project he’s working on, so I will likely not have another update here for a few weeks. I have been thinking more and more about diving into some of these books I have. I think it would be useful to have some information about them here for the public to see. Perhaps I can squeeze one of those in before my next appointment.

Appointment 103 – 1 hour tebori on the clouds and bar just below the clouds

104 – 2 hours of tebori – You’ll notice that two of these photos are very similar. I wanted to illustrate how the tattoo (specifically the dragon’s head) and lighting changes by simply hunching my back a little. I think it’s important to keep body position in mind when you’re looking at photos of tattoos. Shapes and reflections can change pretty dramatically with even slight body movement and you shouldn’t necessarily be so quick to judge an artist’s rendering from a photo. Certainly things like the smoothness of shading or clean linework won’t be affected, but proportions and shape and light might be.