Gunnar is such a down to earth honest guy, and a great artist to boot. Due to snow our noon appointment was pushed out until 3PM. He went to work on my wifes pancreatic cancer ribbon. He didn’t do a pre-sketch because he said it was so simple he’d just draw it up right there. So he did, and after my wife and he went through the color pallet, a little less than two hours later my wife got her first tattoo.

Then he started on my cobra addition at 5PM. No pre-sketch other than a general cobra idea sketch. He spent almost 1.5 hours drawing the cobra with a pen on me before inking and then scrapped the whole idea because he just wasn’t happy with it. he couldn’t get the cobra to sit right. After he took 5 to refresh, he came back and said he just wanted to re-work the eagle first. Actually we never spoke of doing anything to the eagle specifically but I just said go ahead. After that he decided to use a desert scene to complete the tattoo, so he colored in the sky and then moved to the ground. Since the cobra didn’t work, he went with a rattler. At 12:30AM we wrapped it up. We guessed actual inking time was 4.5 hours or so. I cannot really believe the difference in the before/after.

Before:

After (crappy cell phone pic – I’ll get a better one after healing):

Now I know what my original eagle was – an OK street shop tattoo. Now I have two tattoos that showcase an artists talent, key word artist here. I guess I really have become a “collector” as I feel I’ve ultimately received two very solid pieces of work, and to me that’s not a bad accomplishment for my first two tattoos.

Now we’ll see if I stick to that “I’m all done with tattoos” belief. I know people have hundreds of hours on ink on them. I only have 14 hours, but every hour was earned (for some reason this one hurt more that Gunnar’s last piece, at least in comparison to how I felt 4.5 hours in last time).