Over the past couple of weeks I've upgraded from honeydew melons to pigskin (yay!) and I much prefer the piggies at this stage! With the melons, I found that trying to get a stencil to stay on was next to impossible...with a pig, it's impossible to get the stencil off!

But at least on a pig I can practice stretching skin to get the feel of making a bridge with my hand and plus, when you let go of the skin to adjust your machine or something, the skin doesn't roll away like the melons, lol.

Been back at work for almost a week now after I had a month off and must admit that it hasn't been too bad so far. Today I had a chat with another girl about my dismal attitude towards my job and wanting to quit and she really surprised me by saying that she felt exactly the same way, and so do a lot of other people she knows.

SO anyway, my husband has been begging me to tattoo him for his birthday (in June) and I'm veerrryyyy wary of doing that for a number of reasons:

*I've never tattooed another human before (he is insisting he be my first human which is very sweet of him
* I don't want to make an unsightly permanent mess on his body because I'm so nervous and then have to look at it for the rest of my life
* I'm not very confident about my sterile technique - been using a combination of disposables on fruit/pig and still need a few more pieces of equipment to consider my
workspace safe eg. non pourous surface to work on, baggies for clip-cord and machine, need greensoap too.

He only wants a small Cartman (from Southpark) cartoon on his hip/thigh, but still, I'd rather wait until I'm fully confident in my abilities as opposed to rushing in.

My latest pig skin tattoo was of a clown I named "Fungo." Had a bit of trouble with my shader appearing to lose power/speed and therefore needles getting caught in the skin. I tried mixing some colours (made a purple with red/blue inks) and also made a lighter blue (needed to add HEAPS of white!)

I learnt that when doing a stencil onto a pig, I shouldn't draw in any guidelines to use for where shading is to go (if colours lighter than black are to be used, which let's face it, are all of them haha) because the purple stencil lines just show right on through the shading!

I already have 2 people other than my husband lined up for dolphin tattoos (their choice, not mine when I graduateto the human species

Overall, things are looking good and I'm being more adventurous with the types of needles/tips I use - loving the mags for shading! Ink just goes right on in nice and smooth

Till next time!
Kaost.