Tattoo Artist Bang Bang Answers Tattoo Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

hey I'm bangbang and I'm gonna answer some tattoo questions on Twitter let's get started do you reckon my tattoo artist to be mad at me if I have spots where I'm getting tattooed will it make it difficult for her how do you get rid of acne on your body please your tattoos I hope won't be mad at you you can't help blemishes but in some cases it can restrict what we can do and it can affect how it heals and if you get a tattoo where you don't have blemishes or acne and you develop it it can actually push ink out this is what that looks like there's a spot here that's missing this is certainly from a pimple or getting scratched there's another one right here see a dermatologist see if you can take care of it and then get a tattoo whenever there's some question like that we're like see the doctor and see if we can take care of it from little ink stain sounds like we can be friends there has to be a better way to practice tattoos beside fruit and just people it's pig skin isn't it Oh God that makes me gag it will pig skin doesn't smell good my apprentice used to have to go to the butcher and pick up pig scraps and skin and tattoo it and she has to do it quick because we had to get it out of storks it smelly there are now like artificial body parts so silicones that you can tattoo on and fake skin that's really good for kind of getting your hand used to the weight of a tattoo machine drawing with something vibrating keeping your deaths consistent so just warming your hand up to using the tool you can't learn how to drive a car in a video game like you have to get behind a car and drive so first off you should tattoo yourself when you're learning so you can feel what it is you're doing and yeah I mean if you don't trust yourself enough to tattoo yourself why should other people trust you so I've tattooed myself a dozen times I still tattoo myself yeah I did my little 14 left handed I did my little number too it's not that good not a cry for help what's the best way to do a stick and poke tattoo I've tried in the past and only gotten two dots that stayed don't do that man you don't know what you're doing don't do it I don't know how to answer this question it's like how do I go get in a car accident like don't from Mia okay but how to tattoo artists do shading like I can hardly do it on paper how do you do it on skin magic pure magic there's a lot of variables that go into tattooing the needle densities how they're laid out depth and pressure speed of our machine and then also how diluted the ink is so we used several different tones to make it happen and we kind of all blend it together let me show you how that's done when we're tattooing we use several different types of needles different groupings different sizes one that's most specific to shading is called a mag and it's very much like a brush this one is 15 needles and they're stacked on top of each other the technique is really to move that across the skin evenly consistently without damaging so that's the task we use individual grips each time that we tattoo so the stuff is all disposable and another interesting thing is they they don't have to be these things can be made out of stainless steel and cleaned and reused in many states you can even reuse the tattoo needle so it's really important to ask we really recommend people always use brand new needles every time this is the fun part what I'm doing right now is not necessarily like solid line I'm trying to kind of brush it in with my liner make sure I keep that realism because things that are realistic don't have hard lines all around them so I have to make sure I just put the contrast just where it goes to make sure it still looks realistic there's all different kinds of like how sharp its tapered there's different bluntness --es and different sharpness --is of the needles different groupings how close they are together the different gauges are health thick each needle is when tattooing started there was no companies making tattoo needles so you had to make your own so the grouping is specific to the artist so as I'm shading I can dilute my inks with water and I can also move my hand a bit faster to change that tone I can use darker inks and get this area completely to black if I need to I can I use a sweeping motion so it has to be in the skin the same depth and time in the forward motion as the backward motion the depth is really important that's how you can kind of create one tone of pigment over a really large plane is move your hand the exact same way for several hours in a row my tattoo is starting to peel and a piece of completely black skin just came off of it in the shower help yeah it's normal you'll be fine it's not skin that came off it's dried plasma or you know your scab your body is regenerating and you have seven layers of skin we're putting ink in between the third and fourth layer if it's done successfully you'll shed your top layer it's totally normal how do you fit a skull rainbow and a black rose on one tattoo it's really like the balance you need to find in any design that'll make it timeless I feel like almost any subject matter you can piece together as long as you can make sense of it you know when you're old and gray you're still gonna have your skull black rose and rainbow tattoo how do we make it pleasing to the eye this is how I would do that so first I'll pull the clients body part into Photoshop and then organically laying each image on to see which one's you know gonna kind of be the dominant image and which ones are gonna be backgrounds I want to work with the client to make sure they feel comfortable in the design and people are gonna just understand what I tell them what I'm gonna do so I want to give them a visual representation of it almost every larger tattoo I make I will work in Photoshop with people not everything that I try I like so this is very much the sketch process so if we want to do any really fine detailed stuff I will do all that by hand really close if I want to add any motion to that that's