almost finally, but not quite…

i’ve never been a fan of having unfinished tattoo work on me…

…and this one has been hard to carbon date.

i’m not sure when we did the outline. it was done back when mike was at the pflugerville atomic, and i think he moved to the 290 atomic at some point in 2014. we did one shading session at the 290 atomic, but i’m not sure when. i am pretty sure in the late fall of 2015 he moved to the original burnet road atomic but we never did a session there, and we shuttered the 290 atomic in late may of 2016, turning over the keys in august of 2016.

the origin story of the piece we worked on this past thursday goes like this – a guy was leaving texas after being here a bit (but not being from here) and asked mike to draw up a skeleton sitting outside a saloon all western styled and shit. it was a large piece (designed to be a quarter sleeve on a decent sized arm, shoulder to elbow, outside wrapping to middle) and was supposed to be black and gray…but the guy left a $200 deposit to get the drawing going (it also comes off the price of the tattoo) and then never darkened the door again. i liked it, so we agreed on a price for the outline and knocked that out. a year or two (?!?) later we did the first shading session, but as mike can be a little heavy handed, i hung about an hour and that was it. what was done was as done as it got, and as i stated, that was probably around 2014 or 2015.

and there we were. he’s tattooed me since, always with black and grey shit that could be done in a single session. like the time i wanted a “fun” tattoo of a goat head in pentagram, so i chose gabby goat, porky pig’s bff from the 1930’s…

april 2018

or the time i wanted a tattoo of grampa munster, since al lewis and i were friends, but i could only find one pic of him in the munsters outfit smoking a cigar…

but i didn’t like his facial expression on that one. i really liked this one…

that was literally “close, but no cigar”, so i found him smoking just as himself:

and with some good ol’ fashioned photoshop had him right where i needed him:

which mike took, and combined with skills he learned in a previous life as the caricature artist at six flags, cranked out this masterpiece last spring for me…

which really, REALLY hurt, so i was not looking forward to finishing the really pic piece (the unfinished one is larger than the other two combined) but here we were on thursday:

and we did another two hours thanks to mad rabbit tattoo numbing cream. soon the pool will be filled (in theory, i guess it depends on how long our new found “rainy season” stretches out) so i will probably wait till october/november to keep going on this party train. i’ll also hold off on posting a pic of the final until it’s finally done, which mike estimates will be one more two hour fill session, and a final one hour highlight session. look forward to seeing it in the fall!