15 April – Day 7 of apprenticeship. I conquered my fear of butterfly pictures. I traced some tribal flash from a book, to be used later for my temporary tattoos album.
22 April – Day 11. Learned about temporary ink. I got to do temporary tattoos on myself.
I got bored with the stock tribal designs so I freehanded this silly dotwork burning skull tatt.
24 April – Day 12. Done with the temporary tattoos, I did some custom artwork, then spent the rest of the day coloring some koi flash. I wish I had more time to draw like this.
25 April – Day 13. Practice skin arrived. It looked daunting, not to mention rubbery. Gnar!
26 April – Day 14. Trying to memorize things like this: The distance between the spring and contact screw when the armature bar is fully pressed. This is the correct distance for lining. Oh and BTW on the 2nd day of practice, I totally dropped my machine on the floor! Thank goodness I didn’t break it! Don’t try this at your shop!
1 May, Day 16. This is my practice skin after 3 days of “tattooing”. Still learning how to line and lay solid color using 5 rounds. Only 5 rounds. It’s hard work.
How the hell do you make straight lines? Why does the upper part look chewed up? Obviously, I still have a lot to learn…And the story continues. I’ll keep you updated with more pictures, and less whining about how hard it is, because as they say, there’s absolutely no crying in tattooing. Hear, hear.
amelstrange 
Keren Gan! Maju teruuussss
Maju terus pantat munduuuurrrr!
shoot. there’s a thing called ‘practice skin’?? kewlness at its finest! so you don’t have to make mistakes on some first clients of yours, do you 😀
can’t wait for your first real art on someone’s real skin! 🙂
Thanks! ugh… my mentor says it’s gonna be very soon (end of this week)
I’d probably doing it for free, first.
I hope I don’t screw up too bad… LOL
Hi there! I found your blog through Google image search, and this post made my day! I’ve been thinking seriously about tattooing as a career and have been actively looking for someone to apprentice with (which is challenge enough, it seems), and it’s so great to read/see your experience with it. In online forums and stuff, people are not usually so helpful on the advice front, and the industry can look intimidating to someone coming from the outside and wanting in. But hopefully, if I share your humble attitude and dedicated approach, I can make it happen!
P.S. I noticed this post is a couple years old. Are you still tattooing?
Hi Hannah, I’m glad my blog can be of help. Yeah, go for it! I ended up doing about a year of apprenticeship. It was an interesting experience. I am not currently tattooing because I haven’t found a studio near where I live and I don’t want to tattoo from home or at other people’s homes for safety reasons. It was hard for me also to find a place for apprenticeship. The studio I apprenticed in was 2 hours drive one way which wasn’t convenient for me, as I also had to work, etc, so after a year I just couldn’t handle the commute and stopped going there and went separate ways. Long story short… if you really want it go for it, and I wish you all the best. If you wanna talk more drop me an email at asantoso @ gmail dot com 😀