​I had been told on numerous occasions that my apprenticeship was soon to accelerate by the studio founder, Bez. This was clarified the day that he ordered fake skin in for me to practice tattooing on.
 
Around this time, I was generously gifted an Ego tattoo machine from an artist at the Studio, Pete. Ego is the brand of tattoo machines created by Bez which are created ergonomically with different iterations to match the variety of styles of working for tattooists. The machine given to me at this point was one of the original Ego machines, which many of the artists working in the studio had never seen before. The knowledge of the machines rarity enriched it with a level of significance that made my possession of it seem particularly important to me.
 
To set up for tattooing of the fake skin, I was asked to take out one of the stencil exercises that I had produced previously and use it as a transfer. Bez selected a design by the artist Dan Hartley, which was a small devil holding a large capital letter ‘G’. The design was comically tacky, which added a level of light-heartedness to the exercise that seemed to reduce my anxiety to some extent.
 
To create a stencil normally, the design would normally be photocopied and placed in a treble layered sheet of transparent paper, carbon paper, and a yellow-toned paper that the design is placed on face-up. The three sheets with the design inside are then placed in a plastic wallet which is put through a thermal image transfer machine. The machine can be run at a variety of speeds, with the faster speeds producing the weakest stencil (more suited to smaller, delicate designs) and the slower speeds producing the strongest stencil (most suited to more bold and graphic designs).
 
Once the stencil has been put through the machine the trio of sheets is removed, and the top layer of translucent paper has an imprint of the design that was placed onto the bottom sheet. For this stencilling technique, the image was drawn manually however, as the exercise was already completed of creating a carbon copy. The procedure for hand stencilling is similar, however the design is simply placed onto the carbon paper and traced (firmly) with a ballpoint (or other hard nib) pen, with the reverse of the design then holding a carbon copy which can be applied to the skin, leaving a purple stencil as a map for the tattoo.
 
The fake skin is particularly thin and beige in colour, and can be compared to ‘Bernard Matthews wafer thin turkey ham’. Before applying a stencil, the skin had to be placed onto an object to hold it. Another artist in the studio was once sent a prosthetic arm to tattoo a design on (known as a ‘pound of flesh’), so the fake skin was wrapped around the fake arm, and taped with duct tape. The texture of the skin was repellent to any adhesive of the tape, so it proved difficult to secure the skin onto the arm.
 
Once the fake skin was on the arm, a small amount of stencil fluid was applied until tacky. The stencil fluid tends to be white in the bottle but transparent once applied to the skin, and acts as a means to hold the carbon copy onto the skin. The design was then applied, to the fake skin slowly, and peeled away from the corner to avoid any ‘smudging’. Once successfully applied, the design then had to be left for a few minutes to dry before any tattooing could begin. This was in order to avoid any smudging while tattooing. I was told at this point that this would generally be the point when the tattooist would go outside for a cigarette (though in my case, I just waited as I don’t smoke).
 
Despite there being no potential for any health hazards with the tattoo being applied to fake skin, I set up the booth as I would for a client. The bed and trolley where wrapped with cling film, and the machine and cable where bagged and protected accordingly. Ink caps filled with black ink where placed onto the cling film covering the trolley, which was adhered by petroleum jelly. The fake arm holding the skin was placed on the cling film protected bed, and the machine was switched on.
 
The first thing I noticed when holding the machine was the unfamiliar vibrating sensation, coupled with the unusually shaped instrument in my hand. There are two types of tattoo machines; the traditional coil machine, which is a heavy and loud, or the contemporary rotary machine, which is much lighter in weight and quieter in sound. While many tattooists have now opted for rotary machines, some more traditional artists have continued with coil machines, which seems to be down to personal preference. The Ego machine that I was holding was a rotary machine, which had a tube attached which had an attachment for a variety of needle cartridges. The piece I was to attempt was a thick-lined, traditional piece, and so the machine was set with a ‘9-liner’ (9 small needles grouped together).
 
With the supportive presence of a number of tattooists surrounding me, I attempted my first line into the design on the skin. The ink that was applied to the machine dispersed rapidly, obscuring the area I was tattooing, making it particularly difficult to see what I had tattooed. I was told this is something you get used to and intuitively understand in time. The fell of the vibrating weighted machine in my hand was so foreign that getting over the discomfort of that was a task alone, with utilising it to make marks with precision being a separately difficult task. The texture of the fake skin caused much of the stencil to disappear I was tattooing it.
 
As I tattooed, I was advised by Pete how to hold the machine so that I had one finger guiding the needle as it traced over the skin, allowing for a consistent depth. I was also advised to attempt to hold the machine upright to ensure a consistent line weight, and how to create a line that appears connected but may have been completed in multiple passes. This was done by continuing to line once the hand had been taken away from the skin in a position before the previous line had ended. I noticed the inaccuracies in the design, and so spent some time on the areas of skin around the stencil practicing line work. I was informed prior to the exercise that its purpose was merely in obtaining experience in holding the machine, and not in creating a visually pleasing tattoo. Having experimented with the line work, I realised how challenging it was to create a clean appearing tattoo and how many factors where to be considered to do it right. Unlike drawing and illustration, the canvas is human skin with totally different properties to paper, meaning stencils may disappear through wiping, the skin may get over-walked, and the canvas may move from the pain they are being inflicted. This exercise taught me how to both get used to holding a machine, as well as how to understand the logic of those responsible for bad tattoos.
 
