OK, here's what we had to start with:
That's only a 3 1/2 year old tattoo, but it's scarred and raised. Yeah, Painless Ric will probably never get a good review from me. Doug and I talked about the scarab I wanted there, he did some sketching, and the game was afoot. Here's the stencil in place:
We were trying to be careful about placement, because the original wasn't centred properly. In the end, we set it so the scarab would "hold" the halo, in a weird sort of way.
Outline finished (there's some black pen in the scarab to show the highlight areas):
Wings finished, and initial glow laid around the original tattoo:
You can really see now how faded the original tattoo is. When the scarab was finally finished, I told him I just couldn't handle any more. I like to think I can handle pain pretty well, and none of my tattoos have given me a lot of trouble, but this one was pretty large, and part of the wing line and the colour fades was right over a nerve. It was then 1:30 in the morning, and I was exhausted. So, today, we sat down to revitalize the original tattoo. As it was such a scarred piece of work, we had to go over it three times, and will still need to touch it up once it's healed, as the scar wasn't wanting to take the ink as well as we'd like. Still, in the end, I think it's a damn cool piece of art:
Once this heals, we'll touch up the black, and add some background to the upper glow and add to the yellow glow as well, to give it more radiance. Yeah, this one hurt, but it was worth every minute.
now,I just have to get the courage and fortitude up to continue it as a full sleeve...
