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Planning the tattoo - working with what's there.

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Fig. 01

Every tattoo has its own challenges, but Luke's arm had a couple of interesting problems. First of all, there were a few tattoos on his arm and he wanted two of them covered up. The forearm cover-up was tricky because it created a strong horizontal line on a part of the arm where we wanted a vertical flow to the tattooing. The tribal sun on the deltoid wasn't easy to cover up, but it wasn't impossible. You have to take into account the tribal sun was small compared to the size of the tattoo we covered it with.

Luke wanted a dragon to fill his entire arm, he had some reference and knew what color he wanted things. That's how I'm happier working, I really feel strongly that it's not my tattoo... it's the clients. I will resolve the drawing and make decisions about backgrounds and layouts, but the client must choose the subject matter.

Luke also had two fairly large tattoos on his arm that are not going to be covered up. One on the inside of the bicep, and one on his elbow. This left me with a weird format. It's an entire arm from top to bottom, but because of the tattoos we're working around it's sort of tall and narrow with a hard cover-up right in the center at the top, and a harder cover up all the way around at the bottom.