The following is a walk through of the most commonly asked questions and some explanations of how we handle our booking process to make sure everything goes smoothly and efficiently.
HOW DO WE DECIDE WHAT TO TATTOO? This is an important one.
"Why do you never choose my inquiry? I’ve tried x amount of times..."
Something that is probably the most important thing we consider when selecting tattoos, and we see a ton of this, is that people try to put too many things into one idea. They have a ton of favorite characters and colors and ideas and they want to see them all into their one tattoo idea. And while listing that out is easy enough, getting it all to flow into a single design is pretty tricky. Tattoo designs are almost always just 1 or 2 subject matters. A single character or item, maybe two. You want your design to be easily read and flow well with everything rather than cluttered and full of too many action lines and poor composition to not fit your body. Another thing to consider is color theory. If you use all of the colors because there are so many subjects in a design, then it’s tougher to get a complimentary color scheme in your tattoo that makes your tattoo have that extra ‘pop’.
Here is an easy example of what I'm talking about.
Inquiry A wants a tattoo on the inner left forearm. This person wants Lilo and Stitch holding a Scrump doll while sitting on a surf board with three ducklings and one of the ducks is holding a peanut butter sandwich for pudge the fish who is swimming under the surfboard next to squirt the turtle from finding nemo and Ariel from the little mermaid.
Inquiry B wants a tattoo on the inner right forearm wants Stitch holding holding a Scrump doll with a big smile on his face cause he is happy.
See the difference? While Inquiry A would be an adorable idea and would make an excellent print or shirt or something, it has far too many focus points and subject matters to flow well into a tattoo design. Inquiry B is concise and easily recognizable, and in my opinion would make for a way more successful tattoo. So that’s the inquiry that would get a response first. In this case, for Inquiry A, I’d suggest getting a few tattoos, one with Lilo holding the sandwich, then another of Stitch holding Scrump, and Ariel swimming with Squirt the turtle.
I promise you, keeping your idea simple will make for a brighter, more colorful tattoo, and has a better chance of you being happy with it for life.
"My idea falls under exactly what you normally tattoo, why wasn’t I chosen?"
The easiest way to explain how we approach things is through this Halloween Candy example.
Imagine you head out on Halloween night for a Trick or Treat adventure. You come home and have an entire giant bag of candy and you think to yourself, oh man, I can totally eat all of these! Then your hopes are shattered when your parent says, you can only have 40 pieces of the candy.
Now are you going to just reach into the bag and eat the first 40 pieces you grab? Probably not. You're going to dump the bag onto the bed and grab all of your favorites!
But if you have a particularly rough Halloween night, and you come home with 23 pieces of candy and you still can have up to the 40 pieces, then I bet you'd eat all 23 pieces. Even if they were peppermints!
This is how we approach my booking process. We only have a certain amount of appointment times through each of the scheduling windows. So, it's never that we do not want to do your tattoo, it's simply that we fill the books quickly with the pieces we are most drawn to at that time.
HOW WE HANDLE NEW INQUIRES.
Once we open the books, we will leave them open for a few days up to a week or so and allow everyone the chance to send in an inquiry. We understand that people have work and lives and that not every one can make a first come first serve type deadline. So to be clear, we do NOT book on a first come first serve basis. We want everyone to have a fair chance.
The inquires are then divided into folders of small, medium, half day and full day projects. Which allows us the ability to fill the time slots with the correct times to complete the projects. And as the slots become fewer and fewer, less and less projects are able to fit in.
We have broken down our scheduling into easy chunks of time and some basic price quotes that can be given once we know a little more about the project youre wanting. There is obviously exceptions and variables that can affect final pricing and placement but hopefully if you made it this far, you have a better understanding of how things work!
NOT EVERY EMAIL gets a response.
With the amount of emails that are received during the book opening periods, not everyone will receive a response. This does not mean that your inquiry was a 'No' but rather there just was not enough time in the schedule for the piece. I reset the inbox with each book opening, so resubmitting is definitely encouraged. If we see a name a few times, we try to make sure we send out a response.
PRICING and sizing
Ah, the infamous question of, ‘How much is *my tattoo idea*.’
Honestly, I wish I could answer it easily, but it’s a really tough question to answer without the correct information. A piece on a 6’8, 350lb, behemoth of a person is way more time consuming than a piece of a 5’0 100lb person. This is why you’ll fill out a form that requests the information we need to book you in efficiently. We try to eliminate as many variables as possible with the form to remain as accurate and quick as possible. That’s why it’s a lengthy inquiry form, but it really does make the process faster.
You might have noticed in my social media postings that I tend to do larger pieces. That is usually true, however, I absolutely do smaller pieces as well when they fit into the schedule!