To the victor...ow!

2nd session: the old me

Like a DJ who puts on the first side of Physical Graffiti and ducks out of the booth to smoke a joint, I've got a little back announcing to do. Sloppy blogging, I know. Someone should be fired for this. Well, you get what you pay for.

Last week I won the contest my fiance and I were having. I almost won a cheap victory by contracting what my doctor called the Barre Crud, which sapped my will to eat, but I'm happy to say that I won when my appetite had returned to normal. Thanks to a new timed-release version of one of my medications and some better snacking habbits I'm commonly slam dunking my 145 goal. That means it's time to get my leg worked on!

The above photo is my tattoo after two sessions. Although the photo is new, all the work you see in it is two years old. At $125 an hour for custom work, you don't just say, "Well, I've got some time to kill this afternoon. I think I'll stop by and have my tattoo worked on." I don't, anyway. As you can imagine, I was very excited to finally get some more work done on it. Wanna see the results? Sure ya do!


3rd session: still on the bench

He started off by going over the hilt of the sword-thing (by my ankle) with blue, then conentrated on the upper-middle section, using black to add a lot of detail and shading. (The red you see isn't ink. That's my skin asking, "What have I ever done to you?") The alien hand in the middle of that section is really starting to stand out. I like the new stuff a lot, and I'm very excited to see what'll come next.

When I decided to get a tattoo and figured out what I wanted, I asked around as to who in the Burlington area would be a good choice for some stuff inspired by H.R. Giger. (In case you don't know, he's the Swiss surrealist who designed the creatures and sets for the movie Alien.) The name I kept hearing was Bald Bill Henshaw of Yankee Tattoo in Burlington. I checked out a few shops and looked at selections of the artists' work. After seeing some of his stuff there was no doubt Bill was the man I was looking for. His work had great attention to detail and shading, and his wildlife pieces looked realistic, not cartoonish. I brought Bill a folder with 4 or 5 Giger printouts in it. I told him I wasn't looking to reproduce a paraticular print. Rather, I showed him elements of each print I liked and asked him to incorporate them into a design of his own. A few weeks later he showed me a pencil sketch that just blew me away! This is my first tattoo, and Bill has been a real pleasure to work with, answering all my noob questions and making it a very stress-free process. His design still blows me away, even after seeing it every day for the past two years plus. I'm proud that my tattoo will represent his art as well as Giger's unique vision. If you're within driving distance of Burlington, VT and want a tattoo, definitely check out Bill's stuff at Yankee Tattoo.