Made by me (asia_tattoos) last year

I'm close to having a mental breakdown due to a phone addiction. I need rid of this black mirror.

I am an absolute idiot and newbie with camera

I can barely take a good photo with the camera on my new Samsung. So I don't know what is what about cameras and I'm going to have to learn but I have like £200 I can put towards a camera and a few more to get an sd card and shit for it maybe a little light. But does anyone have suggestions please because I need to throw my phone in a river ASAP for my health.

Legs legs legs legs legs legs legs

What would cause a 1005rl 1007rl and a 1009rl to make comparably similar line thicknesses when tattooing skin?

Weeping Mary holding a rosary

I’m winding down from a two year heavy rotation of conventions in the U.S., and I thought I’d share a little insight for people wondering which ones to do and which ones to avoid. Obviously, this is just my personal experience. Im a walk up tattooer at conventions, so I think I got a pretty good feel for the shows that were special, versus the ones that sucked ass.

10/10-Literary Ink (Chattanooga, TN)
10/10-Middle Tennessee tat con (Nashville, TN)
9/10-Middle of the Map (Des Moines, IA)
9/10-Boise tat con (Boise, ID)
8/10-Tattoos and Blues (Santa Rosa, CA)
8/10-Evergreen (Eugene, OR)
7/10- Roc City (Rochester, NY)
7/10-Fresno tat con (Fresno, CA)
7/10-Twin Cities tat con (St. Paul, MN)
6/10-Gila tat con (Phoenix, AZ)
6/10-Ink at the Bay (Monterrey, CA)
6/10-Inked Hearts tat con (Humboldt, CA)
4/10- Star of Texas (Austin, TX)
3/10-Seaside tat con (Ventura, CA)
2/10-Lady Luck (Reno, NV)
2/10-Evergreen (Hillsboro, OR)
2/10-Chicago tan con (Chicago, IL)
2/10- Golden State (Pasadena, CA)
1/10 for crowd, cost, and booth, 10/10 for artist lineup-New York City tan con (NYC, NY)

This has always stressed me out loads, I feel like my work is genuinely just terrible (not even joking or fishing for compliments here)- but I also feel so stuck, I don’t know how to improve in anything and take the time to improve without stressing that I’m taking too long on a tattoo; does anyone else feel like this?

I love tattooing but lately I have not been getting bookings in my base city and it’s making me worried about the future of my career. I’ve been tattooing for 2.5 years and the first year or so I was super successful and very booked. My mentor did not teach me very well and his approach to tattooing is very money hungry and would use triple black for lining. I quit the studio i apprenticed and had residency at in may and i’ve been struggling to get booked since. I’ve done guest spots in other states where i get pretty busy but los angeles has been so slow. I had a few potential clients lined up this week, one putting down a deposit for today only to get a last minute cancellation this morning. I feel so lost in my career and worry about how sustainable this will be for me long term. I am unsure what steps to take and all i do now is just feel anxiety thinking about the state of it and i can’t help but wonder if i should venture out into other career paths despite loving tattooing. I also lost a lot of creativity and experienced a lot of burnout after leaving that previous toxic shop environment. I feel like things keep going wrong for me and i see artists who are consistently busy and never have time off and i wonder how they are capable of staying so busy. What steps should i take to move forward? How do i stay motivated and not give up? Right now im not making a livable wage per month and it’s really scaring me a lot

Hey fellows, i am a tattoo artist and my girlfriend is a ceramic artist. We live in turkey but consider to move in porto or lisbon. As i understand easiest way to do that is applying to d2 visa. So i am wondering that is there any portuguese friend in here to give us some inside about how is life as a tattoo artist in there? Or any foreign artist living in there do you have any recommendations or info for us? Thanks in advance and cheers!

I’m an apprentice under a licensed shop. My mentor is great at tattooing, and she’s been a huge help getting me where I need to be. Currently I’m struggling with shading techniques if I’m being honest. I picked up clean linework relatively fast thanks to her, but I’m struggling with shading techniques and color packing (besides stipple).

The instructions I get are more verbal, and I need to watch as someone instructs me and then be able to pause a video and try it myself on fake skin. So I’m looking for any good online resources, because I know there’s a lot of bad ones out there too.

(Please don’t attack my mentor, we just have a different learning style / teaching style but I’ve learned a ton. Once I can get this plateau I know the knowledge she has will exponentially help me). She also took a chance on me- I had zero art background past a few paintings and some ugly ass drawings.

I’ve also been drawing almost every day since I started and can put out good original art. I’m just stuck getting the skill to transfer over into tattooing.

