Been wanting to do this for a while and the stars finally aligned about two weeks ago. Gotta go back in a few more to get the background and eveything else done.

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Update 3/14 - Round 2.

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Update 4/24 - All done!

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Well, like any tattoo you get, I feel like it should have some personal significance... otherwise why the hell are you putting something that's likely permanent on your body?

I was a NES nerd as a kid...never owned any Sega systems until Dreamcast. Dr. Mario was the first arcade game we bought, that got the ball rolling and brought me back into pinball. The background will be something that recognizes pinball both more directly and kind of represents a lot of the knowledge that I've gained from the last 3 years, and that I'm still working on in some college courses I'm taking, and where I hope to be going.

It's actually a coverup of a much smaller tattoo that had relevance to me when I got it, but after 16 years (I got it when I was 15!), didn't really have much meaning for me personally anymore. I wasn't embarrased by it, or anything, and I'll probably post a before/after picture later on, it just happened that I had this idea for a much larger tattoo and it lined up well with what I wanted to do. The actual work is being done by one of our local pinheads too, which is freakin' awesome. I asked if he had done coverups before, just out of curiosity really, and we got talking...few days later I made a sketch at work, then a few months after that I seriously sat down and made a detailed mock-up of what I wanted to do. It's actually a lot larger than I originally intended, but it had to be scaled up for the background to really have any detail at all....fine by me. I'm really happy with this first part.

I wish I could go get it finished tomorrow. And man...I really need a pic that's not taken by my phone covered in glass dust looking through a scratched up plastic lens...lol..

Got some more of it done on wednesday. One more trip next month should finish it off...my guy was afraid of dragging the black ink into the circuitboard background if we had tried to do it all at once. Image in original post.

All done now, last pic up at top! My wife decided she had to get one too.

Phase two in progress....should be done with the mock-up tomorrow, I hope...I've got this split into two files, I need to merge them. It's been horiffically slow at work today....don't mind the goofy tears... I let my tattoo guy handle that part.. For comparison's sake, here's the mockup I took him for the first part too.

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Alpha form from Metroid 2 on the GBA.. I don't really dig black and white, so I colored it by hand. I also have a Gamma as well, but it's on the other file that's at home.

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Finished this a few days ago....have been letting it simmer to see if I really wanted to make any changes to it..mocked out the size on my arm (which is actually just about perfect at the resolution it's drawn at, go figure. Cosmic wierdness!). I really can't think of anything else that I can or want to do with this that would make it any better than it is for me. I know I'm done with it because I'm just ready to get it done for real.

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Here we go...getting started. Took a long time for us to figure out scale and had to do some work to isolate the black pixels for a stencil after I got the the studio. Going back prepared in a few days with ready to print stencils for the other ones, but I think the baby metroid and beta are getting cut from the overall design...I don't really need two from Metroid 2 and the capsule is so small relative to the other stuff it might not be recognizeable.

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Okay...so...the above concept wasn't really going to work. It was just too much monoculture (all metroid, two sprites from the same system/generation) and the hatchling in the capsule specifically just would have been way too big to be recognizeable. We're basically working at the lower limits of practicality in terms of pixel size at the size they're being done on my arm right now. So decided to go a different route than just having the band of everything but Metroid.

This is another thing about tattoos that I really believe is key for larger pieces and projects like this...you have to trust your artist. The purple backgrounds and the tears not matching up with what I'd already done was just going to look goofy and mismatched. He told me that, my wife had already told me that... I didn't even try and argue. If I can't trust the guy that's been doing this for over 20 years and the person I married....well...FML, right?! I started poking around for other things to use that I liked, while trying to make sure that I was going to cover multiple eras. Part of the whole idea I had in mind was that if I decided to go full sleeve with it, the top half was going to be all bad guys, bottom half was going to be all good guys, but then it's like...well, you don't really have to limit it that way. There's a ton of sprites out there, and you can throw in a good guy on the "Bad guy side" but use one of the "getting hit/died" animations or something so that it's clear they're getting stomped for being on the wrong side.

Don't mind the positioning right now, it looks kind of funky because the tearouts are going to be built around them. I'm a big fan of bright use of color, so to not have too much green all over the place (circuitboards will still be green...at least on upper half of my arm... I have an idea if this goes further) Yoshi will be red...let's face it, red yoshi was always the gimp of the litter anyways. Always spitting those stupid fireballs and robbing you of the chance to get the 1-ups with the long string of shell kills...unreal. That prick, he deserves to get owned!

So here's where we're at as of last wednesday...

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There was going to be more done this last time but he was running late. Also, you would not even begin to believe the amount of prepped artwork I have done for this....sprite color separations with grids, templates to be printed on ink paper...yeah. I'm juggling all that and making changes on the fly with his old Vista PC that takes a half hour to boot up and running a version of paint that is SO OLD, there's no "back" option... just the 1-step-Undo and that's it...he uses Photoshop CS3 and he had to teach me how to work with layers so I could convert my art into something that was easier for him to work with. I don't mind doing it, at all, but it's a process and it takes a LOT of time to make sure that nothing gets screwed up.

Also, at some point, it doesn't matter how long I am willing to sit, my skin just will not cooperate. All of this is being filled in with a liner needle, and let's be honest here..I'm fat....the skin on the sides of my arms is pretty thin. It welts up a LOT afterwards, and is red for 2-3 days in these areas. It's pretty bad. I think if we had more time this last visit, then we probably would've outlined some of the tearout, or started coloring the gamma metroid...we just didn't have the time. I took a cancellation spot... /shrug. My other scheduled times are full days.

Last session...

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Finally done, I think. don't like this post being in the basement....dumb.

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Another pinhead who I don't know if he's on here or not...

Nervosa Tattoo in Sherman, TX. Brian is the bomb.

I'll be at TPF next year?

His sarcasm was so witless you completely missed it. (Unless that wasn't sarcasm, then I'm totally lost.)

Point is, thread existed before the Basement was a fart in Robin's mind. It's not offensive, or crude, or anything, really. I don't read the basement at all, as I'm sure MANY others don't, because the idea of the segregated site (cue ironic joke about the basement being black and pinside being white..) halves doesn't really suit me.

Oh, and for the record, the relation to pinball is that I was looking at a very high-rez picture of a WPC driver board when I drew the example of what I wanted in paint, as pixel art. So even though the traces and component layout doesn't really match anything, I definitely used that as inspriation of how I wanted it drawn.

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