How to make tattoos; outlining and shading

By this stage you might feel ready to actually begin testing your tattoo making skills. The vast majority of the tattoo work you do will either be shading or outlining. In the following chapter we will examine both of these important skills. Hopefully this will provide you with a better understanding and you will be able to precisely create designs.

Once again it is important to re-emphasize how important it is for you to have created a sterile and clean environment into which you are going to bring your customer. Let’s go over the steps one more time; as well as mentioning a few other things you will need to understand.

You will need to make sure that your sterilized needles are removed from their autoclave bag while the customer is watching. This will be after you have scrubbed your hands and you are wearing latex gloves.

Remember to prepare the customer’s skin around the area where you will be working; wipe this down with an alcohol solution prior to beginning work.

Make sure you have plenty of clean tissues handy; you will also need one wrapped around your small finger which will be holding the tattoo gun; you do this so that you can wipe away any excess ink or blood from the skin so as to make things easier when you are shading or outlining.

Here are just another few things that you will want to consider prior to getting stuck into your design. These general rules will make things go better for you and your customer while working through the tattoo process.

• You must have tight skin in order to tattoo correctly; you might need to use the hand not holding the tattoo gun the stretch the skin. Working on saggy skin will make the final tattoo look terrible.
• When the tattoo gun is lowered, and the needle touches the skin, the machine noise should become lessened; if this does not happen it means that the power is too high and you will need to adjust it.
• When using the tattoo machine you should always only move forward or sideways. This will ensure that there will always be ink in the machine tube because the needles have backward pressure on them.