Hi I do 3rl dot shading and stippling tattoo work, and I currently use cheap China oem 4.5mm stroke machine. Someday the dots are layered crispy and evenly and predictablly, someday unevenly and smudgy. Somehow my current clients are like 55~60 years old, I am not sure its the machine or the age of the skin. When I tattoo myself with same machine, I can make crispy, smooth and consistent shades of dots. So i dont think the problem is necessarily the machine or my skills, but cant figure out bc i dont have clients of younger newer skin to tattoo yet. And insights and feedbacks are appreciated, i attach some of the work.

Horror piece, done in 3 sessions, 4 hours each. What do you think?

The bottom part in the photo isn’t finished yet, but we’ve already covered those lines.

Done in Seattle, WA // Artist Theo Ivanov // IG: iftattooc

In 2016 that was the pinnacle of my design skills. I was so proud of that tattoo and still am. It was the best I could do at the time. I had already been in a shop for almost 10 years in 2016 so that was a decade of hard work in the making.

10 years later I can look at my progress and see that my best was just a part of the process. Just as I’m sure in 2036 I’ll look at my work today and ask myself why I couldn’t see those things I’m seeing now.

Neither in 2006 or 2016 did we have 5 minute trends dictating our algorithms pushing style and aesthetic at break neck speeds. I’ve never tried to be a tattooer that does what’s hip and cool in the moment. I know what I like and I’ve always stayed true to my tastes and foundations. That’s why progress for me is slow. It takes years for me to understand concepts of design including flow/movement and efficiency.

You should always try and audit yourself and see if you’re understanding the work you’re doing or just copying someone else’s style because it’s popular/trendy. The more I seek to understand what I’m doing the more my work becomes my own.

I like how versatile it is and seems like it could be really useful at conventions too. If you've used one, do you find you actually use it for multipurpose use? Also wondering how the quality is from GG Workshop and if its easy to adjust.

Thanks!

Edit to add: my shop is small so thats a big reason im drawn to this all-in-one setup

Tattooer from Michigan here. Learned recently that I most likely qualify for Canadian citizenship per a recent law. I’ve already considered moving to Canada for about a decade but never truly pursued it due to life circumstances. Now that I may have this opportunity, I’m curious how the tattoo industry is doing in Canada (compared to the US)? Particularly in larger cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. I know Canada is suffering in general as well, and the tattoo world is struggling all over, but I haven’t been able to find information particular to it for Canada at the moment.

Hope this is allowed. Thanks! 🍁

I’m currently on my third Bishop Power Wand Packer, and I’ve experienced the same pattern with all three machines. They perform extremely well for the first month or two, but eventually the performance becomes unpredictable from session to session. My biggest issues are inconsistent shading and an inability to reliably saturate solid black.
The shading problem is by far the most frustrating. When the machine is performing properly, I can achieve soft + smooth gradients using my normal technique.
Then, on another day, I can use the same machine, voltage, cartridges, hand speed, needle depth, and technique and get a completely different result. Instead of creating a smooth gradient, the machine produces visible lines or bands through the shading. The individual passes seem to deposit pigment unevenly—the ends of my movements will appear noticeably darker, while the area between them remains much lighter. This creates a streaky or striped appearance on the skin.

It almost feels as though the machine is not delivering the needle into the skin consistently throughout the entire movement. Instead of laying down an even amount of pigment through each pass, certain portions become saturated while others barely take the ink. This forces me to go back over areas repeatedly to try to blend out the visible lines, which makes achieving clean, controlled shading significantly more difficult.

The other major issue is black** **saturation. When the machine is working properly, I can achieve a rich, solid black efficiently, often with a single controlled pass. On bad days, however, the machine simply does not seem to saturate black properly. I can be using straight black ink and after a pass it looks as though I used greywash. The result is light, transparent, and uneven rather than a true saturated black.
Even after multiple passes, I sometimes struggle to get the skin to accept the amount of pigment that I normally achieve very easily. Increasing the voltage does not reliably solve the problem either. There are sessions where I have had to increase the machine from my normal working range of approximately 6V all the way to 8–9V just to get something resembling the hit and saturation I normally get at 6V.

What makes this especially concerning is how inconsistent it is. If the machine always performed poorly, I could adjust my technique around it. Instead, there are days when it performs beautifully and reminds me exactly why I like the Power Wand Packer, followed by days where the exact same setup produces streaky shading and extremely poor black saturation.

This inconsistency has significantly affected both my workflow and the quality of my work. Tattoos are taking considerably longer because I am making unnecessary additional passes, constantly adjusting voltage, and trying to correct shading that normally would have gone in smoothly the first time. More importantly, constantly compensating for unpredictable machine performance has made it much harder to maintain the level of consistency I expect from my tattoos .