all something I can add just with some of my smudge tools and we can carry some of that background to fit the body part and this is all something that I wouldn't necessarily map for myself before I tattoo it but it's something that helps clients get an idea of what I'm going for on their skin so now we're really close I can just put a filter on these that will make it look like a finished tattoo and then I'm gonna pull that rose just in front of that rainbow and I think that's gonna do it brighten that rose up a little bit and there you go there's a rose and a rainbow and a skull it doesn't always work but I think it's pretty cool I thought it would be worse yeah I want to make that tattoo so hollow tattoo myth or fact coloring Kurt's more than black ink certain techniques hurt more than other techniques sometimes color needs more effort from the artist skin needs to get beat up a little bit more for that color to put as much pigment in your skin as possible if a pigment is thicker it's going to take longer and be a little tougher to get into your skin so different colors have different consistencies through different companies of brands that make them white hurts because we're drilling it we're trying to get as much in there as possible tattoos of the insanely itchy stage can't decide if best technique is blowing tapping itching around it or distraction through alcohol sounds like we can be friends yeah slap it that's the best one if you itch it you can force off scabs or effective if there's no scabs on your tattoo go for it it's away enjoy if you have little scabs or it's still healing very fresh within the first you know ten days or two weeks don't itch your tattoo your nails are also gross so you know if it's killing you like smack it ice helps you can put ice on it friends with tattoos question what's the best way to wrap a fresh tattoo my Santa Durham fell off and it hasn't been a full 24 hours I got a significant amount of color done and I'm worried about leaking plasma and my tattoo scabbing attaching itself to clothing it is on your tattoo artist to make sure they educate you when your tattoo is done and that they're there for you when you do have questions when I do a highly rendered full-color tattoo that's more trauma to skin than any other style because it's very densely tattooed trying to make color very solid your tattoo will ooze more it'll scab more wash your tattoo all that plasma and gross that's gonna come to the surface and leak should be washed off gently with warm water and soap and let it get air I wrap tattoos for two to 24 hours your body really does the healing the things you put on top of your body are not going to heal you your body's gonna heal you there's things that can promote healing and there's things that can kind of restrict healing let me demonstrate that I'm going to do one final wash of his tattoo I'm gonna apply some ointment and I'm gonna put plastic on top we're gonna make sure the tattoo is really clean before we wrap it after we wrap it we'll go through the next steps in a couple hours this will all be absorbed by the skin and and when he takes this bandage off he'll wash this all off appointment is not helping your tattoo heal in any way it's just keeping your skin protected or moisturized so your body can do the work so I'm gonna use your chest first I personally don't use Sanna derm it's essentially a little bit thicker plastic wrap with glue all over it it's applied to the skin it sticks on almost like a secondary skin so you can you can touch it similarly to this but it won't come off you don't need to tape it on the healing properties are gone within 24 hours so you really need to remove that wash the area and you can reapply senador it's sticking to a tattoo is not the best for what I do so I use plain plastic wrap and I think it works pretty well for example if the shirt he wore into this store if there's any sweat in that shirt there's bacteria in that we don't want that in contact with his tattoo if when he gets home and he takes that shirt off that brand new tattoo gets scratched by his his nails his watch even the shower curtain is he's entering we want to keep it really clean he's gonna get in the shower he's gonna remove this he's gonna wash his hands wash his tattoo had it dry with a freshly cleaned towel and let it get hair let it breathe your tax his breathing your touch is healing what's your favorite tattoo on Justin Bieber I got to tattoo his torso and fill in a bunch of gaps and that was really fun he had a son of God written on his stomach and it looked like it said sent food so I text him right away I was like man we need to work on this he had so many tattoos on his stomach of so many different varying subjects it was like how am I gonna ties together make this one story so big cross send food an eagle a bear and a lion and I was like alright well how would we tie all this together so we used some reference of old Renaissance paintings of religious works try to tie a story of religion and spirit treating these animals like they are his spirit animals or his protectors and then treating the rest of his torso in the subject of religion that was challenging I wish that I could have a blank slate and tattoo him without all the obstacles but like I kind of like the challenge so I think that's my favorite he's got a bunch of crummy ones and he knows it so do i when you have a bunch of tattoos and you're kind of a little loose about it you're gonna get some crummy ones how do you tattoo artists learn and practice their craft it's a really good question there is no standard format or education for tattooing the traditional method to getting into tattooing is to find a great tattoo artist and have them teach you so an apprenticeship program it's tough work you have to draw and draw and draw and so you don't want to draw anymore your art has to improve you have to show that person who's teaching you you are worth their effort and that you deserve to be a tattoo artist that you love tattooing so much that you'll work your fingers to the bone to become a great one hopefully