Full color biomech sleeve tattoo. Orange, purple and yellow colors. Alien metal parts intersects on the arm with yellow lights coming from the inside. Done by by the best tattoo artist Jerry Magni, Bergamo, Milan, Lugano, ItalyA Biomech Sleeve.

A cover-up is always a total drag. Regardless of its size, it’s always, or almost always, an imposed limit over the creation of any design, and this guy came to me asking for exactly that.
He had a sort of DNA helix twisted around his arm.
A poorly conceived tattoo, badly designed and tattooed even worse, yet another demonstration that working in a studio doesn’t necessarily mean being able to do good work, on the contrary, unfortunately there are a lot of crappy tattooers out there, especially lately when even the last of the butchers wants to open a tattoo shop without knowing a thing about tattoos.

before cover-up People often think that a tattoo shop is a guarantee of professionalism and that the potential damages will be slight. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Any professional figure must attend a training program for a few years: hairdressers, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, etc.

For tattoo artists this is not the case. You just need to take a 20/30 hour course and even the last of the scratchers can open his studio and start scribbling on people’s skin. That’s absurd, especially if we think about the fact that they are supposed to create something that is going to stay indelibly on people’s skin.

But let’s put anger aside and get right to the point.
This client wanted to cover up that eye sore he deeply regretted with a Biomech. To me, a biomechanical tattoo is always like icing on the cake, and he came to me right when I was drastically evolving the style of my biomechs: fewer details, fewer mechanical parts, more simplicity and cleaner surfaces, not exactly suitable for a cover-up. So I showed him some things I had done in the past and some ideas I was developing on the way of this evolution. He liked the drawings I was working on, so he asked me to create something in that style.

The new style wasn’t suitable for a cover-up, so I suggested laser removal. After some hesitation, the client eventually listened to my advice and decided to do the removal. Having solved this problem, he then told me that he wanted to add an element to the design.

I was already worried before even knowing what it was.
Biomech is a style that doesn’t allow for big requests; the risk is that of ending up with something that has nothing to do with it or in any case with something that completely distorts its style and shape. To be more explicit, let’s say that when the client gets in the way, often art goes out the window, especially with a style where abstraction plays a vital role.

The element he wished to add was a pendant that reminded him of his father. Luckily, the piece of jewelry already had a biomechanical flare to it.
It was a split cross with a unique design, and as soon as I saw the pendant it reminded me of a spaceship. I would have reworked that to transform it in what could become the supporting structure of the entire Biomech.

After doing some sketches to show him what I had in mind, he asked me if it was possible to add some details linked to his father’s welding profession. Not a problem, adding elements that produced sparks would have been cool in this project.

So we scheduled a meeting to draw the draft directly on his arm, I would then develop it calmly at my drawing table and later on my computer waiting for the laser removal to lighten the old tattoo and start the project.

third sitting Full color biomech sleeve tattoo. Orange, purple and yellow colors. Alien metal parts intersects on the arm with yellow lights coming from the inside. Done by by the best tattoo artist Jerry Magni, Bergamo, Milan, Lugano, ItalyAfter several laser sessions and almost one year of waiting (you need to wait approx. two months between laser sessions), we found that the old tattoo had not been removed or lightened completely.
Some of it was still there, but luckily a good part had faded considerably and in some spots it had even faded away completely, so disguising it wouldn’t have been much of a problem and we decided to start this Biomech.

Despite some minor difficulties during the process due to his elbow, he couldn’t straighten his arm completely due to a congenital problem, credit is due to this guy for having a great pain tolerance, he could sit on the chair for hours without even blinking.
Too bad we lost a good amount of time chatting instead of working, but I am lucky enough to have smart and interesting people as clients, with whom it is always pleasant to confront myself and chat.

Thanks to his strength and dedication we were able to finish the entire project pretty quickly.
A Biomech tattoo we are both proud of 🙂

 

Look at the pictures of the working process below.