Japanese Tattoo Style

sexy girl with geisha japanese tattoo on back body tattoo design picture

This is a woman who had her leg tattooed entirely by hand at the 1994 NTA convention, and was kind enough to let me watch, take pictures and chat with me about it. The picture that you see of the tattoo artist working by hand in the introduction to this lens is the Japanese master working on this very tattoo.

She was the partner of an American tattoo artist, and she was getting the kanji for his name on her leg along with a single cherry blossom petal. Conscious of how long it could take to work by hand, she told me she purposely made it be a small design so that the Japanese tattoo master could work entirely by hand and not use a tattoo machine to save time. In a convention setting, outlines are often done by machine just to help get the design done a lot faster, with shading then done using the hand techniques.

I asked her if she felt any difference between the sensation of having a tattoo done by machine versus by hand. She thought for a moment and then said she'd almost say the Japanese hand technique was "cool" whereas the Western machine method felt more "hot." She felt the work she was getting was less painful, but she could also feel the distinct punctures of the needles into her skin, which she said felt sort of weird. If it's very quiet, you can hear the hand tool puncturing the leg, and it makes a strange crunch/popping sound, almost like when you hear a rat or rabbit chewing on something.

The completed design, shown here, took just about an hour to tattoo. Now imagine how many square inches there are in a full Japanese body suit and you start to understand why they can take up to a decade to complete.