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Summary: When giving a tattoo, be sure to set up the work station before getting started, which includes setting the proper speed on the machine, laying down some aluminum foil as a palette and filling up the ink caps. Keep all supplies stationary while administering a tattoo with helpful tips from an experienced tattoo artist in this free video on tattoo techniques.
Chip Taylor has traveled extensively throughout his 19-year tattooing career, and he spent many of those years working on the east coast at some of the best studios. Such studios...read more
"Okay what we're doing here is a Boyce settable machine. I'm setting up another now with a shader. And people have different ways of doing this and use different materials for grommets and things of that nature. All I need is a paper towel for the grommet on the armature bar. What this does, is keeps your needle bar snug to the armature so when you start running your machine it's not flopping around. It's nice and secure. Here's the armature bar here. Just place your piece of paper towel or tape or whatever you want to use. Then you just press the needle bar right down onto the armature bar. Also very important when you're doing this that your needle grouping is soldered to the bottom of the bar and you've got that portion against the bottom of the tube tip. If you've got it flipped over it's not going to work. And you will know so just a little note there for you. Everybody adjusts their tube and needle depth differently. I like to leave just the very tips of the needles poking out. When your machine's in a relaxed position just the tip poking out of the end of the tube tip. And just pull down your armature bar to check your depth, tighten her down and that one's ready to go. This little trick here I'm about to do is I like to use aluminum foil for my my matte to work off of. You just put a little green soap on your workbench there. Take your foil, pull it out, some people use paper towels, some people use paper plates. I learned this from an old tattooer off off t.v. I'm not going to mention any names but it works very good. This just sucks it right down to the, to your workbench there. Once you've got that done take a little petroleum jelly and you can use a tongue depressor or a plastic knife, spoon or whatever. Put a little of this down, spread it out. Spread it out to the length that you're going to, for the amount of caps or ink caps that you're going to use. I'm probably going to have five or six colors going on or five or six caps going on here so I'll go ahead and lay those out. Stick the cap right down into that Vaseline and it's not going to go anywhere. Some people use ink cap holders but a lot of times those ink caps will pop out of your holder and land on your lap. So if you're using this Vaseline it works a whole lot better. When you're putting pigment into your caps fill them to the top so as not to tap your needles on the bottom of your caps trying to reach down to the bottom to get that ink. Go ahead and fill it all the way up. That way you dip right into the center of your black there and you're not going to worry about bottoming out and bending your needles in the process. Once we get to this point we're ready to go ahead and get the customer into position and start the outline."
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