Tattoo Artist Bang Bang Answers More Tattoo Questions From Twitter

I'm Bang Bang, and I'm gonna answer some questions

about tattoos on Twitter.

[upbeat music]

Pretty sure this is a dumb question,

but say if you have a tattoo on your arm

and you somehow cut that arm,

what happens to the tattoo?

Do you just end up with new skin in the middle of it?

Yeah, you get a scar.

This is what that looks like.

Tell me again how these scars happened.

I had a piece of wire in an impact jump

and the wire slipped out, whipped around,

and got me from my armpit down to my wrist.

So this tattoo is a few years old

and some of what I'm gonna do today

is fix some of that that metal wire did to him,

all these scars throughout his tattoo.

For each different grouping

is something different I'm gonna do,

so if I need a really,

if I need a tattoo in a really fine area,

I'll use a grouping of needles and fewer needles,

depending on how large I want that line to be.

Now I'm just trying to hide some of that scarring.

I'm gonna keep some of it,

'cause it matches the pattern of her dress.

But try to fix as much as I can.

I like to work like copy machine.

So I like to finish it block by block

and just move along.

Since my hands are rested on the person,

we've gotta kinda finish it,

then we can put our hands on that finished area

and work above.

That's kinda the way I learned.

You'll always have a scar, no matter what,

but we'll get the tones to match.

If it's a deep cut,

you'll get a line right through your tattoo.

If you get stitches and they don't sew it together evenly,

it can be crooked.

If you get a bad one, I would recommend

asking a plastic surgeon to close it

because I've seen them misalign tattoos

and there's really no fixing it.

Even a cat scratch can remove pigment from your skin

and leave you with a little mark of fresh skin.

I have seen some very bad ones.

People working in kitchens, they get cut with a knife.

The worst that it can be is if it heals back misaligned.

That's a tough one.

How hard is it to get a tattoo removed?

Asking for a friend.

If you're getting a tattoo removed,

there's two ways to do it.

Sandpaper and laser.

I recommend laser.

People do it, I've seen it on Instagram.

People removing tattoos with sandpaper.

God.

Russians, they're crazy.

Laser removal, it works.

Both of my hands, actually,

were tattoos previously that I had lasered and covered up.

So yeah, you can totally get laser done.

And it works, it works pretty well.

From Abbey Mae.

What's the best way to make a word tattoo interesting?

That's the question, I don't want just words.

If you're trying to make a text tattoo really interesting,

try and make it unique.

Unless you want a common horizontal text-on-ribs tattoo,

then you know, go for it.

My favorite phrase that I have ever tattooed on someone

was [bleep] it.

QueenOfBlending.

How do folks get simple words and basic grammar all wrong

tattooed on their body?

Does this mean that tattoo artist fails too?

I'm not sure her grammar in that tweet's perfect.

There's a reason we're tattooers and not English teachers.

Like [laughs] we're not the best spellers.

We do a lot of spell check.

We do a lot of grammar checking,

and people still do get it wrong.

Oftentimes, it's from a song lyric.

You know, we know it's wrong but it's the lyric so it works.

It works for that person.

We talk about it sometimes.

I remember I tattooed something on someone once

where we purposefully changed grammar,

lose an apostrophe so it feels more linear.

We definitely talk about it and we do our best,

but yeah, I've seen some pretty bad ones.

From Lea.

Does anyone know how much a person

should tip a tattoo artist?

Tips are not expected by tattoo artists

so it's really on you.

It's really cool if someone gives you a thoughtful tip.

Speaking for myself, I deeply appreciate the people

who get tattooed by me, when they get me something

specific to me that's more than just money and a handshake.

That's really special.

I think that's cool.

Sorry, I didn't answer your question.

I don't know, 20%?

I don't know.

From Hayley.

How do you draw a tattoo based on a song?

Help.

Whenever we design tattoos, we start with subject matter.

So what's the song about?

Then it's like, okay, what's gonna be

the best visual interpretation of that subject?

And then what is going to work best

on your and your body?

Find the subject matter, find your great tattoo artist

to help you design it.

I think I've tattooed Let It Be like 100 times.

It's an amazing song

and kinda like a perfect tattoo.

I might need a Let It Be tattoo.

From Robin?

Tattoos artists are incredible.

Like how do you draw on a squishy, imperfect surface

without an eraser and consistently create good pieces?

It's tough to draw around a person's body.

We only get so many passes on someone's skin

before we scar them.

You have to be very precise and direct in what you do.

Sometimes you have to give up.

You can take the skin as far as you know you can take it,

and if you didn't get it exactly where you wanna be,

you have to stop.

To answer your question,

the way we make these tattoos great

and on a consistent basis is preparation.

Preparedness, it kinda lines you up for success.

A great tattoos artist is very prepared

for what he's gonna do or what she's gonna do.

They know what the tattoo is gonna be

before they even begin.

I use a traditional tattoo machine.

The electromagnets turn on and off

and a spring that carries it back and forth

and the capacitor regulates the energy.

That electricity moves through the power unit

and I control it from my foot switch.

It's kinda like a suction.

They are essentially the guts of a doorbell.

That's why I said this is a traditional tattoo machine.

There's several different kinds

and you'll see some of the artists here

working with tattoo machines that might look

much more like a pen.

Now, the reason I really love working

with these kind of tattoo machines is

they're all handmade.

You have to be a tattoo artist

or recommended by a tattoo artist.

There's an apprentice to

being able to buy one of these

from one of the guys who makes them.

Now, there's knockoffs

and you could buy a tattoo machine on Amazon

or like, Walmart, but you will not get the same result.

They have to be handmade by an expert tattoo artist.

A lot of tattoo artists will not

spell tattoo machines on line.

They will only sell them in person to a person they know.

