It Is Finished
For all the research, planning, and visualization, I really could never have envisioned what the finished piece was actually going to look like nor what the tattoo process was all about.
The Japanese dragon back piece, complete. Tattoo by Greg James. Photo by Bob Young Photography.
It’s transformative, in many different ways, and not something to be entered into lightly, no matter the size or placement of a tattoo. To look at tattoo magazines, web sites, calendars and coffee table books you’d think that everybody who is tattooed is heavily tattooed. But this is not the case. Although one in ten people in the United States has a tattoo, only a small minority get this much ink.
Although I did not take note of the actual number of tattoo sessions, my best estimate is that the entire tattoo took about 50 hours of tattooing, spread over some 15 to 18 sessions, over the course of a year.
Will I finish the body suit that I had originally envisioned? Very likely not. Tattooing really does entail more pain (and healing periods, and no soaking in the tub, and Lubriderm by the case) than I would like to endure. What I wanted from a tattoo — whatever that was — I got.
While the majority of people who get a tattoo do not regret it, there are certainly some that do. Of those that do, the majority of these regret their tattoo primarily because of “the name” in the tattoo or poor quality. Suffice it to say that there is nothing that I would change about mine.
