My Cover-up Tattoo Journey
Big Cover-up Tattoo Work in Manchester
In this blog I would like to talk about the last experience I had with a cover-up tattoo. There’s a lot involved in order to achieve success in a cover-up tattoo, so I hope in this blog, talking about my experience approaching this cover-up tattoo in Bury, hopefully it could help and guide those looking for a cover-up tattoo in Manchester.
Cover-ups is more than a fresh skin tattoo work to do. I would say it’s at least double the amount of work, than approaching a normal tattoo. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to do cover-ups, to be honest I love the challenge to do a cover-up tattoo.
Approaching a cover-up tattoo requires a lot of thinking and planning, thinking about tones is a big thing to consider, as the tones you will add on top of the cover up, it has to be darker than the tones that already exist. So the darker the tattoo that needs covering up is, the harder it’s to make the job work.
Paul got his tattoos a long time ago, so I could see there was a lot of black on the tattoo, however, the black was quite old, not so solid. His old tattoo there was a lot of black on it, however, we would have to see which image he wanted to cover his tattoo with. In order to find the right image for a cover up, the image needs a lot of texture, texture is the perfect example to make a cover up tattoo work. Examples images of that are, dragons, snakes, nature, patterns.
Paul showed me an image of a monkey with sunglasses on the beach, really fun image, the image he chose it was fun, it had some details in it, and it looked like it was possible to cover-it up, however, I knew I had to contrast the image a bit more in order to achieve the cover up request.
In this post I will upload an image of the reference Paul gave me, and the image of the finished tattoo, as you can see the image of the finished tattoo, it looks a bit darker than the reference image, and that’s due to, I had to contrast the image a bit more to give more depth, to be able to cover what he had. Depth and contrast is really important in a cover-up, and in most cases when the client gives me a reference, I have to add depth to it, so basically I do every tone darker than what’s meant to be. Darkening all tones it makes the image clearer, it’s good for longevity and it works well for the cover up.
Tattooing Paul was a good experience, he was very appreciative of the tattoo work he got done, that’s a good tip for when you get tattooed, be appreciative of the tattoo you have, be appreciative of how much work you got done as well, tattooists work so hard to give their clients a good quality tattoo, and sometimes when the session is over, the client only focus on the parts of the tattoo that hasn’t been done or needs finishing. Focus on what you got done, understand that you chose that artist to tattoo you for a reason, so if that means coming back to get it finished, as soon as it’s done properly so be it. It’s not about how long it takes, it’s about how it’s done, some tattooists work really fast, and try to impress the clients with speed, however, speed does not mean quality. It’s very very rare, when a tattoo artist works really fast and does amazing work, a majority of tattoo artist’s who work really fast cut corners, and that’s something you don’t want to happen when someone is marking their body for the rest of their life.
Thank you for reading
In this image you can see his previous tattoo, before i started working on the cover-up
