When it comes to a bad tattoo, there’s a scale. So many things have to be considered. Time, subject matter, placement, size, cost, color, detail, quality, and most of all sentimentality. The thing most people worry about before their first tattoo is the permanence of the process. By the time most people are in their 60’s an old tattoo is rarely the ugliest part of life. They should probably focus more on the speed and quality of the piece. Protip, the ability to suffer a ridiculous number of hours under an artist’s needle does not necessarily make it better art. I thought deciding what to get tattooed was the hard part but now I know the real trial is finding a good artist. My artists in Memphis ranged from apprentices to masters and almost none of my art took longer than 3 hours. It’s easy to tell which pieces were done by more experienced hands.   

Here in Seattle all of my pieces are more significant because I’m not just decorating my body, I’m changing my appearance. I’ve only had two artists so far, an apprentice and a master. The former has done work on my arm, side and leg. She started the flower on my neck in two uncomfortably slow sessions before revealing her distaste for working with me. Luckily we stopped at a salvageable point and I was able to find a more professional artist for the final product. The woman that completed my neck tattoo utilized what was already there like a stencil and covered it with a piece uniquely her own. She brought depth and life to the flat floral pattern stamped on by an apprentice’s inexperienced hand. The master’s fee was twice as much but she finished the entire piece in half the time.

Cheap, fast, good – choose two, as they say. When I signed on with someone just starting their career I knew I could save a little money while getting quality work done slowly. The thing I appreciated most was her ability to interpret what I wanted into an actual tattoo. The problem is I forgot the cardinal rule for amateurs – keep it simple. Despite her artistic skill, there are aspects to tattooing artists don’t have to deal with on canvas. When I inquired about inking my neck I misspoke and only asked if she would do it, not if she could. Truth is, working on different areas of the body is not the same process and what I was asking for ranked beyond her current competency. Of course, she was more than willing to awkwardly practice on me for $125/hour and I paid the ultimate price – a botched neck tattoo.

Having an apprentice tattoo my arm and calf wasn’t that big of a risk but even then all the warning signs were there. Almost none of my sessions included the progress we planned on and inevitably led to one more appointment than predicted. During each consult she would trace the area but every first session started with her saying she had to make it bigger to get the detail she wanted. Naturally, I always agreed because at that point I’m jazzed to get a new tattoo. I didn’t stop to consider how much more time and money I’d spend. Starting with the owl, I should have said no and reconsidered the same piece with a different artist. Somehow I felt a twisted loyalty to this person despite her complete lack of bedside manner. It seemed shameful to reject a piece of art she had spent time creating for me, even if it wasn’t what we originally discussed.

I didn’t know is that she harbored animosity toward me until I tried to book the next session for my neck. Via email she claims I have complained about her prices for the last five sessions and she wasn’t going to tolerate it anymore. This was all news to me because at the time I didn’t believe she was overcharging me. In hindsight, maybe she was and I didn’t realize it. She alludes to a negative opinion she got from someone at my old job and complains that I don’t tip enough. In every budget I laid out for my tattoos there was a tip included. Unfortunately, it was often consumed by her need for more hours than predicted. Her response was a list of conditions before she would work on me. Still confused about where she got all this negativity that I couldn’t even feel, I told her I couldn’t trust her to do any more work on me.  She backpedaled slightly at that, seemingly surprised that I would bail on a half-finished piece. It’s not a hard choice for me. It’s insane that she let feelings like that fester for so long. If she felt like I was insulting her why did she let me book multiple times? Ignorance, temerity, greed? Regardless, the only favor she did was being honest eventually.

The bittersweet ending is that now I have Abby. She’s a very considerate person that listened to what happened before rejecting me off hand. She didn’t want to work on a foreign piece if there was any way I could reconcile with the original artist. I told her absolutely not and since we were at a stall in the Seattle Tattoo Expo a stone’s throw from the apprentice herself, I imagine getting a hearty thumbs up from her silence. It had been six months since the original piece and I knew exactly what I was looking for when I saw it. A messy version of the realism I once envisioned, I surrendered control to the artist’s aesthetic. Couldn’t be in better hands. In the contest of Cheap vs Fast vs Good I’m usually patient enough to take the first two however when it comes to getting a tattoo, never choose cheap.