Dagger Tat
The reasoning behind this one is very simple: I collect knives, daggers, and swords. Since you're on this website, you should have twigged that already. Anyway, I wanted a slightly "arty" tat to link me forever to bladed weapons. So after rooting through my collection, I decided that the Vaciacraft "Chaos" dagger would be my model. Here's the photograph:
After cropping, removing background, other simple manipulations I then thought I'd spend a while reducing it to a line drawing effect, like so:
And then colour that in. The problem with that of course was that I'm shit at graphic manipulation and it was always ending up with bright, bold colours that I disliked. So I decided to take a different route. After scrapping those hours of work, I went back to my original image and made it more painting-like, retaining the original colouration but smoothing it and removing the photorealism, ending up with this:
then it was pretty much just bluing the blade, darkening one side, and lightening the other (which I admit, I got someone far better at this stuff than I to do), which gave me my final design. Arty but not too arty, understated but slightly extravagant, and of course totally unique. Perfect I thought:
But for one thing. After looking at the printout and comparing it to my skin, it was soon apparent that just having it like that would be too great a contrast, it would look flat and lifeless. So I took the printout down to the Portsmouth Tattoo Studio to have a word with Scott, Jeff's son. What it neded was just a little "clutter", something in the background that would push the dagger to the fore and give it some depth. I made my booking and left the image in the hands of Scott, specifying only "no tribal" and laving him to do the hard work.
As it turned out, he came up with the perfect answer, hard to describe with words but a sort of wavy, widely-spaced cross-hatch with some shading between the hatches. this as further improved by Jeff when he inked it in, and the result (relatively fresh) is below. Once it's settled down, I'll get another pic to show it of properly. Must be said, trying to get the dagger the line up straight on the curvy surface of the arm so I can get a decent pic of it is bloody impossible.
