How can I design my own tattoo? – Giving Your Tattoos a Personal Touch
Now that tattoos are becoming so much more acceptable to the mainstream, a lot of people are wanting more than something out of a book or off of a wall. A lot of people are asking: How can I design my own tattoo?
Designing your own tattoo is going to boil down to a few different steps. First there is finding the basic theme. Next, the theme is interpreted into some form of rudimentary design. Finally, the design is fine tuned into something which is both atheistically pleasing to you and yet functional within the art form of tattoo.
Finding the basic theme should usually have something to do with your personal philosophy, history, or other meaningful part of your life. This should be something which is unlikely to change over time. Try not to come up with something you HOPE will not change over time, but something which is UNLIKELY to change.
For instance, it is unlikely that your birthday, your kids’ birthdays or the date on which you father died are going to change. Whereas you HOPE the name of your present girlfriend or wife isn’t going to change. When considering this bit of information, keep in mind an old tattoo proverb which roughly goes: The easiest way to get divorced is to tattoo your spouse’s name on yourself.
That having been said, perhaps you love the sea, are a pilot, or a local restaurant chain has offered to pay you if you tattoo a dish of their food on your bald head. There are all sorts of ways to come up with a basic theme. The rule here is to go with a theme which really means something to you and avoid hiring yourself out as a billboard, unless you can remove the ad when you’re not at work.
Now that you have the basic theme, try to spice it up a bit. Make it more meaningful. So, you love the sea, yet every time you ship out with the navy, you have to leave your three kids behind. How about an ocean scene with three lighthouses in the distance? Or maybe a nautical star which always points towards their birth dates? Or maybe the GPS coordinates of home tattooed on a dolphin’s behind?
The idea here is to take two ideas and somehow blend them together in order to come up with more interesting imagery than a tattoo of Webster’s dictionary definition of ‘Sea’. Although, that might be kind of cool.
Okay, so now that you have the idea, you can scour the web and art books for pictures of things you want to incorporate into your tattoo. Manipulate these images with programs, such as Photoshop, into the final piece and then print it out. You could also learn how to draw, but keep in mind that designing your own tattoo is about the concept. One of the best ways to get it done is to take your new ideas to the tattoo artist you have chosen and then let him draw them up in his own style. Remember that ‘How can I design my own tattoo?’ is not necessarily ‘How can I draw my own tattoo?’
How can I cover my tattoo? – Some are Easier to Cover than Others
For people who have tattoos, both those who are glad they have them and those who are not, there comes a time when the question, ‘How can I cover my tattoo?’ arises.
For those of us who are happy about our decisions to get tattoos, I submit the answer, ‘Try a scarf’. For some of us it’s as easy as putting on a pair of pants or wearing a top which isn’t quite as low cut as usual.
Yet for some the answers are more difficult. For example, Jane Doe gets tanked on Long Island Ice Teas one night and decides to go out and get a tattoo which truly expresses the way she feels, while she is drunk and disorderly. Upon regaining consciousness the next morning, she experiences anxiety and remorse when she realizes that she has a tattoo of a stern looking bald eagle displaying a fist, which one can only assume must be made of feathers, with its middle finger/feather extended upward. Under the patriotic plumage are the words ‘America…Love it, or up yours!’ which on her girlish frame takes up all the space from shoulder to elbow. Living at home with her father, a preacher, makes covering up a tattoo for this person an entirely more complicated and critical endeavor.
Then there are those of us who have tattoos we love, but also endure employers who don’t understand our desire to wear our flaming hearts wrapped in thorns and banners saying ‘Mom’ on our sleeves. As if blood dripping down from the tattooed thorn holes ripping away at our flesh is somehow going to affect customer relations at Thong-Mart in a negative way.
For these times we have the basics. Cover it with clothing while pretending it’s fashionable to wear long sleeves in July. Cover it with a bandage, making it appear to repeat customers that you have a terminally unhealed wound instead of a KISS ARMY tattoo from 1979. Cover it with makeup and try not to rub up against anything or get caught in the rain after you learn how to get the makeup thick enough to hide the tattoo while still looking like it’s your normal flesh color and texture, instead of some kind of strange skin disorder. Or you can just cover it with some sort of neoprene or leather holster for carrying your mp3 player or work tools. For those of you with a bulls-eye on your forehead, maybe a nice headband/flashlight combo to let everyone know you are prepared for that next daytime blackout and simultaneous eclipse of the sun.
Oh and then there is one more way to take care of that cover up. Just ask your local tattoo artist, ‘How can I cover up my tattoo?’ He will no doubt answer, ‘With a larger tattoo of course.’
