It's my birthday and I'll get inked if I want to.

That's right. As a birthday present to myself, I got some more tattoo work done. Today's three-ish-hour session was to begin fixing the snake that I got colored this time last year. The artist I went to then is relatively good if you have easy, small stuff, but the more complicated stuff is a bit beyond his talents. And being an artist myself, I of course have to complicate the hell out of most of my tattoos. No hearts with names in them for me - I gotta go all out.

So while the snake was colored and pretty brightly so and everyone I've run across who's seen it has exclaimed at its beauty, it wasn't the way I had designed the color. The artist had tried, but just didn't have the skill to get the colors to fade into each other nicely, and he completely screwed up the snake's face. Being also too kind-hearted, I didn't say anything, just decided I wouldn't go back to him unless I had something far simpler in mind, like the Eyes of the Buddha I had done later (which looks fantastic and I have no complaints about). It's not that the other artist did a horrible job on the snake's coloring in and of itself - he does have talent - it's just that it wasn't done exactly how I had done it, and I knew it even if no one else looking at it did, and it bugged the hell out of me.

My regular artist - Eddie Julian at Something Wicked Tattoo in Rosevillle, California - is much much better than the artist I went to for the first coloring. He became "my artist" with the first tattoo he inked on me, the dragon on my chest, because unlike any other tattoo artist I've had experiences with (myself, or through friends whom I've designed tats for), he actually inks the designs exactly the way I draw - and color - them. It's like I might as well have drawn the tats on myself. And that is very very important to me. If I hand an artist a drawing and tell them to tattoo it on myself or a friend, I want that drawing tattooed on me, not the artist's personalized (see fucked up) version of it, with reversed shading, crappy coloring, etc. I drew it the way I wanted it and that's what I'm paying for.

Eddie understands this. Someday, when I eventually move to Sonoma County, I will not change artists to keep the commute down (the shop is already an hour or more out of my town as it is). I will either schedule tattoo appointments to fit in with visits "back home" with family and friends, or I'll just plain ol' take a mini, extended-weekend vacation to get the work done by the artist I know and trust.

So, getting back to today's session: No actual re-coloring or shading has taken place yet. Instead, Eddie re-inked the entire outline and added the outline of all of the scales (it had only a very little bit of scale definition here and there before). Even with only that done, it already looks much, much better than it did before. I can reast easy knowing that when it's finally done, even though there will be much more black in it than I had orginally designed (no getting out of that sometimes with re-working tats) this is going to be one helluva tattoo. It will be one that I no longer cringe about, and one that won't restrict my choice of wedding dress to something with long sleeves to hide it from the photographer (that's been bugging me, too).

It's still too fresh right now to take photos of it, but in a few days I'll post what it looks like right now. And of course when it is finally done later this year I'll post final shots of it. For now, I'm freaking thrilled, and due to the pomegranite margarita I had with my oven-baked lasagna at dinner, I'm sleepy too. So I'm going to bed, to dream dreams of a prettier, darker horned viper than the one that I've tried not to see coiled on my arm day after day for the past year.



P.S. In ID theft news, there is no news, and I think that's probably a good sign. Now I just have to wait a few more weeks and order my credit report to make sure there's nothing suspicious there, and so long as that's all good, I think I'm in the clear. Yay!