Tattoo apprenticeship week 3

Week 3:

This week has been a little bit interesting mostly due to the fact that I was gone two days, due to Aros  (my husband) getting Lasik, and The boys tattooing at the Ray Price Harley Davidson Event all this weekend. However it has not been without it's learnings…. Oh no…. In fact! This week has been full of learnings and I think I made a couple of very big steps on my journey!

Taking apart, cleaning, learning all the parts, and properly reassembling tattooing machines! Tattooing machines (at least the older ones) Are finicky beasts that don't take shit from anyone and will happily not work right if you don't have them tuned right. Well, having now taken them apart, I know why. What I thought was a solid piece up on the top of the machine, is in fact, just a giant Spring. A giant spring that more or less goes willy nilly and hits on everything else under the sun, and is stopped by a screw that more or less prevents it from flying off into space.

Everything wears on these machines.  Really, the more I look at them, the more they look like someone just stuck crap into them till they started doing what they were supposed to be doing. Dongles, wires, and an O-ring where you wouldn't think an O-ring would go… and BLAMO it works!

I am lucky that I have a visual memory, and one that randomly makes up shit so it's easy to remember what things are. Like 3-2-1-contact screw! Or Clip board, clip cord, upper and lower clip cord posts! (I blame this on the fact that I have been watching children's educational TV since I have been tiny and I have to make up little jingles to remember anything important, or associate it with something else.)

Another thing I have learned this week is if you are getting text on you… MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS SPELLED RIGHT, AND IS THE ACTUAL WORD YOU WANT.

Also…..

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT USE SIRI TO SEND IMPORTANT E-MAILS…. SHE WILL FUCK THEM UP.

Case in point, one of the cool tattoos my boss did in the first week I was there, was this cool looking star thing with words like "Respect, Family, trust," Ect in it, recessed into this guys arm. Well, it was the guy's wife who was ordering it and she ordered "respect, family, trust, faith, and Hobart". My boss was confused at this, as was I. So, we asked, many times, if it looked right. We got approvals every step of the way, the sketch, the tight line work, the stencil, and then the tattoo itself. The guy was super happy with it!

Then when he got home and started cleaning it, he saw "Hobart" and freaked out a bit. He showed his wife and asked her to look at the E-mail. At that point she was so freaked out she couldn't speak to him for an hour.  She had indeed sent "Hobart". What she wanted to send was "Honor".  So he called us and let us know about the mess-up. This was a big mess-up, but the end result was my boss adding cracks to change the B to an N, using white ink to change the letters and in general just adding more detail. It's going to take a couple more times with the white ink to make the bridge of the B go away, but the end result is worth it. Lesson learned… don't trust Siri.

Because of the Harley bikefest, I got to see a couple more of the guys tattoo, including this really awesome gothic tree all over this lady's back. Everyone tattoos a little differently. It's interesting to watch!

I also learned that when you tattoo people, they lose skin cells like it's going out of style. This creates dust. All of the dust, everywhere. Right now I am cleaning my bosses room, and it feels like withinan hour of dusting, there is dust on everything again. Dust dust dust. Did I mention that we clean, a lot? All the time? Every surface? And that paper towels add to the dumbness of the dust because they leave little pieces and parts of themselves behind .

After I wrote that bit about the dust part we figured out part of our problem, one of the air intakes's filters hadn't been changed in who knows how long, so we decided that now was a good time to re-dust everything again (a day after writing that first bit) and change all the air filters! What a change that makes!

Today specifically was another big step because I have begun to work with a tattoo machine to draw with. My boss me a ball point pen that had been stuck in the business end of a tattoo machine, and told me to practice. So I did. I drew a couple flowers, then some horse parts (which I always default too when left to my own ends), and then I turned the page and decided that I wanted to do one of those really spiffy tattoo roses. Somewhere in the middle of that I was like OH GOD I WANT TO DRAW A GEISHA (these moods hit me). So… because nothing I draw has to make sense, I stuck the giant Rose on the Geisha!

Tattoo machines are heavey, and bulky, and in general, akward to work around. But I made it work!

YAY!

Here is hoping that next week holds just as much interesting fun as this past one!