Biomechanical Tattoo – An ancient story.
I tattooed this guy approximately seventeen years ago, at the time it looked like a good Gothic tattoo. There had been some naive choices on my part, mostly I wasn’t yet fully aware of how a tattoo changes over time.
After so many years, and because of weight changes, the tattoo had suffered and was no longer as appealing as it seemed almost twenty years ago, without mentioning the technical and stylistic evolution I’ve had over the years, both personally and professionally.
So a couple of years ago he asked me to re-work that tattoo to bring it to new splendor, an idea that for various reasons fell into oblivion.
He recently contacted me with the same idea, but after discussing and evaluating my latest biomech work he agreed to do a cover-up.
The old tattoo had somewhat faded so there was no need to undergo laser removal.
After evaluating several of my ready biomech tattoos designs he chose the one he liked best and which in my opinion would be more appropriate for a cover-up.
Having no intention of tattooing his entire arm (my ready-made projects for biomech tattoos are basically all designed as full-sleeves or backs) we chose a design that could be “split” without losing fluidity and harmony, including a couple of changes in order to insert a numeric code that had particular value for him.
All that was left to do was take measurements and transfer it on skin.
Limited pain tolerance
Unfortunately, his pain tolerance was not the best (there seems to have been a drastic drop in pain tolerance lately) so we had to spread the work over more sessions than planned.
Apart from this, everything went smoothly without major problems except for a long break between the first and last sessions.
Now that the biomech tattoo is complete, this guy is thinking about expanding it down to his wrist.
I suggested he get the entire sleeve but some people need to “digest” their tattooed body one piece at a time.
It’s always best to plan a large tattoo right from the very start rather than finding a way to expand it later, but if and when we’ll continue it won’t be much of a problem, I’m sure I will be able to expand it in the best possible way.
Below are pictures of the working process and a video of the tattoo more than a month after healing.