The images included are of my first 2 attempts on fake skin – the first of which has been described above (and is likely visually apparent). The area around the imagery that is of a lighter colour is the part of the fake skin that has been covered by tape, with the darker areas being the parts where ink has been wiped off from the tattooed line and resulted in staining. The second sheet of skin was mainly as a means of the consideration of lines and gaining comfort with the machine again, and included motifs and images drawn by Bez for the purpose of the task (in addition to one of the flash designs for Friday the 13th created by the artist Stacey Green).
 
The fake skin practice is integral in the gaining of tacit knowledge that simply couldn’t be learned without empirical understanding. I am writing retrospectively and have since tattooed 3 more pieces of fake skin with increasing success – the pieces shown are artefacts of my very early stages of incompetence that I am now in the process of attempting to better. Tattooing practice is integral to the discipline and the reason it functions as a commercial art form, however there is so much more to the process than the act of doing. My time up until holding a machine has been focussed on gaining the necessary understanding of studio functioning that is a key part of the job. The use of a machine discussed here is the seminal moment of the next iteration of my career progression. 

​There are distinct differences in drawings that are created to exist only on paper, and those intended to work as a tattoo. My next steps of the apprenticeship clarified this difference, isolating the rationale behind them, while also giving me an opportunity to get used to drawing subject matter that is outside of my common illustration vernacular.
 
Perhaps the most common motif within pictorial tattooing is the skull, as a brief google search of the term ‘traditional tattoo’ will reveal. Skulls have been typical subject matter since the advent of western traditional tattooing, and can be seen in the portfolios of the majority of tattoo artists internationally. There are a multitude of speculations that could offer insight into the reasoning for the commonality of the presence of the skull, ranging from the symbolism it may present in acknowledgment and acceptance of mortality, links to ‘hyper-masculinity’, or an instinctive admiration of natural form. The skull is present in all taxonomies of tattooing from all cultures, (with the exception of pattern-orientated tribal).
 
Roses are perhaps the second most common tattoo motif in tattoo culture (particularly western tattooing), and are not uncommon to find in combination with a skull. Similarly, speculations for the popularity may be that they could symbolise life and vitality, and an aesthetically pleasing form of nature that adhere to a universally accepted, almost objective idea of beauty. The combination of the rose and the skull may be understood as reference to the fundamental truth that death is a consequence of life, and marking such an acknowledgment on the body may be an attempt to overcome the fear of this reality.
 
Irrespective of whatever the origins of such motifs popularity, their presence in the tattoo vernacular is apparent to anybody who has entered a tattoo studio. Given the gravitas assigned to such subject matter within the community, my next apprentice task was drawing tasks involving such forms.
 
I was first asked to draw a rose without any reference, so the artists at the studio would be able to understand the visual reference bank of my mind. They soon recognised that It was somewhat sparse, and opted to give me lesson in drawing ‘traditional tattoo’ roses, which are generally made up of 1 central oval (the bud) with five circles surrounding it (the petals). I initially struggled, but was advised by one of my many mentors, Dan Hartley, to keep my images inside an all-encompassing circle. This was in order to keep the shapes from going too far out of the border of the image, which would be a directly relevant skill for when it comes to tattooing at a designated size on a persons body.


I experimented for some time over a series of my days as an apprentice, until I moved on to rose drawings using reference from photographs, more in keeping with ‘neo-traditional’ or realism. I found that this way of working suited my natural way of processing external visual material into drawings, and the stylization of the rose wasn’t as dramatic and reductive as the traditional approach. Part of the difference between ‘drawing for tattoos’ and regular drawing is that lines needs to be more separated when being applied to tattoos, as over time they spread as the skin ages, which results in a loss of clarity of the design. This exercise was partly to understand those differences and apply them through drawings.
 
A similar approach was taken with imagery of skulls, however I was able to use reference from the beginning given the precision of anatomy that would be integral to the image looking correct. In order to attempt to create something that served both my interest and fulfil the purpose of the exercise, I opted to draw animal skulls, which although generic, has some slightly more interesting shapes than a human shape to consider. With the skulls, I began sketching in a way that is more in keeping with my illustrative style, as I recognised from completing the rose drawings that I was stronger when drawing in keeping with reference, and then reducing the elements down into more basic shapes that are more in keeping with the traditional tattoo aesthetic.
 
I continued exploring skulls, which where created by breaking down the reference imagery into shapes (primarily circles) which I then sketched onto the paper I was drawing onto, before picking out the central elements that I could convey. This process was completed with a mechanical pencil that was held towards the end of the instrument, to allow a more loose and free sketch, before bringing the grip closer to the end of the pencil in order to define the sketched area with a greater sense of control, once lines drawn from the sketches seemed appropriate to commit to.
 
Following from these observational exercises, I also attempted to combine a few of the studies into a singular image (roses, skulls, scrolls), with varying levels of success due to the shapes present and angles which the elements where drawn from. I additionally attempted to simplify the observational drawings by going over the sketches with tracing paper (a process very common in the creation of tattoo stencil creation post-sketch), picking out the integral elements of the image. This exercise was useful in getting out of my traditional methods used to create an illustration, while also practising how to draw with pace and efficiency in a format that would suit (or could be made to suit) multiple tattoo taxonomies.
 
Though the images shown are merely sketches, they also serve as documentation of cognitive process in interpreting information and trying to force it into adhering into a specific style (with little real success), before creating methods that organically allowed my approach to become more open, and thus acquire a greater diversity of skills. This exercise was just training in broadening my illustrative approach, and discovering methods of working that would suit potential client requests while also utilising my abilities in a way which would allow their natural expansion.