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CAPTION FOR THE VIDEO ABOVE:

Hey, so I haven’t officially done a tattoo tour yet for y’all and I know I’ve been talking about my tattoos a lot and you’ve seen them and I’ve showed photos and stuff, but I wanted to do like an official tour for y’all today. So, here we go. I might need to move the camera some or like have some weird angles or something, to show you everything or probably just stand on my bed. I don’t know. So I know you’ve seen some of it. And I’m currently like I think I’m getting my next session is next week. So by the time you see this, I’ll already have my next session and it’ll look a little different, but this is where we are. I’m recording this mid-January, but this is going to be shared, I think early February, probably.

So yeah, I don’t want to… I’m doing it now because I don’t want to do like a tour when I still have a tattoo that’s healing. I want it to already be mostly healed before I do this. Because if it’s really fresh, it’s like bleedy and irritated and frustrated, and it like sometimes looks a little scary. So, I’m doing this since I’m healed from my last session and it’s before my most current session that’s going to happen next week.

So, here we go. I started this tattoo in September of 2020. We have been doing it about once a month since then. I’ve had a bunch of sessions, we’re over 28 hours into this tattoo. It took 12 hours just to get all the outlining done and we’re getting closer to getting more of the color done. We started color a few months ago and my leg and butt are finished. We’re working up my hip now. So right now, we’re mostly just that we’re working up from the bottom. So the last thing to be done will probably be my arm.

So all the outlining has been done, but we’re working on coloring it all in. So I’m going to stand up to show you the base of my tattoo, and then we’re going to move up from there. So my tattoo starts down here at my ankle with the… see if I can get closer… with a little frog. And it’s the base of the tree. This is a Poplar tree, some Poplar flowers, lemme move again. So from the front, this is what you see. Here’s the side, my leg. And the back… got my butt done! So excite!

So on my hip, I have a red tailed hawk. All of these creatures in my tattoo I have a personal relationship with, and I mean, obviously the tree too like, I grew up in North Carolina and a lot of these are around my house or I’ve seen a lot. So here’s my butt I’m gonna go over here so you can see more. I have a little snail on my butt. Isn’t it cute? I love the snail! So this is where we finished off last time. So my butt and leg are done. We’re working up. I’m guessing we’ll probably do this Cardinal next. You might be able to see. Let’s see. Nope, too far.

You might be able to see the couple of red lines here. We did a color test last time, sometimes people are allergic to ink and tattoos. And that as you can imagine causes a big problem. The most common color to be problematic for people, in terms of being allergic to ink is red. That is like, if somebody is allergic to the ink it’s most likely going to be red ink. So those little red lines. Right there on the, on the Cardinal. Those are a color test to make sure that my skin will heal with that color, and thankfully it did. So I probably won’t have problems with red. So that’s going to be all red. So, Cardinal, we got, the tree comes up my whole side. So this front, this cat was already here.

I can see in the back. Let’s see if I can point to things, so the cat was already there. Here’s all my branches. Have a dragonfly. It’s going to be painted or not painted, it’s going to be colored in blue dragonfly. On the back here, in the center, this bird, that’s a bilateral gynandromorph rose-breasted grosbeak. And I know you probably are like what the fuck is that? The rose-breasted grosbeak is a bird that I think is more North like Northeast. I haven’t actually seen any in person. This is the only bird that I don’t have a personal relationship with, but in I think it was 2020 scientists and researchers found a bilateral gynandromorph rose-breasted grosbeak and what that means is, it’s the bird, but since it’s bilateral gynandromorph, that means it’s half male and half female, which is really fucking cool. I’ll put a link below with the like an article with information about that. But I was like, I need a half male and half female bird on me. So that’s why that one’s there. It’ll be colored in really cool. So that guy.

LINK FOR MORE INFO ABOUT BILATERAL GYNANDROMORPH ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK

I have a hummingbird up here. It’ll be a ruby-throated hummingbird. So there’s my back. For now. And front goes across here, this is a Carolina Wren. I’m going to this is going to be one of those black and blue butterflies. More tree. This is a tufted titmouse. They’re so cute. We had one when I was a kid. Well, there’s a baby one that fell into our truck when I was a kid and it was too young to be on its own yet, but it was old enough that it didn’t really need a parent. So we fed it like dry cat food that we had soaked in water to let it get really soft. We fed it that for a little bit and then once I started flying and seemed ready to go. We let it outside and there was like a couple of other tufted titmouse, that seemed to adopt it in our backyard. So so cute. So that’s this.

And then I’ve got a chickadee on the back here. See if I can show you this way. Little chickadee. They’re so cute. My elbow… my elbow is empty right now, but it will have a little spider and spider web in there. Elbow tattoos are painful as fuuuuck. They’re not fun at all. So that’s why I don’t want anything really to cover up the whole space. Like a spider web will be a way less painful, because they have a lot of open space and it’s not all colored in, but I… because I wanted it to not be blank, but I also didn’t want to kill myself with a lot of pain in my elbow because it’s not fun. Even just the stuff like around here was really not fun at all. So spiderwebs going to hurt. That’s gonna be okay. Lower arm. I already had this but I have a, let’s turn this way. This is a Luna Moth that will be colored in eventually. So yeah, that’s my tattoo. 

Yay! Tattoo tour! if you have any questions about my tattoo, or how it’s going so far, or wanting updates, whatever, comment, let me know. I’d love to hear from you. Yeah. I hope you like the tattoo tour, it was fun. By the time I do another one I’ll have more color. I don’t know how often I’ll do these, but I’m for sure gonna do a tattoo tour when it’s finished, which will probably be another year from now. Thank you for being here! Thanks for watching! I love you so much, and I’ll talk to you soon! Bye!

PS- My tattoo artist is Alex Santaloci at Iron Ghost Tattoo in Charlotte NC!