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Summary: Tattoos done by hand are usually hand-poked tattoos, which are applied by wrapping thread around a needle, dipping it in an ash, water and toothpaste ink mixture and sticking the skin repeatedly. See how tattoos are administered in jail and in the military 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
"Applying a tattoo by hand. This is a way people a lot of time in jail, sometimes even in the military and different places, if they can't get to a tattoo shop or just don't really care what the tattoo looks like, they might go through a very crude method of applying a tattoo called, hand poking. And when you apply a hand poked tattoo, which I have had done to myself when I was younger. I'm going to pretend that this is a regular sewing needle. What you would do is take some thread and you would wrap thread around this needle until you had about an eighth of an inch of the needle exposed and the thread wrapped probably about the same amount of the shaft of the needle. The reason you wrap the thread, the thread acts as a reservoir, just the same as your tattoo machine here. You dip your needle and thread into the ink, the ink gets caught on the thread, and then as you go along poking, every time that needle touches the skin, that ink drops down into the hole. It's very painful and it can take a long time to do a very small design. So it's something that you might want to steer clear of, unless you just absolutely have to have something done, but I would suggest go a different route than hand poking. But that is how it's done. A lot of time the pigment used, if a person can't get a hold of a professional tattoo machine or a rotary machine, they probably don't have access to good ink either. So you're probably going to be getting some pigment made out of ashes and water and toothpaste, and god knows only what else. So be very thoughtful if you are planning on getting a hand poked tattoo, because it is the least desirable method of getting one. This is a hand poked tattoo setup. You got your sewing needle and you get some sewing thread, you wrap it around the tip of the needle like this, and leaving a little bit of the needle exposed at the bottom. Once you've got that done, you've got the thread secured, you dip that whole shoot match down inside your pigment, get that thread soaked pretty good; try to do this without bending your needle if you plan on doing this. And once you've got that thread saturated with pigment, then you've got your design drawn on or with a stencil or whatever, then you just start going down that design poking over and over right on the line that you want to make. And you have to poke it in pretty fast succession and pretty close to one another so you got a line, you have to build a line when you're doing it like this. So you'll probably have to do quite a bit of dipping in your ink to keep that thread saturated. But that's what you do, you just dip it in there, saturate the thread and then start poking pretty quick right down your design until you've got your desired thickness with your outline."
eHow Article: How to Tattoo by Hand
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