Why I love doing consultations first
If we haven’t met, I like to meet you and let you meet me. Some tattoos are small and don’t take that long, others are going to take all day. I want you to feel comfortable with me and my space, and I want you to have an idea what to expect.
I don’t want anyone to feel shy or nervous—consultations are a great way for you to ask all kinds of questions, whether it’s your first tattoo with me or your first tattoo altogether.
We can discuss the design you want, and I will give you a set price in advance so you know exactly what you're walking into. I ask people if they have a budget not to offend anyone, but to work with people. Everyone deserves nice tattoos. A few things I can do to work with people are: design the tattoo in a way that is more efficient for me to apply it. So if I know you only want to spend $150, I won’t go overboard with details. I may not ask you to go smaller—I may say, “Are you willing to do it slightly bigger?” because I enjoy doing bigger tattoos. If you want large-scale tattoos, my preferences are doing all-day sittings with limited breaks, and for those I generally charge between $500–$800 per session. But if that’s not doable for you, we can break it up into shorter sittings and work out the details. If you're pretty open to different designs and giving me full artistic freedom, at this point in time I am looking to level up my portfolio, so if you talk to me about this you may end up getting one heck of a tattoo at a great price!
I like to see the space on your body we are working on, photograph it, and design your art to fit the space and flow nicely with the body. Sometimes I draw things directly on you with marker/pen and sometimes, when we place the stencil, we need to make changes. It happens—if the design doesn’t work how we thought it would, we need to do what we need to do. So even with advanced preparations, we are putting permanent art on you, so it’s important you aren’t rushing to leave. This is also why I don’t charge by the hour. If you are in a hurry, I am not the right artist for you.
My style is pretty versatile and I always try my best to exceed client expectations. I also don’t want anyone having false expectations. I post my work unedited. Occasionally I’ll try to reduce redness or do something minimal. Sometimes the preset TikTok templates adjust lighting—other than that, I want you to see how my work looks and I’m not going to use technology to make you think it comes out differently. AI scams are probably affecting almost every industry at this point, and the tattoo industry is no exception. There’s a girl who posts videos of making fine line tattoo designs on the sides of fingers. She never posts actual tattoos or how something like that would look healed. She will always be more loved and more popular than some of the most talented tattooers in the world on social media. This isn’t the only case—it’s a small example. I find it extremely upsetting that they feel the need to trick people to get popular. Actually, I find it pretty disturbing.
Back in my day, people would go in shops and steal an artist's portfolio, then try to say it was their own. This is next level now—not only are people stealing other artists’ images and saying they did them, now they are creating fake images with AI. I understand setting up concepts for people, explaining to them that it is a concept, and so on. Or using AI to help with ideas or designing. We should absolutely use it to better ourselves and our work—I mean, it is here, it’s not going anywhere. But be mindful—the scammers are taking full advantage. I hate to even put this information here because I don’t want to give bad people more ideas, but they will likely do it regardless. My main point here is that during a consultation, we can better discuss what works with tattoos realistically—what tattoos will look best on your skin, what will look good in 10 years, and what will not.
While I said my style is versatile, I still don’t do everything, so if I think I can’t do what you're looking for, I will let you know. If you still want me to do your tattoo and you're willing to let me put it into a style or placement I am comfortable with, then we will proceed with booking your appointment.
I love meeting in advance and all that discussed above, but if you have a busy work schedule or live far, we can do consultations via email or set up a FaceTime call—pending the tattoo you are interested in, as well as what you're comfortable with.
To contact me via text my direct number is 3363178067
