From Client to Finish

A client walked in ready to get a tattoo. She was once a guinea pig for my fifth tattoo. She loves it and is now a paying customer.

Her father just passed away and she wanted an "In Loving Memory" tattoo. Having already spent a good amount of time with her husband piecing the layout together, she handed me a print out and we scheduled an appointment.

Here's the original:

My instructions were precise. The "57 Heaven" lettering was to be the same - she loved the coloring in the letters. The car was to be red, the halo yellow and the wings the same.

Here's the outline:

Also, her dad named his car "Lucy" so she wanted it on the license plate. I was a bit hesitant seeing how small the area was. But after condensing the text, I went in trying to pull it off. I told her straight out that if it looked sloppy or blending together odd, I would simply fill in the plate black.

After it was okayed, we sat for a few hours and finished the piece.

Would I have loved to thrown in some background and went all out with some negative lettering? Sure. Did it cross my mind to add more road to fade out and create a scene in the distance? Yep. Or what about making the car look more realistic, with more dimensional shadows? I thought about it.

But finding a balance between what your customer wants and what you'd like to do isn't always a good thing. The effort she put into it before hand mixed with my effort to render her memorial tattoo was exactly what she wanted.