Video: Examples of Quality Tattoo Pieces

See examples of tattoos from an expert with tips on tattoo artists in this free body art video series.

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mzrizzo Aug 02, 2008

I watched the entire series of Shotsie's videos and I thought they were fantastic. Very informative, beautiful and engaging. Shotsie is a true artist.

mzrizzo Aug 02, 2008

I watched the entire series of Shotsie's videos and I thought they were fantastic. Very informative, beautiful and engaging. Shotsie is a true artist.

Video Transcript

Well this is a particular image that's one of my favorites. It's also something I'm quite well known for. It's a portrait of Charles Lindbergh. But it has heroic proportions. So this is really one of the first times that portraiture in tattooing was taken to this scale. It's a complete full back piece, which goes from the back of his neck to his, just below his waistline. This fellow came to me; he was a pilot training to have his own pilot's license. And he admired the relationship that Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh had with each other, the husband and wife team. Anne Morrow was not only Lindbergh's wife, but she was his number one navigator. They you know navigated through life together, although Lindbergh was a very controversial figure, and I brought up a lot of information to this guy. And he had been a Lindbergh collector for many years. And we had a friendship. I talked to him about the relationship between Lindbergh and the Nazi's, and his admiration for German engineering. And he kind of put it off that "Well it was simply an affair, affection for technology having to do with aviation."Ironically, years later after I did the tattoo, it's been exposed now that Lindbergh actually was a bigamist, and had a family with four children in Germany, which could have really been the reason he ended up spending the last years of his life in Paris after the kidnap and murder, kidnapping and murder of his youngest son. So this was an interesting process, this tattoo. And it took thirty-three hours total of actual tattooing. In addition to that, it required that I design special equipment to try to achieve the soft, airbrush gradation in the face. So I designed a fifty needle cluster, and had a machinist work with me and create a jig so I could assemble groups of needles and fifty needles in a cluster creating a sort of eraser tip formation at the base of them. And then I had a machinist to make tubes for me, and adjust to the machines that I was working with. And the fellow who got the tattoo was kind enough to allow me to experiment with a few different needle groupings and configurations, and experiment with different techniques to try to get this soft grade of blush over the skin. I think it's one of my most successful tattoos in terms of reproducing a photographic image. It won many awards all over the world as he traveled and showed the tattoo. It's been the source of many references. It was actually included in a major exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in New York in the early part of two thousand.

Examples of Quality Tattoo Pieces

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