It’s time to start a new series, apparently! We both really love tattoos. Laine has been getting them off and on since she was 14, and while Josh only started a few years ago, but regardless of number of tattoos or time spent getting them, it’s one of the best ways to get either or both of us babbling about the things we know and love about them. We plan to write about our favorite of our tattoos, and our recommendations for getting a tattoo (PRO TIPS! NUMBER FIVE WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!!!!!….actually not, just what we’ve learned as we’ve gone along).

So…the series as we have it roughly sketched out right now will go something like this:

1. Tattoos are super cool, here’s what we know about how they work and some of our fav artists (this post!)
2. The stories behind Laine’s tattoos
3. The stories behind Josh’s tattoos
4. Tattoo pro tips

Why Tattoos?

As you know, we love souls and the power they have, and we hate hiding them.

We believe everyone has a unique awesome to them, a shard of some great holy essence, a supernatural Meaning. So…hiding that shit is stupid. But not hiding it is kind of scary, for the reasons that we’ve talked about before and will continue to talk about that basically boil down to being afraid of being alone – well and truly alone – because of not hiding your soul well enough.

Tattoos have an interesting sort of cost/benefit when it comes to souls. They require physical pain, and sometimes emotional pain, to design them and to get them, and then they themselves serve as a monument to that pain. You would think that physical and emotional pain could not possibly be beautiful, and that it wouldn’t be something a person would want a permanent reminder of – but the pain existed regardless of it can be seen, and tattoos are beautiful. As a result, we’ve found that tattoos are a great way to show your soul, and intermingle your soul and what it loves and knows and means with a super talented artist. The mingle results in something beautiful and permanent and uniquely you, that goes where you go and helps tell your story.

How Tattoos Work

Tattoos are permanent body art that comes to be via stabbing someone repeatedly with a motorized cluster of tiny needles with ink coating them.  (Josh: I didn’t know this, I thought the ink flowed from inside the needles. This week I learned.) This article explains it well, although its advice for aftercare is old. Basically, skin has multiple layers and is a lot thicker than it seems, and tattoos deposit ink into the dermis/middle layer. The machine that does the tattooing is shaped a bit like a gun, but most tattoo artists prefer to call it what it is – a “machine.”

The palette of inks available is staggering, and you can get a tattoo in any of those colors that exist or any color that your artist mixes FROM those existing colors. The outline of tattoos is typically done in black, although not always, and the whole tattoo can be black and white and gray, or it can be all of those plus full color. Tattoos last a long time, but because you’re an alive person, and your skin is also alive, tattoos tend to fade and blur over long periods of time. There are a few factors that influence how fast this happens, or even if it happens in a way that’s noticeable. We’ll talk about those later, in the pro tips post!

You can see some interesting slow-mo video of how tattooing works here:

Do Tattoos Hurt?

…yes. Tattoos hurt. Sometimes they hurt a lot, because…you’re literally being stabbed, thousands of times.  How much they hurt varies depending on the person, and on the location of the tattoo. For us, it’s ranged from feeling like a light scratch to feeling like being cut open. In the later posts where we talk about our tattoos, you’ll learn that Josh has a massive rib tattoo – and I (Josh) can say clearly that ribs are not a fun place to get tattooed. But they are huge real estate, and sometimes that matters because bigger areas to tattoo mean…well, that you can have a bigger tattoo. And bigger tattoos mean that you have more space, or canvas, for beautiful detail and color and shading. Big tattoos can be really pretty, and that might mean getting a tattoo in a painful place.

In our experience, we both have a high pain tolerance (per our favorite tattoo artists, anyway!), so… we aren’t afraid of pain, especially physical pain. It’s worth it, and at times it can even be quite cathartic.

How Much Do Tattoos Cost?

Tattooing is not prohibitively expensive, although the cost can require some planning. Neither of us are what you’d call artists in any drawn medium, which means that we typically need a tattoo artist to do some design work for us on top of the tattoos themselves. Some artists will charge for this design work, and some assume it’s an included cost of doing business. For the tattoo itself, most artists charge somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour, and tipping is both accepted and welcome in our experience.

As a rough example, a well-done tattoo about the size of your hand could take between 90 minutes and 4 hours, which would translate to somewhere between $150 and $800, plus tip. The bigger the tattoo, the more detailed the tattoo, or the more painful the tattoo, the more sessions it might take to complete – which would mean one trip to the tattoo shop, then time to heal plus time for the artist to be available again (artists can be booked months in advance), then another trip to the tattoo shop…repeat as needed.

But…don’t forget, you get to keep the art forever. And it serves as a reminder to yourself, a memento of your history, a thought that brings you joy, or just something beautiful that you have as a permanent decoration on yourself. If you amortize the cost over your lifetime…they become relatively cheap.

We also tend to build relationships with people who do something as intimate as tattooing us, which means that we spend time and money to obtain something important to us, and we also get to hang out with friends. It’s a great way to spend a few hours and a few hundred bucks.

Favorite Local Artists, and How to Find a Good One

We’ve both had a significant amount of work done by the folks at Ministry Ink. Between us, we’ve had 3 tattoos from Adam Crane, who is also the owner of the shop, 3 tattoos from Kayla Grosso, and 4 tattoos from Shaun Friday.

Laine also got 3 tattoos in 2017/2018, all very different styles, from Trish, who owns My Little Needle Tattoos. We also both got a tattoo from (a different) Adam at Psychotic Ink in Clearwater, FL.

…which brings us to the “how to find a good artist” portion of the blog! There are two ways to find a good artist or shop – 1) recommendations from people you trust, usually people who already have tattoos that are not ugly, and 2) looking at artists’ work online and falling in love with their style. Ministry Ink, and Adam and Kayla in particular, were recommended to Laine by tattooed friends, when she was trying to find someone who would do two custom pieces. Instagram is great to see an overview of an artist’s style, which is why we’ve linked to artists’ Instagram accounts where we can.

You can research what makes a good tattoo/what a good tattoo looks like – Josh learned a lot recently by watching Ink Master, while Laine learned a lot 20+ years ago by scouring tattoo magazines. You should also meet with/consult with your artist before getting a tattoo and find out if you’re comfortable with them, if that matters to you. It matters a lot to both of us, because this person will see you at what could be close to your weakest, and…vulnerability + a jerk with a tattoo machine does not make for the best possible experience.

Next Up…

Part 2! The stories behind either Josh or Laine’s tattoos, depending on which one gets done first!