I had wanted old school Sailor Jerry style birds for about a year, and never actually went out and got them. I thought about them all the time, and drew them all over my textbooks and notes, but it never seemed like quite the right time. About a week before this experience took place however, I decided that 3 years of troublesome nipple piercings was long enough and I removed them-- and suddenly needed a replacement. My chest felt naked. Here was my opportunity for the tattoo I had been planning for so long!
At A Glance Author arrr_im_a_pirate Contact arrr_im_a_pirate@bme.anon IAM arrr_im_a_pirate When Three months ago Artist Kate Hellenbrand Studio Shanghai Kate's Location Buffalo, NY I hadn't been tattooed in Buffalo (where I go to school) in 3 years, so I wasn't really familiar with the local artists. I did some searching and turned up a shop that came highly recommended. I went there to see if I could get an appointment and a female artist immediately started talking to me about what I wanted and offering to draw things, etc, without even asking me who I wanted to see. I went along with it, mostly because I hadn't expected to be swooped on and claimed, and made an appointment with her. I offered her a few drawings of my own to work from, to try and express what I wanted. I'm no artist, and I couldn't get the drawings exactly right, but I hoped she would improve on them. A few days later, I came upon a tattoo experience about the same artist. It was not flattering, to say the least. I decided safe was better than sorry and canceled the appointment.
The problem was, I didn't know where else to go. I spent a few days researching online and in the phone book for a respectable artist, and found a listing for Kate Hellenbrand at Shanghai Kate's just a few miles away from me. Kate began tattooing in 1972 with Sailor Jerry (and bought his estate and ran one of his shops after his death). If I was looking for someone with old school experience, I had found her!
I drove down to the shop that evening with a friend to check it out. The shop was empty when I walked in except for Kate and Tyler, her betta fish named after the character from Fight Club. She was incredibly friendly and gave me her portfolio to look at. I barely had to say two words for her to know EXACTLY what I wanted. She opened one the books she had published on Sailor Jerry and pointed out the bird she thought would best suit me. It was almost exactly what I had pictured in my head. We made a few edits (an extra row of feathers and a slight change in the eye among other things), and she offered to draw it up for me so that it was exactly what I had pictured. I didn't bother to even offer my own drawings as examples, preferring this time to let an artist I trusted do her job. Suffice to say I was absolutely enraptured. The shop's atmosphere was peaceful, pleasant, and clean, and Kate's portfolio was fantastic. If all that wasn't enough to make me commit to he r, the sight of her talking to Tyler the way I talk to Claudio, my betta, instilled a certain feeling of camaraderie that made me positive she was the perfect artist for me. I knew there was a reason I had waited so long and been so hesitant about getting this piece I had dreamed of-- I was waiting until everything seemed perfect. And now, it was finally all falling into place. I made an appointment with her for 10am the following day. She told me to make sure I ate a good breakfast, or in her words "pancakes and french toast and eggs and cheese and ham: a lot of carbs and a lot of fat," and after a little more small talk, I left.
I got up the next morning extra early to have breakfast with my roommate, then drove down to the shop. The door was still locked, she didn't usually open until noon, so I sat on the step for a minute. She came downstairs and opened the door just before 10 and I went inside. First she photocopied the design from the sailor jerry book, then she took it to her drawing table to add the extra feathers and change the eye. Then I came back and she gave me... well I don't really know what to call it, but it was a piece of pink fabric with elastic around the top that I could wear to expose my chest but cover the rest so I wasn't naked while getting tattooed. I put that on and we made a few copies of different sizes and put on a few stencils until we were satisfied with the size and position. Then she made a stencil for the other side, drew some kind of grid on my chest with a ruler to make the placement perfectly even, and we sat down to begin.
She set out a few small cups for black ink and got the machine ready. She is a tattoo shop inspector in Utah, and occasionally pointed out things that she often caught people doing or not doing such as not checking the needles before using them. Then it was on with the gloves and on with the tattooing. She put vaseline over the area and began the outline. It overall was not too bad, a couple spots were painful and a couple I barely even felt. I didn't bleed at all until she began the blue part of the birds, and even then only minimally. She told me that the cool colors don't go into the skin as easily as the warm colors, and therefore she has to go a little deeper, so it hurt a bit more and bled a little. Then came the red/orange/yellow part which was pretty much smooth sailing although I was a little sore by then. The whole bird took about two and a half hours. We stopped at that point because I had a class in less than an hour, so she put on a dressing, told me no t to take it off until morning and then to put a TINY amount of bacitracin on it. Then we made arrangements for me to come back the next day after class.
The next day, I rushed out of class and down to her shop. For a couple reasons, the second bird did not go as smoothly as the first had. Kate had spent from noon til midnight the night before tattooing almost continuously, so she was a bit more tired than usual. The positioning was also more awkward because of the way the shop was set up. We ended up trying various different positions but the one we stuck with was with me laying on my back on the bench. The third thing was that my period had started on the night between the two tattoos, and everything started to hurt a lot more than it had the first day. These things combined with a few interruptions, and bird number two took about four hours in all. Over the course of both days, it was truly a wonderful experience. Kate was fascinating to talk to, full of stories of what it was like to be a female tattoo artist in the seventies, in New York City and around the world.
She bandaged both the new and day-old tattoos and taped me up with a different tape than she'd used the day before (since I'd had trouble getting it off the next morning without hurting myself), and gave me a tube of Curel fragrance free lotion. She told me to leave the bandage on overnight, then to use bacitracin four times a day for the first four days, in tiny amounts only, and then switch to the lotion until it was completely healed. The healing took about two weeks, and I was left with a fantastically beautiful permanent piece of artwork.
I will be eternally glad that I waited and planned for this tattoo, and that I did not just go with the first artist who caught my eye and drawings by my own hand I could never have lived with. The moral of the story is, do your research, take your time, and you will be rewarded!