They don't wanna get their tattoo machines

in the hands of someone who can harm somebody.

You see how quiet it is in here before I start tattooing?

That's the difference between rotaries and coil machines.

[whirring] I love this sound.

From Adrian.

So like, what's up with Lebron's tattoos?

Does he have any cool stories?

I tattooed Lebron once and I have a cool story.

I got a phone call one night at 8:00 p.m.

that Lebron wanted to get tattooed the next day.

He was in Cleveland and I was in New York.

So I fly there and I get to Lebron's house.

I say hi, I go downstairs, walk past his bowling alley,

into his barber shop and I forget ink caps,

which are pretty important.

They hold our ink when we tattoo

and the size of those caps matters

when I'm diluting inks.

I needed ink caps.

So I started calling tattoo shops in the area.

I said hey, I'm in town to tattoo an athlete

and I totally forgot my ink caps.

My name's Bang Bang, I'm a tattoo artist.

I'm not some junkie making kitchen tattoos.

I'm really in a bind, can you help me out?

People would hang up the phone on me.

I was like jeez, I guess I gotta name drop.

Hey, I'm tattooing Lebron.

Really need ink caps.

Can we be friends, please?

Nobody would listen.

So I found a head shop

that sold pipes and tattoo equipment in Cleveland.

We drove, I picked up ink caps,

go back, we made a really cool portrait

of his daughter on his back,

put him through a bunch of pain.

His mom said you're the greatest as what you do

like my son is the greatest at what he does.

And coming from Lebron's mom,

that was one of the best compliments I ever got.

Keeping Up With Kelly.

In case you wanted to know

how a tattoo can change over time.

This is a 10-year difference.

I didn't realize how bad it looked until now.

I saw what it looked like when I first got it done.

How do you even fix this?

When a tattoo is first made,

that tattoo is as sharp as it'll ever be at that moment.

Over time, your white blood cells come

and break this pigment down and carry it away.

In this case, we have a dense congee

and the area in between each one of these symbols

of your skin, this area is quite small.

As the black settles into your body and spreads,

those spaces of skin start to become less visible.

For our tattoo to fix it,

there's a couple things you can do.

You can cover it with a much larger tattoo

and you can pull your eye away from this area,

or you can get it touched up.

It looks to me, since it's so closed up

and there is not as much skin

in between as there used to be,

that you would need to put white around it

so that your eye can make a clear separation

between the black ink and then that gray blurred edge

and the little bit of skin in between

and then again, it picks up that gray blurry edge

and then black inks.

Let me show you how that's done.

Since his tattoo is quite old,

this is about seven years ago we did this,

I just wanna add a little bit of contrast

to any areas that I think have aged and changed a bit,

so I wanna make sure his tattoo stays

as sharp as the day we did it,

and I can do that with just a couple of darker edges

and a couple spots that'll help the eye separate

and put contrast to some things that have aged.

I'm gonna work here, around her hand a little bit.

I'm just gonna create a little bit of edge

between where her hand is and this cloth that she's holding.

Whenever there's not a defined edge next to something,

I'm gonna try to make the edge a little more defined.

This tattoo's aged really well.

Whenever I tattoo, I'm trying to think

of how the tattoo will age

and so the contrast points are really strong,

so there's really deep darks and really light lights

right next to it.

It makes a really easy step for the eye to see.

I'm trying to create the thinnest little edge

just to separate two areas that are in highlight.

So I wanted to separate enough for the eye to see it,

but I don't wanna put a big thick black line in.

So although I could do that with this,

that variable of depth right now,

I'm trying to control the depth of it as I move my hand,

will give me just a much lighter effect.

I imagine it hurts a lot less too, right?

Yeah.

If you've ever seen a tattoo that's very old,

it's very blurry.

Working really large or with high contrast over big areas

helps to avoid the image changing

as the tattoo is gonna settle.

When you're 80, it's gonna look like [bleeps].

This is why when I tattoo,

I'm making decisions based on

what it's going to look like in several years.

From Jon.

Fellow tattooed peeps, how did you find your tattoo artist?

There's no decent website and Instagram search is useless.

Instagram's pretty helpful, I think.

There's some cool tattoo fan pages.

Just an assortment of different artist works

from all over the world,

so you can kinda find a style you like,

find that artist and track 'em down.

Information travels really fast nowadays

so you have access to the entire planet

in your pocket on your cellphone.

Do some good research

and you'll find someone really great.

Probably not too far from you.

There's a lot of amazing artists in the world.

From Amrit.

Architwitter, who designed Bang Bang's tattoo store

on Grand Street in New York?

I need to know.

Jessie McGowan is a designer I've worked with

since I opened my first store.

When me and Jessie kinda collaborate,

I know what we need for tattooing.

Jessie really knows what we need for the eye.

The core value of the design of the store is balance.

It's black and it's white on purpose

and there's no art hanging in our stores

because we're making it.

It's built specifically for artist experience

and clients' experience.

When I designed the store with Jessie,

we thought about where people are gonna sit,

where that wire is gonna come from,

where it's gonna run to, where's the power source for it.

We hid a lot of things.

We've eliminated certain wires on floor lamps, for example.

Now they're battery-powered

so we just lose one of those obstacles.

Tattooing is very stressful

and being tattooed is really stressful.

We wanted to make an environment

that is incredibly welcoming

and break that barrier down.

So there's amenities for artists,

there's places to relax,

there's big dinner table and there's TV downstairs,

there's fish.

It's my job at the owner of the store

to make people feel comfortable.

Whether they're making tattoos or receiving them.

For tattoo artists,

we pour so much of ourselves into our work

and then it walks out the door and we don't see it anymore.

It's a little sad.

It's kind of a bummer [laughs].

That was Tattoo Support.

I'm Bang Bang.

Thanks for watching.