Bad Friend

29. In a Precarious Spot

I hated doing portraits.

There was just so much that could go wrong with them—botching key details, not getting the expression exactly right, not making the tattoo similar enough to the reference. And most of the time portraits were in honor of someone, so if I did get it wrong (which I rarely did), the client would be pissed. There was also no creative freedom in tattooing portraits, at least the ones of someone's family member or real life people and pets. I liked creating, working with a client to make a unique design, but with portraits, everything had to be exact. Tattooing in general was an exact art, but a portrait had to be identical to the reference, and I didn't like having such strict parameters.

So I normally tried to avoid them by referring an inquiring customer to someone else that actually liked tattooing portraits, but the person I consulted last week was insistent on having me do it, so here I was. A man in his mid thirties came in and asked for a portrait of his two kids on his back. The reference he gave me was small, which meant the features on his kids weren't as clear as I would've liked, and there were shadows cast over parts of their face that would make things difficult. I tried to persuade the man to pick a different picture, but he insisted on this one.

"You're the best, aren't you?" he'd asked accusingly.

Well, he had me there. I told him to come back in a week so I could get the sketch right. All week I'd prepared for this thing. I saved the picture to my phone to see if I could enhance it, and after I fixed it up enough, I was able to put something together.

I decided to do the whole image—he'd said as long as his kids were in it and it was the picture he provided, I could do whatever—adding the trees from the park they were at, using color to create a blue sky, clouds, and the color of their clothes. I had Anisha try her hand at making a sketch too, to see if I liked hers better than mine. My sketch ended up being the one that was used, but I let her make a big post on Instagram so she could document the journey and put her sketch in the post too. That had been one of her ideas for the studio's Instagram account—posting the whole tattooing process from the initial idea all the way to the finished result—and people who followed the account seemed to like them, so we kept posting them.

And when the day finally came to tattoo this guy, I was ready. It turned out really nice, which the guy seemed somewhat surprised by. I may not have liked doing real life portraits, but that didn't mean I wasn't good at them. He was the one who said I was the best, not me.

It wasn't my most intricate tattoo, or even my most difficult, but I spent five hours bent over somebody's back, and time was not flying by. After he paid and left, I slumped in my stool, not ready for whoever would come in next.

Thankfully it was just Anisha. "It turned out really great. I don't know why you were so worried."

"I just don't like doing those kinds of portraits. And I go out of my way not to do them. I only ever do my best work, but you can prefer one tattoo style over another. Make sure to write that down."

I didn't have to look at her to know she was rolling her eyes. "I think I can remember that on my own."

I shrugged. "If you say so."

It was quiet in my workroom after that, so quiet that I thought Anisha had left. But when I opened my eyes, she was still by the open door. "Your phone is ringing. You gonna get it?"

Shaking my head, I said, "No. I'm too tired. I'll call them back later."

Anisha shrugged and left me to sanitize everything. My feet were a little sluggish as I shuffled from my cabinets to the tattoo chair. Did I eat today? I couldn't remember. It was hard to do things like eat and sleep when I was hyper focused on a task, like doing a portrait tattoo that I wasn't necessarily excited about. Another thing that made tattooing not feel so harrowing was enjoying the piece you were tattooing. I made a mental note of sharing that wisdom with Anisha.