Frankly this tattoo was a bit of a disappointment. It’s also the reason you shouldn’t be afraid to be really specific with your artist.
I wanted a Piece of Heart from the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It’s a glowing heart inside a larger, heart-shaped crystal. My plan was to get the red heart in the center, then get the outline of each facet. I was going to come back for another session later and fill in the difficult blue/green shading. I thought that I was REALLY SPECIFIC with my artist; it turns out he had a totally different idea of what I wanted. I’m not sure how but he got the impression that this was going to be the only sitting ever, I wanted absolutely no color, and he should shade in the crystal in depressing black that makes the whole thing look like an emo, goth spiderweb.
I did double-check the stencil, and he had drawn the lines I wanted him to draw in the tattoo. He did not explain that the lines he’d drawn were merely guides to himself to know where to shade the crystal.
I keep telling myself this is fixable. I’ll go in for my second sitting (sooner rather than later) and get color added over the gray, and it will be the tattoo I originally wanted. It’s just a lesson. I didn’t want to be annoying and bug him and be really picky and particular. And now I have a tattoo that is basically the invert of the tattoo I actually asked for.
Placement of the tattoo is inspired by Care bears. Every Care Bear has a heart high on their right butt-cheek, canted slightly left. So that’s what I got. Now that I have it, I call myself Snark Bear.
The quality of the tattoo is, I think, amazing. The artist did an excellent job doing what he thought I wanted. This was simply a failure of communication.