someday there will be a format to tattoo education do tattoo artists ever just refuse to do a horrible tattoo idea because they know the client will regret it later I will refuse a tattoo if I don't think it's gonna be a great tattoo so if I can't see it in my head or if the idea there for me it's certainly not going to be good once it's on you if I'm not confident in it I am NOT gonna make it for you people don't design tattoos for a living I do if you're coming to me I'm not just making your sandwich the way you like it I'm gonna make the tattoo the way I know it'll be a great and unique and fit you and your person and if I'm not feeling it I'm not making it my favorite client in the world is Rihanna several times she's come in with ideas I didn't think we're gonna work Google real hard you'll find her walking around the streets in New York City in 2007 with a stencil of a guitar broken in half with a pair of underwear hanging off it on her arm it's because we went really far in this design and I wasn't feeling it and I didn't like it and I told her like go home and live with it and we'll talk about it tomorrow and see if you're still feeling we'll talk about in the week we didn't make it and I'm glad that I kind of pumped the brakes on that Cara Delevingne has a really iconic lion tattoo on her finger when I met her she wanted the word lion el i/o and straight down her finger your skin on your finger is really inconsistent it's very hard to tattoo fingers in general let alone moving through different types of skin in a very small area I want tattoos to be visually appealing I think it would be hard to read the word lion down her finger number one I think it would have been inconsistent if we'd done that text and so I made the recommendation that we treat it like a piece of jewelry and do very similar what I have on my fingers and make it more of a ring more of a decoration let's make an actual Lions face and credit to her she was like yeah I'm down and it's cool I've seen that tattoo all over the world and big billboards and she's really like kind of transcended you know modeling and bridged that gap between fashion and tattooing as much as Rihanna has you know what happens if you get a big-ass tattoo on your thigh or something and you lose a bunch of weight and your thigh is super tiny now tattoos gonna be super tiny now tattoos gonna move with your skin so if your skin changes shape size your your tattoo will do the same oftentimes the reverse thing happens if someone gains weight your tattoo can grow or it can migrate based on where the skin stretches from the tattoo will move if your tattoo is on a pole where your body is stretching from the tattoo will stretch this happens on pregnant women on their stomachs and sometimes you can come back to normal and be just fine and sometimes it won't stretch marks can move through a tattoo and really distort the image two artists at bang-bang know how to tattoo colors on brown skin because I'm looking through IG and all I see is white people I get this a lot and I would say look harder we live in New York City the minority of our clientele are white people are from all over the world and tones of skin are really hard to see when you are shooting just an arm we often desaturate a photograph to take away the redness of a fresh tattoo and that changes the tone of the photo when you're seeing an arm from here to here you can't tell that person's ethnicity don't assume that every client you're looking at is has white skin it's really not not the case we took a ton of athletes celebrities forget ethnicity for a moment think about your tone of your skin because that's how we see it so if you're gonna draw a picture and you take a white piece of paper and you want to draw on it it's gonna show a lot and if you take a darker piece of paper and you use a yellow marker on it it's not gonna come through but if you use a darker tone like a red blue in some cases greens they come through a lot more so based on the hue of someone's tone we kind of pick which colors are gonna work best this question always upsets me because I feel like people feel left out and you're not at all I think you just can't tell what ethnicity people are in our photos so yeah don't feel that way sorry it comes off that way what's the worst tattoo you have ever seen so many celebrities are running through my head that have bad tattoos like I don't want to be that guy I think my least favorite tattoo that I've seen stuff really big tattoo of huge roses larger than life on someone's whole butt that's not super attractive from Laura how do you tattoo artists draw perfect circles with extreme difficulty tattooing very stressful there's nothing that shows imperfection like a circle or two circles right next to each other it's like really easy for the eye to see mistakes we do it really carefully really slowly we kind of dive in and hope at the end we're like who made it tattoos do you have any if you do what's your favorite one I've bunch but mine would have to be some of the faces I have I've always really loved my hand tattoos they're all really special milestones for me I got the Statue of Liberty tattooed on my hand when I had tattooed in New York for ten years and I got the Empire State Building tattooed on my hand when I thought that I had opened the best tattoo shop in New York and I have Mickey Mouse because I like Mickey I hope I've answered your questions I hope you've learned something and I hope you go get great tattoos

Channel: WIRED

Views: 4,823,492

Rating: 4.9427848 out of 5

Keywords: bang bang, tattoos, bang bang tattoos, bang bang tattoo, bang bang tattoo shop, bang bang nyc, bang bang tat, tattoo support, support tattoos, tattoo advice, tattoo support bang bang, bang bang tats, bang bang tattoo stores, tattoo shop, nyc tattoo shop, keith “bang bang” mccurdy, keith mccurdy, bang bang keith mccurdy, bang bang tattoo support, bang bang tattoo advice, how to tattoo, how to shade tattoo, tech support, tech support wired, tattoo tech support, wired

Id: 2x_s8LX5Xwk

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019