People asking me about tattoos usually want to be told either that they should get it or that they should not, and I am not going to do either, because I do not know what you want and neither, usually, do you yet. What I can offer is the method I use, which has kept me from getting several things I would now be quietly resenting. It is not a rule about waiting a year. It is a handful of questions that are surprisingly good at separating a real want from a mood.
The question that does the most work
Ask whether you want the image, or whether you want to be the kind of person who has that image. Those feel identical from the inside and they are completely different in their outcomes. Wanting the image means you keep coming back to the shape of it, you notice similar linework on strangers, you have thought about how it sits on the body. Wanting to be the kind of person who has it means you have thought mostly about how other people will read you afterwards, which is a real desire and a bad reason for a permanent decision, because the audience changes and the tattoo does not.
The second question: could you describe it to somebody without showing them a reference photograph? If the answer is no, you have not got an idea, you have got somebody else's finished piece that you liked. That is a perfectly good starting point and a terrible ending point. Bring it to an artist as a mood, not as a specification, and let them build the actual thing around your body rather than tracing a design drawn for somebody else's arm.
Placement is a decision about the next ten years, not the next ten minutes
Look at where the body already has a line and follow it. A forearm has a long clean run down the outside. A calf has a curve you can wrap. A ribcage has a diagonal. Work with those and the piece looks inevitable; work against them and it will look slightly wrong for the rest of your life, no matter how good the drawing was in isolation on a screen.
Then consider how often you will actually see it. Anything on your own back is essentially for other people, which is fine if you know that going in and disappointing if you do not. Forearms, thighs and the inside of an arm are the ones you live with daily. And be honest about hands, necks and faces, not for anyone's moral reasons but for practical ones: they age differently, they hurt considerably more, they need touching up sooner, and the number of artists who will do them well is much smaller than the number who will do them.
Choosing the person, which matters more than choosing the design
Find someone whose healed work you have seen — healed, not fresh. Fresh tattoos all look crisp. Healed work at three years is where you find out whether the lines were laid at a consistent depth, whether the fine detail held or blurred into a smudge, and whether the artist knew what happens to that particular design at that particular size once skin has had its way with it. Any artist worth booking will happily show you healed photographs, and a portfolio containing only fresh work is telling you something.
Then match the style rather than negotiating it. An artist who does bold traditional work will do bold traditional work beautifully and fine single-needle script adequately at best. Asking someone to work outside their register because they are local, or cheaper, or available sooner, produces the most common regret I hear about — not the design itself, but a version of the design executed by the wrong hands. Travel. Wait. It is a small inconvenience against a very long time.
The practical bit nobody enjoys
Eat a proper meal beforehand, do not drink the night before, and book a shorter session than you think you can handle. Pain tolerance is not a fixed quantity, it collapses after about the second hour, and the last twenty minutes of a session you pushed too far is where flinching happens and lines suffer. Two comfortable sittings produce better work than one heroic one.
Aftercare is dull and it is most of what determines how the thing looks in a decade. Keep it clean, keep it lightly moisturised rather than smothered, do not pick at it however much you want to, and stay out of the sun. Sun is the single biggest ager of tattoos by a distance — more than time, more than skin changes, more than anything about the ink itself. Sunscreen on a healed tattoo is the cheapest possible way to keep it looking like it did in the first month.
None of this is an argument for caution. I am not remotely cautious about this and I would not pretend otherwise. It is an argument for wanting the actual object rather than the idea of having it, which is the only thing I have found that reliably predicts whether somebody is still pleased with a piece years later. Answer that question honestly and the rest is logistics.
Some of the ones I do not post publicly.
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