My name is Tony, I’m from AU and have been tattooing for about six months now 🙂 Yeah, I’m a novice, I will post some pics of tatts I have completed eventually so you can all see how I’m traveling. It all started when I hooked up with this really cool chick and we moved in together. She hadn’t picked up a tattoo gun for about ten years, but has been tattooing since she was a whipper snapper (grew up around bikies). So she has been teaching me the finer points of tattooing.

We have been growing our kit slowly and fine tuning our skills by tattooing our friends, initially for free but once we realized we where pumping out quality work and really enjoying ourselves started covering the running costs. We have a room dedicated to tattooing in our house and all the appropriate equipment. My motives for joining an online community of tattooists and tattoo enthusiasts stems from a desire to learn more about tattooing and share in my experiences with others. For instance, last friday night one of our dear friends came over with a touching story about a mate who had passed away and he wanted to get thongs (jandals/flip flops/etc) tattooed on his feet. Apparently this friend (who died) was kicked out of a shopping center for not having footwear so he drew on his feet with a magic marker subsequently allowing him to ‘hang’ with mates at the shopping center. He was originally ejected by a security guard and rejoined his friends after the aforementioned doodling on his feet. He died in tragic circumstances at the young age of 19. The motivation behind the tattoo was to keep on moving.

The day prior to our friend asking us to tattoo his feet we had just acquired a new power supply so at this stage we had two power supplies, three footswitches, eight guns (some too heavy to use for extended periods of time but still useful for small jobs) and various brands of inks (which I will ask questions about shortly). Subsequently this was the first tattoo my girl friend and I could undertake simultaneously, which made it special to me. Using some flash on the PC we designed a tatt (modified three tatts to create one) for him which took a couple hours as he had no idea what he wanted. She took his right foot and I tackled his left. After four hours we had finished and to be perfectly honest it was the most fun I have had tattooing to date, with a meaningful story as a bonus.

here is a pic of one foot:

….and now I would like to ask you about inks: We have been using mainly Millenium, Star Brite, and Intenze. By themselves they are beautiful and we’ve not had any problems, but it seems when you mix them to create different colours they don’t hold, it seems that the composition changes. I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. For example my girl friend was tattooing herself the other night with a composition (two drops Millienium “Forest Gump Green” and sixty drops StarBrite “Brite White”) and the ink was behaving weirdly. Basically it would drop out of her skin when she wiped it and it had a very strange consistency that is, any spilt would dry and go ‘powderish’ and ‘flakey’ it is the queerest thing I have seen so far. Well that and a power supply with no voltage markings…….but thats another story for another time. Peace – Tony