Well, of course, one of my first clients came in and asked for a tattoo to be covered because another artist screwed it up. "When I first opened my shop, I was SUPER nervous about making mistakes, so those first few clients were a roller coaster of anxiety. In the end, we fixed it, and you couldn't even tell there was once a mistake under it." The phrase he’d gone for ('Riiff Raff') was similar enough on each hand that all we had to do was block out the vowels a bit more and make them slightly larger than the other letters to hide the original vowels underneath.
Cue panic from both of us: From me, convinced that he was going to go mental for my not noticing and from him, convinced he’d landed me in deep trouble with my mentor.Įventually, we both calmed down and started spitballing on how to fix the tattoo on the fly. Meaning, to everyone else, the finger tattoos were backwards. I finished the first hand, everything was fine, until I went on to start his second hand, at which point he was checking out the tattoo I’d just finished and realized he’d written the script out left to right FACING HIM. The tattoo artist I was practicing on is ambidextrous, and had an exact font in mind for his finger tattoos, so he said if I got everything set up, he’d freehand the script (no stencil) on his hands, and then we could just get started. My mentor okayed it, so he got to work on the stencil. Well, one of the other guys in the studio overheard us and said he’d actually been wanting to get his fingers tattooed for a while, so, if my mentor was okay with it, he’d let me practice on him. I asked my mentor, and he said it was too early for me to move onto hands just yet. "Back when I first started tattooing (I think I’d only been doing it for about 3 months at this point), one of my pals asked if he could come to me for finger tattoos. So I sit down with the original drawing and manage to turn part of the L and the Y into an E, add another couple lines to re-form the L and Y, and boom: 'Bentley.' It worked out in the end and I felt like an absolute wizard, but DUDE, it’s your kid’s name and you didn’t notice the spelling was wrong the 10 times you checked it out during the process?! So I show him what he had written down, and he groans, 'Oh man, I always fuck that up.my wife is going to kill me!' He’s checking it out in the mirror, loves it, until I hear, Did the lining and had him check it out while we took a break, still loved it. I put the stencil on him and had him check it out (I even told him to make sure everything was right), all good. Literally, HE wrote it down: 'Bently.' I drew up a fun custom script, he loved it. "I had a guy who spelled his own kid's name wrong! I spent the rest of the session covering them up with another design he’d had as a backup tattoo idea and I didn’t charge him, but it was a good learning experience for me to always ask what initials/acronyms stand for ahead of time to make sure I get them in the right order!" In my defense, he had seen them several times since then and also didn’t notice my mistake.
I had typed them into the font generator wrong. I ran to the shop computer to check my email and, sure enough, he’d sent me them correctly. Midway through the tattoo, I asked him what the letters stood for and he told me. I placed the stencil and he approved it and I got started. On the day of his session, I showed him the acronym again and we chose a size. He picked the one he liked best and we set an appointment date. I don’t do freehand script, so I put the letters into a font generator and sent him back some options. "I had a client email me asking for a four-letter acronym.