TLDR: Tattoos are cool and life is short

Background

I was born in 2001. In my early childhood seeing a tattoo was rare, whenever I cought a glimpse of one it always captured my attention – nearly always something small on an arm. I would try and get a good look at it without it being too obvious that I was looking. As I grew up and tattoos became more socially accepted I got to see tattoos more regularly, and the quality and coverage of them started to improve. Now it’s not uncommon to see full sleeves, hands, throats etc. and every time I do I still feel that excitement that I felt as a kid and try and get a good look.

I had a neighbour who was a tattoo artist, and I was friends with his daughter so I got to see him fairly regularly until she went to a different high school and we drifted apart. He had the typical visible coverage that you would expect from a tattoo artist working in a town – full sleeves, hands, head, and a little bit on his face. Knowing him opened my eyes to the idea that a tattoo didn’t just have to be something small.

I decided fairly early on that I was going to get tattooed. I found them too interesting and cool to leave it as something that I’d always wanted to do but never committed to. I always thought that I’d end up getting a sleeve and leave it at that, deciding that a Japanese sleeve of a dragon would be a good fit.

By the time I was in my early teenage years, smart phones had taken off properly and the internet was more like it is today (although with less bullshit). This was fantastic for me because it meant I could see more tattoos, in more styles, with more coverage and in better detail than I could if I was trying to sneak a look at a sleeve that was half covered by a t-shirt, or peeking out from a coat sleeve. Naturally this meant that I was seeing better tattoos, in places on the body not on show in public and in a much larger range of styles.

I very quickly realised that a sleeve wouldn’t be enough for me. If I didn’t do a bodysuit I would always be itching to do one, so I may as well commit to the whole thing from the start. I thought that a Japanese bodysuit would be a good fit (because it looks cool) and left it at that because I was still too young to get tattooed.

How did I know I was ready to start?

Unfortunately I’m one of those people that thinks about death too much, and how little time we get to enjoy the things we love (it’s probably part of why I pick up so many hobbies and interests). I always planned to get started young – you can’t get a bodysuit in a day, and I want as long as possible to enjoy it before my time on this planet comes to an end. I told myself that I would start looking properly when I was in a position to start getting tattooed regularly. There would be nothing more annoying to me than sitting around with an outline for a year while I save up for the next session.

That time ended up being August 2019, when I started my degree apprenticeship and started earning money for the first time. I decided to take a few months enjoying having a nice amount of disposable income before I started to spend it all on sessions. I was just about ready to start seriously considering which artist and style I wanted to commit to and then we reached March 2020. Obviously this ended up delaying things a bit, but gave me a chance to carry on spending too much money on video game merchandise, pokemon cards and books (whilst also building up a tattoo fund).

Throughout all of the lockdowns and restrictions I was keeping an eye on Instagram, following more artists and talking to more people that are heavily tattooed. By October 2021 I decided that things were looking ‘normal’ enough that I’d be able to start without ending up in another national lockdown.

How did I choose an artist?

As I was looking at tattoos, I was saving any images that I particularly liked. I knew that if I didn’t then there was a chance they would become impossible to find (a lesson learned the hard way, with the loss of some tattoos that I’ve never seen again). I reasoned that this would be a good way to try and refine my interests when it came time to contacting an artist. I wasn’t going to end up sending over a folder of 100 images of somebody else’s work, but it would be more helpful to say ‘I like when a sleeve has a dragon that wraps around the arm and has clouds and lightning’ than ‘a dragon would be cool’.

It was time for me to find an artist and I was in two minds about what I wanted. I’d always liked Japanese tattoos so that was my go-to for years when I thought about it, but I’d also been seeing a lot of blackout and geometric tattoos that I thought were really cool and interesting. I was stuck in decision paralysis about what I wanted to do, and I’d still be there if I hadn’t decided to remove emotion from the process. How many images of Japanese tattoos did I have saved, and how many of blackout/geometric? The answer was 300 vs 3000 so that made the decision for me. It was obvious that I was subconsciously more attracted to blackout and geometric than I was Japanese tattooing.

I managed to narrow things down to 4 potential artists (all in the UK by fluke). Seth Arcane in London, Toogoodtattoo in Bath (now Bristol), Ash Gray in the Cotswolds and Hanumantra in Shrewsbury.

Hanumantra was my initial preference. He’s close to where I grew up (and was living at the time), so would have been easy to get to. I love his work, but I wanted a nice balance between solid black and geometric patterns. I’m sure he would have been able to execute what I had in mind, but I wanted to go with an artist that had some examples of patternwork so he was excluded early on.

I decided that removing conscious bias would be the best approach again. I scrolled through the Instagram of all 3 artists (back to their first post) and downloaded any images of tattoos that I liked, trying to keep the number of images per artist at a similar amount. Then I stuck them all in one folder, left it for a couple of weeks and looked at them again; deleting any that I didn’t have a strong feeling about. With that done I split them back out into separate folders and looked at the numbers. Seth had the most images left (by a large margin) so he was the obvious choice. Now it was just a case of trying to work out specifically what it was I liked.

I took my folder of blackwork/geometric tattoos and went through every image, deleting those that I liked the look of but wouldn’t get myself e.g. too much black, too many mandalas, too round. Then I picked the best images from the remainder and sent Seth an email, with some references of his work and images of a completed bodysuit done by Joe Kintz in Sydney on a client called Kev.

Any regrets?

I have no regrets about sending Seth an email 4 years ago. I’m sure that when he read it he didn’t think I was serious about doing a full bodysuit, especially when he asked me if I had a preference of starting with my chest or back. If you’re reading this feel free to correct me, but I’m sure you started with my chest so you’d get a good piece out of me if I finished it off and then quit.

Working on my bodysuit is one of the biggest parts of my life, and I can’t imagine what things would be like if I hadn’t started. I wouldn’t have met my partner, I wouldn’t be living in London and I wouldn’t be as comfortable in my own skin as I am (which isn’t comfortable, but is a hell of a lot more comfortable than it was). Not finishing it now that I’ve started would be worse than not starting at all.

I’ve also realised that if I had gone with a Japanese bodysuit, it wouldn’t have been with the right artist. I never got close enough to it to start narrowing somebody down, but I didn’t know James Bull in Bristol; now that I do I think he’d have been the artist I chose to complete my bodysuit with.

Closing thoughts

It doesn’t feel like it’s been 4 years, and it feels strange saying that my upper body is nearly complete. At times it’s been challenging, not just in the sessions – but with the healing afterwards. It’s put strain on me, on my relationship, and can be a pain to plan things around; but it’s all been worth it.

I’m going to miss it when I’m done, which is part of why I don’t get tattooed more regularly. I’ve got at least another 4 or 5 years left in the journey, and I don’t know what I’ll do with my time and money when I don’t have it as a commitment anymore. If I was doing it all over again I wouldn’t change a thing.