Everyone’s Skin is Different

TATTOO ART 101 WITH MADAME LAZONGA

By Madame Lazonga

Tattooing on the skin is a never-ending learning process. Just when you think you have it down, whamo, something unexpected happens, and the challenging part is, there’s a person connected to it. I always joke around and say, “Can you please leave your skin here and pick it up in a few hours?” As most of you tattooers know, it’s a challenge moving and contorting to get into the right position to get the ink in the right way, let alone all the skin differentials you need to deal with. It is just one of the variables that make tattooing such an interesting and difficult media for artists to explore.

One thing that I never thought about until recently is, when a person loses and gains weight over an extended period of their lives, it will tend to make the skin much thinner, therefore making it more fragile to tattoo. You can’t see the thickness with your eyes, of course, so there’s no way to tell except when you start tattooing. When people ask me for estimates, I usually tell them that it’s hard to give an exact price because, depending on their skin type, what would take me an hour on one person might take me an hour and a half on another. There is absolutely no way to tell until you sit down and begin to work.

Once you get started, you can get the feeling for the skin and how you need to go about adjusting your equipment and techniques. When working over any bones, I always turn the machine down as far as I can. Working over the waist is perhaps the most challenging, because it’s where the anatomy has the most elasticity. You often have to expend a lot of energy to properly stretch the skin. This means you often have to bring out the contortionist in them and have the client lie with a pillow under their waist with an arm reaching above their head, in order to stretch the skin out as much as possible.

Skin is such an amazing organ and something that tattoo artists need to be intimately acquainted with. A newer complication is overly tanned skin. When I was growing up in Seattle, I remember tanned skin meant you went to Hawaii on vacation. This was back when they didn’t have suntanning machines. In high school, all the rich kids would go to Hawaii for winter vacation or spring break, and all of us less fortunate kids would look up to them in awe. Now, as you know, having tanned skin tends to make you look a lot older than you are, unless you use a lot of antiaging products. I have to say, it is not easy to tattoo tanned skin. After years of tanning, the structure of the skin changes. The skin looses its elasticity, with many fine little lines below the surface, almost like fissures or cracks. Tattooing on this kind of skin is very scary (for me) because, when I lay the needle to begin to tattoo, I see a little bit of fuzziness surrounding the actual line. It looks like the skin is cracking. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Tanning excessively without continuously using #45 or #50 sun block will also definitely fade the color and permanently damage your tattoo. In general, UV light is just not good for your skin, with or without a tattoo.

If your shop is like ours, we guarantee our work, and a touch-up that is done within the first year of the tattoo’s life is free. We are realistic, in that small issues can arise when a client is healing, and being willing to fix these small areas, as part of our service, is reassuring to the public. Therefore, when we are discussing price, we keep in mind that some parts of the body heal hard, like the hands and feet, and we charge accordingly, since we will often end up spending time doing a touch up.

What really causes artists headaches is when clients don’t follow instructions or don’t take care of their tattoos or their skin, in general. This causes damage to the tissue, scarring and possible loss of color. Recently, we had a person leave the shop who didn’t wash their tattoo for a week after they left. They didn’t read the instructions that were given to them, and they didn’t remember a word of the verbal instructions their artist gave, so you can imagine what happened to their tattoo. The image scabbed over more than usual and lost a lot of the color. I know that when people leave the shop after they’ve received their tattoo, they’re usually spaced out. That’s why it’s even more important that the tattooer go through everything the person needs to know before they leave. In Seattle, it’s the law that all tattoo shops verbally explain the healing instructions as well as pass out written instructions. I know that every shop has different instructions, but it’s important for the recipient to carefully follow the aftercare guidelines if they want the best healing results. The artist is only trying to help them through the healing process, even if the instructions are different from the last artist the client worked with.

I get so many people who come into my shop price shopping. There’s a faction of the public that goes from shop to shop looking for the lowest price, thinking that we are all the same. Price shoppers need to know that every shop is different, and the prices charged are equivalent to their expertise, their years in the business and what they’ve done to establish their standard of achievements in the tattoo community. Being able to talk to the public and educate them is an invaluable part of being in the business. For example, if a shop has a sign that says, “Names $25,” and you are price shopping, you should stop to think that the sign doesn’t provide any information about how big the name will be, what style and where it will go on the body. Often, this kind of sign means the shop does production-style tattooing, and they’re set up to do that kind of work. They probably have several sets of tattoo machines ready to go, one right after the other.

In the end, we all need to be mindful that tattoo shops and artists are as different as their clients. Our profession must take into consideration a myriad of variables when going about our work, skin being just one. Hopefully, as the clientele becomes more savvy, they can make better choices regarding their tattoos and, in the end, wear their art proudly—covered in SPF 45, of course.

—Your sister in tattooing

Vyvyn (Madame Lazonga)

madamelazonga@hotmail.com