You think the gradient is the way to go then?
Here’s a different concept for you. May not work at all outside my brain, but:
Get the pads in solid black (no helping that with this concept), then design a grey drop-shadow, so as to make the black lift off the skin a bit. All pads would thus get MORE shading, but very light. This new drop shadow would cover the extra blob on #1 and #5, assuming that it heals relatively light.
Like I say, I’m not sure it could work, though.
I cant visualize this, I will PS it and see what it looks like.
When I looked at the “fingerprint” versus the tattoo, other than the fact that the individual lines on the pads were missing (which would have been a very difficult process to begin with) is that all of the extra filler from the ink was from your dogs fur on his feet, not from his pads.
So, in reality, you DO have a tattoo of his paw print, just not all the detail of the hairs between his toes and such.
What you could do, is maybe some combination of shade work as Arni suggests above, and maybe even have the little hair “marks” or “spots” or whatever you want to call them added in the spaces around and between the pads? I think that might achieve the detail you are looking for without completely re-doing the whole tattoo.
Don’t fret too much, it IS a tattoo of your dogs paw. Its just up to you how much you want it to look exactly like the print you made.
I agree, there is a fair amount of clutter from hair between the pads, mostly in the center, but the basic shapes of the pads are all wrong. Tattoo pads 2-4 are essentially just candle flame shapes, varying some. Real pad 2 is a triangle, pointing 20° to the left. Real pad 5 is more like a tear drop, as if it was falling from left to right (roughly triangular). None of these are represented in the tattoo. In the photo of a dog’s paw, you can see that particular dog has lots of hair between 3 and 4. That is where the most pad shape degradation is in my dogs’s print. So the shapes of 3 and 4 are less defined in the original, making pad 4 look wider than it probably was. In the original, pad 3 is off about 10° to the right and pad 4 is off about 5° to the left. But just as with a human fingerprint, shape and size can be distorted by things like pressure, angle etc. Thats why when you go to booking, your inked fingertips are placed just so on the card. But this paw print is genuine – not placed, set up or pressure applied uniformly. I dont really need the hair clutter reproduced but the shapes have to be as close as possible. Also notice the shape of heel pads in the photo and on that webpage – irregular and different from dog to dog which covers the issue of making slight changes in size/shape/placement of pad 1 to hide the area to the bottom and right.
cluttered but cool design
something rough that looks genuine as if it had been lifted out of the mud
A dog’s paw
http://www.bear-tracker.com/dog.html
Let the first tattoo heal for 8 weeks, find yourself a really good laser tech in a tattoo studio preferably.
Get two or three hits across the tattoo over 4 months and sit back and wait another 8 weeks.
You should get enough of that out in a couple of hits to let a great rather than good artists do the tattoo you wanted in the first place and the time it takes to sort the mess out will give you time to find an artist and work of at least some of his or her waiting list.
You can of course rush into getting your second choice tattoo slapped over the mistake but its a tribute to your beloved dog, so why would you?
Peace.
The last thing I want to do is sob like a school girl, “just make it better, please” and like you said, slap something else on my chest. Please correct me if I am wrong but I think this is a surgical/precision tweak rather than anything else. A little ‘rough around the edges’ is ok, it adds to its ‘authentic’ look.
you mentioned you didnt check the stencil, that was a mistake, when someone is putting ink in my dermal layer I make sure it is what I want…….
the hack you hired used a generic stencil and didnt even consider your paw print, this is the type of hack that permiates this industry now, he wanted his pay and didnt care about what you needed……..probably couldnt have done a decent job anyway
but you chose this hack also, it is ultimately our responsibility to locate, meet with and choose our artist.
the only thing you could do now is laser, wait 6 months and do this right
Yes, ultimately, I have no one to blame but myself since I didnt catch it in the stencil. But in my defense, I am retarded.
I also have what I call ‘expert syndrome’. Thats when someone who obviously knows what they are talking about makes a recommendation, I do a ‘well, thats good enough for me.’ and turn my brain off. I know someone that has had a lot of great lookin, intricate work done and he said this is the place he goes. So off I went. Again, is going through the time and expense of laser and starting all over again a considerably better solution that what I propose?
@
I wouldve loved to do the fingerprint style, line by line, but I couldnt afford the all that work.
I think you are getting too wrapped up in the tek with this one mate.. I mean you have a paw print on ya and you know it’s there to represent your late pooch.. so the paws arnt exact to be honest if ya go with the original it just lookalike a dogs paw gone wrong.. and I assume the artist feared this also,, that would be my concern if ya bought it to me
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Well mate the stencil can only be as good as the quality of image it was taken from and in this case the paw printing wasn’t perfect.for example do you think if there were 2 examples of the same dogs print you could tell it was the same dog??
I couldnt have said it better myself 
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Wile E Coyote couldnt have done a better job if he had done it myself…
All’s well that ends well
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