July is an exciting edition for Swamps as the date of her & Matt’s wedding is getting closer! Swamps has has some more of her tattoo sleeve extended and is sharing it with you all today. Seriously, it’s super cool! I’ll let her tell you all about it.
Hello fellow bride folk. I hope that you have had a super lovely June. The sunshine is finally here and I am feeling like the wedding will be here before I know it. Scarily, after this blog I only have one more month before the wedding will actually be upon us – eeeeek! It is exactly 9 weeks until D-Day. Everything is coming together and its just finishing touches now.
I must admit that throughout my whole blogging ‘experience’ as much as I have L.O.V.E.D sharing my wedding experience with you lot (and at times it has helped keep me sane) I have felt like a bit of a fraud. Being your resident ‘tattooed bride’ and all I feel like my posts have been lacking slightly on the tattooed front. It is like when you look at suicide girls and there’s some half naked chic (she’s probs fully naked but let’s not be vulgar haha) on their website and there isn’t a single strand of multicoloured hair, and shaved head or tattoo in sight! Ok, ok, it’s not quite that bad as I do have tattoos so I guess I’m not a complete impostor, but never the less some of you may be thinking “This chic isn’t really living up to her title here”. Well wait no more. This month I finally took the plunge again. To say I have had a bit of a tattoo draught would be an understatement. Tattoos certainly aren’t cheap and when you have to pay for your venue and registrar and all of the other ‘relatively’ important wedding elements, getting another tattoo end’s up taking a bit of a back seat. Now we are into double figures on my wedding countdown app – yes I am that person that annoyingly posts her countdown on her Instagram every month – soz! I decided that actually if I don’t want to look like a half finished drawing then I should probs just pull my finger out and book in and get some more work done. So alas my June has been very, erm, painful shall we say.
I get tattooed by two separate guys, also both called Matt. I think I must have an attraction to all males called Matt. I blame my brother, also named Matt; he must have been good to me when I was a kid. Let’s not introduce another Matt into the situation though as I fear 4 Matt’s may get a little confusing. So for the purposes of less confusion to your wedding filled heads I shall refer to them by Surname and in one case nickname.
So the first guy I get tattooed by is called Webb. Coincidentally I went to school with Webb, back in the day. I say back in the day – it really wasn’t that long ago! Oh wait, it was 7 years ago when I left school. Cripes I don’t want to think about that too much. God knows what I have done in the last 7 years it all seems a bit of a blur.
So anyway, when we were in high school me and Webb had a little to do with each other but we weren’t best pals or anything. To be fair in the politics of being at school we filtered more in the ‘GREEB’ category so we know each other by way of association I guess. Now, all of the people who though we were ‘greebs’ are actually now also covered in tattoos – such is life! Webb is an absolutely fantastic tattoo artist.
You can find more of his work here. He owns his own studio 72 Street Tattoo. The fantastic thing about Webb, besides his talent is that he is local to me. I don’t know if any of your have ever had the fortunate experience of visiting my hometown of Stoke on Trent, but it isn’t the most diverse of cities and so it is a little limited on good tattoo artists. Webb’s style would described more as traditional and he has done some absolutely incredible pieces. His work tends to use lots of bright colours and look really vibrant. The piece of the left is one that he has done recently and I think I am a little bit in love with it. I love the bright colours and the little teapot.
I find in my experience that lots of tattoo artists have a selection of colours they use and when people have sleeves that these colours are often repeated throughout the design, which can look a little samey so I really wanted to get Webb to tattoo me to make sure I get plenty of colour in mine. I aren’t quite 100% complete on the tattoo front yet. I have one last 3 hour sitting with Webb in August to add in my background colour but I am going to get him to do it exactly as it is in the above image. I love the purpley pink background and I actually really love the block colour he uses in the background. You don’t get to see this much. Some people really don’t like the block colour background but it is my faves so that’s what I’m gonna go with.
I first went to Webb when I needed a terrible tattoo covering up. I have made reference to my ‘backwards’ tattoo before where at the point I agreed to go ahead and tattoo it the transfer of the text was the right way round in the mirror. Meaning I could actually read it in the mirror and the absolute idiot that I am didn’t realise that there was something wrong there haha! Dohhh! So following that experience he transformed that part of my sleeve incredibly well.
It is a little darker than his normal work but that is solely because the tattoo I had underneath was very large and dark so it needed a big slab of darker colour slapping on top. I’m really happy with what he has achieved and whilst had I not made the idiotic decision to tattoo a rate rubbish tattoo onto my body at the age of 18 I may have had a nice pretty lady, he has made a really terrible tattoo look bloomin great so im made up with it! It is considerably better than what I had before so Kudos to Matt Webb.
The second Matt that tattoos me is better known as ‘Matt Craven Evans’, he can be found here. He too tattoos in a similar style and opts for a traditional approach to most of his work and he currently works in One Shot Charlie’s in Stourbridge in Birmingham. I’ve been getting tattooed by Matt since way back in the day. I have always admired his work and I have seen him develop his style over the years considerably. When I first started getting tattooed by him he was relatively new to the game and we used to sit for largely full day stints.
I have to say in my ‘older’ age my pain threshold has changed considerably. I am now somewhat of a wuss. This latest sitting we had was a 7 hourer! I was like ‘yeah what evs, I can normally sit like a rock without as much as a murmur.’ This, however, was not the case this time. Because we were finishing lots of little things all over the place it involved lots of line work, which was then left for another hour or two to ‘sore up’ and then returned to to add colour. It wasn’t even remotely fun. By the end of it I was wriggling around making rather a lot of noise and fuss from the waist down. Wriggling your tattooed arm around mid tattoo isn’t the bestest idea so I managed to keep that stillish, with the help of Craven pinning me down. This is the end result of what we came up with, please excuse my majorly FAT arm, it is full of waters and swelling – ouchy…
So there you go. You may notice that there is a bit of a theme we have gone with for my work with Craven. We went all things butterfly, buttons and general cute things. People ask me what is means, but unfortunately, for those people, I am one of those annoying people who just tattoo’s themselves with things they like. I guess I just treat my body as a bit of a blank canvas. Some people find it hard to understand why you would tattoo yourself with things that don’t have some sort of symbolic meaning but I just like colourfulness and pretty things. This is as far as we have gotten this month. I have one last sitting booked in before the wedding. This time for 3 hours as I know I can’t bare longer now. I can also confirm that having your inner bicep tattooed is majorly painful. If you are a tattoo virgin I would avoid inner bicep and elbow. Major ouch.
So there you go, I hope I have lived up to my ‘tattooed’ bride status a little more than usual. I will keep you updates as and when I get the colour added in for the big day. Next months post with be the last one before the wedding….eeeek! I will have to try and cram in all of my last minute stuffs.
I should probably also think about writing a list of things I have left to do otherwise I don’t think this wedding sitch will actually come together as well, and we cant have that.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the sun while it is here, and I also hope you don’t go on your holidays and it is actually warmer here. I would be majorly upset if that happened. If any of you would like me to make next months blog about something in particular the please leave me some cheeky comments and I will make sure I cover all of your requests in next months bloggio.
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