Tattoo You

I’ve been given the honor of designing a tattoo for a friend. How someone would trust me to design something that will be on display on their body FOREVER is beyond me. It’s actually not the first time. You may not know it (or believe it) but I was an actual Jarhead for a few years, a Leatherneck, a Gyrene, one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children…a Marine. I designed a number of tattoos for various friends or platoon-mates during my tenure. Never got one myself though. I guess I didn’t trust myself and never saw anything that I’d care to look at on my ass forever.

Jason and I met through my work for the ailing Gill McFinn’s t-shirt line when it was in full swing. He won a Zombie Bass shirt and we’ve been in touch ever since. So, naturally when he wanted a Skeleto-Catfish tattoo, I was the go-to guy.

Having designed many of my best fish shirts while flat on my back on the couch in the living room due to a slipped disk, I figured that’s where I’d work. Good mojo there. So, I spent a couple hours with Patty Duke re-runs on Antenna TV sketching out this:
I’ve actually added some ink to it here. I didn’t think I’d be making a blog post at that point. Then I realized how long it’s actually been! You can see the pencil hiding under the ink here:

Well, I spent some time cleaning up the pencil with my trusty Magic Erase and then applied more ink for bolder, simpler lines. Then it’s into Photoshop for more cleanup and some color variations. This part is really fun, you never know what you might come up with by simply laying down some color and then sliding the Hue/Saturation adjustments back and forth. I’ll send all of these to Jason and see what he thinks. It’s easy to tweak at this point and I’m sure we can get it just right. Adios!