I love working on sleeves. There is nothing cooler than a tattoo sleeve that covers and flows well on an arm or leg. As awesome as they are, they are also very time consuming and can sometimes take a long time to finish depending on the determination and financial situation of the client. So its always a big deal to me when one is finished or getting close to it. Here are some of my most recent ones that are in the almost done pile.
This one I’d say is 90% done. This started out as a half sleeve that just kept growing. Most everything pictured here is healed except for the forearm flowers and they yellow accents on the snake. It also continues onto the chest but the connection is not finished and thus not shown. If I had to take a guess at how many hours its been so far I’d say it should be between 16 to 20. Of course we break it up into 2 to 3 hour sessions which is the way I recommend for sleeves.
Now this sleeve was finished in way less sessions, but each one was at least 4 to 6 hours long each one. My man Paige here was working on a tight schedule as he was finishing school and moving back to NY.
This particular sleeves is part cover up. There used to be a band of stars going around the forearm, which is easy to notice only if you know what you’re looking for. I can’t remember right now if there was something else I covered. The name under the arm was not done by me and we ran out of time before I got to fix it. I think we got this whole arm done in about 4 sittings for a total of about 16 hours. ( My estimate, he might have a better idea).
Black and gray is mostly faster than color work, and in my opinion could be a lot less painful too. This here arm came to me with a few scattered tattoos on it and it was my job to make it all blend in and look like one cohesive piece. Hopefully I succeeded in my mission. What you guys think?
Things I did NOT tattoo on this arm: upper cross and lettering, the kanji (Chinese letters) on the triceps and the dice with the banner. I did not do the lettering on the wrist although I did fix it. Everything else was designed and tattooed by yours truly.
As of this picture the sleeve is pretty done, but like always there will be a few things to touch up and tighten up. Specially the elbow, rare is the time a tattoo heals perfectly the first time on an elbow.
I currently have a few more sleeves on the works but are not so done that I can show you guys what they look like. Please check out the tattoo gallery if you’d like to see some other sleeve shots I have in there. There are a lot of tattoos I’ve done that are missing from these galleries which is something I will try to remedy some time soon.
Thanks for stopping by.
I’m done for now.
Sink a fork in me. 