Mixing Ink in the Cap
By Larry Brogan
Who hasn’t tried to mix colors directly in the ink cap with the end of the tube? It kind of works, but you push half your pigment out of the cap and make a big mess of your tube. Some artists keep a box of toothpicks in their station for this purpose but, unless they are individually sterilized, you should not be using them to stir pigments that will be entering someone’s skin. If you know anything about blood borne pathogens, you will already understand this and, if not, stop tattooing all together and take a B.B.P. course such as the ones offered by the Alliance of Professional Tattooists (www.safe-tattoos.com) and the Health Educators (www.hlthedu.com) .
Two simple and sanitary solutions to this are to use a sterile tongue depressor, which many of us already use for petroleum jelly tubs, grasp both ends, while still in the package, and twist in opposite directions. If done correctly, it should split the wood in two or more pieces, with pointed ends giving you at least two handy little stir sticks. The second solution is to use the looped eye of a sterile needle bar and roll it between your fingers to spin the eye. It makes a great little mixer and, if you are eye-louping your needles during set up (like everyone should every single time), you will find that you may have an unusable needle, but the other end of the needle bar may come in handy, after all. You can also pre-sterilize plain needle bars without needles, to use for this purpose.
Easy Ink Bottle Shaker
Don’t you hate those thicker tattoo pigments that take forever to shake and mix up? You graffiti artists are probably a step ahead of me with your rattle cans. A helpful solution is to add a ¼-inch-20 stainless steel nut or a small stainless steel ball bearing to the sterilized bottle. Naturally, you will want to run it through an ultrasonic cleaner and autoclave them, just like your tubes, but it makes a great little shaker and helps to mix up your pigments faster. Companies like Eternal have been adding shakers to their bottles for years.
Premixing Custom Colors
Often, as tattoo artists, we find the need to mix custom colors from our favorite tattoo pigments that we do not find in the color line offered by the ink companies. Most of the time, mixing a small amount of that special color in the ink cap will do, but, sometimes, you may have a large project that requires much more than a cap full and even multiple sessions to complete the tattoo. To keep an even, consistent color, I find it best to pre-mix small bottles of pigment to suit my needs and the project at hand. I sometimes even use a Sharpie marker to mark how much of each different color that I add to the bottle, so I have a loose gauge to follow, in the event I need to mix more in the future. Please pay particular attention to keeping the environment and your entire process as clean and aseptic as possible, to avoid any contamination of your pigments.
—Larry Brogan
