Tattoos are now, more than anytime before, accepted in most of society. A majority of the people that I know have at least one tattoo. That excites me because I appreciate tattoo art and the artists who make it.
This post is going to walk through the process of what it looks like to get a sleeve tattoo. This is from my point of view and each tattoo place is different. If you are curious about setting it up for yourself, go in and ask at your local shop.
My artist’s Instagram link are here and at the end of the post. His name is Mike Grant and if you want some good work, hit him up!
The idea for the “deep sea” theme came from having this anchor tattoo. I first only had it in black and grey, then later had it colored in.
I figured that having an anchor at the bottom of my arm would be perfect to have a ship on my shoulder, a deep-sea squid on the inside of my bicep, and a scuba diver on my forearm.
This was my first big tattoo session ever, so I was sort of on edge. The sessions that I had for this tattoo were a minimum of 4 hours each, and happened every month for about 12 months.
This picture is the day after the first outline session. You can still see the soreness and tiny bit of swelling that came with it. The healing for the line sessions were much better than the shading sessions.
No more swelling! Yay! (Please excuse the face I am making.)
For the second session, we started shading the diver and other things.
This was the point that I knew the sleeve was going to be excellent. As you can tell, he does a great job.
The amount of time between the picture above and the picture below is a few months. Once the shading for the main pieces was done, the coloring of the sea was the main objective. There were at least 20-30 hours of blue shading.
Once the blue was done, there wasn’t much else to do with it! In its current state, it still needs one more session probably. The end goal would be to have no skin color left and it be a full ocean.
The part that hurt the most about this tattoo was the elbow. It isn’t so bad for lines, but with shading it really hurts. My elbow swelled up for a week and I couldn’t use it.
And that is what it looks like now! The whole process took I would guess around 50 hours. I am happy about how it turned out and I hoped you enjoyed reading!
@iamredbar
Mike Grant’s Instagram Page
Do you have any tattoos?
I have a tribal tattoo from 1999.
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Great post man
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I can’t wait for my next one. I’d be scared to have shading done on my elbow. I had an artist tell me that he could do sleeves on me easy since I’ve got ity bity arms.
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