How to Tattoo a Person

Video Transcript

"When people come in to get tattoos, they, they have many reasons for it. They might be getting a name for a loved one, maybe in memory of for someone who's passed away. Sometimes the shop will provide designs for the customers to look at and lots of times they'll bring in their own design. If we have to assist in, they may have a magazine, they any form of art that we can use to make a stencil for them, that's how we're goin' about that. Lots of tattoo shops have once in on this flash on the wolf and flash is a design that are done by other tattoo artists for people who are just in the business for drawing flash. And they can go through that, find designs if they don't necessarily want exactly want that designs she has on it, they can be changed around to fit that person's need. So, here's the design that we come up with and so this is what we call the master copy. This master copy is placed into a stencil type paper, this didn't run through a machine and you, you get a stencil that's got a carbon outline of this exact design. When applying the stencil, the first thing you have to do is prepare the skin. We also call this skin inspection. You take a little of your grain soap, rub around the skin. If the area hasn't been shaved, you would get any hair that might be in the area off. You don't want to have any hairs sticking out where the tattoo's going to be which all if the needle pokes one of those hairs on under the skin, you have an ingrown hair problem there and it's not, it's not very fun. Once you got the area shaved, put a very small amount of grain soap and you rub it into the skin until it's not very shiny, just tacky like wet paint almost. And once you've got it that way, you just kind of rub it around with your hand like that. Once you got the area tacky then you take the stencil, line it up on the area that you want it to be on, lay it gently on the skin and then just press it from the center out until that liquid adheres the entire stencil paper to her skin. Make sure you press down on the areas where the design is, gently but firmly so there's not a rip of stencil. Once you feel that it's settled on up you want me to take this a second or two, just grab it at the top corner and peel the stencil off her leg, and you can see it leaves a purple stencil, that stencil will last for quite a while. Tattoos that gone to this form of stencil from a different form of stencil that was used years ago with acetate because this particular type of stencil will stay on the skin for a very long time, so if you have to take a break for whatever during the outline, you don't have to worry about that stencil disappearing on you when you come back. So, it's a very good idea to always use this stencil when you can. Once you got the stencil applied to the leg, take a grain soap, put a little on the paper towel and again you're from top to the bottom and get any of the excess purple off that stencil. That way when you're doing the tattoo and you're wiping, you won't end up smearing going on while you're doing your outline. Once you got your stencil applied, very important in doing the tattoo with the stencil that you start with the bottom right hand corner and work your way to the top. The reason for this being, if you started up here, you started working and you make a line, you start to wipe as you continue down, every time you wipe you're going to be wiping away your stencil. So, always start with the bottom right, you're work your way up using the same technique that I showed earlier when doing your outline portion of the tattoo. Do a line, always block when you're doing the tattoo off the stencil as supposed to doin' a lot of hard wipin'. Once again, you're going to wipe the stencil if you don't do that. Start at the bottom, work your way up, block and do again. Once we got the outline completely done from bottom to top, when we come back once the outline's complete then move on with the shading and the color."