Hand Poked Tattoo & I
Tattoo has always been an obsession of mine. Since when I was a little girl, I have been begging my mom to buy the flowery temporary tattoo stickers from shops. Then I started to notice tattoos on people on the streets. However, it was hard to find people with tattoos where I came from. It would be extremely rare to see tattoos in public five yeras ago in Beijing, however, my strong interest in tattoos never fade.
I got my first tattoo about a year ago and immediately got addicted to getting tattoos. Now I don’t even keep track of the number of my tattoos. Hand poked tattoo came to my knowledge about half a year ago, when I was looking for tattoo artists to tattoo me. I encountered a young tattoo artist who only does hand poked tattoos. All of my previous tattoos were done with a machine, so I made an appointment with her.
While she was tattooing me, I observed her techniques and equipment. We also shared our stories. She started hand poked tattooing when she was in college at Paris, France. She was studying fine arts and had always wanted to become a tattoo artist since she was in high school. Therefore, she started to tattoo her friends for free with hand poked tattoo. This is a rather cheap and safe approach than tattooing with a machine gun. After she graduated, she came back to Beijing and became a professional tattoo artist.
I was very inspired by her story and have always thought about side hustles I would take when I get into college. Now I seemed to have found the perfect candidate. So I started to research on how to do hand poked tattoos online. It was not until this summer in July when I actually practiced on a piece of practice skin. Not long after that, I started to tattoo on my boyfriend’s skin to practice. The experience was extremely fun. While I constantly ask for advice and feedback from the tattoo artist who inspired me, I made great progress in a short amount of time. Then I started to tattoo friends I met in college.
For this project, I decided to teach hand poked tattoo because I think it is fun and very interesting to do. Moreover, it is also something if one knows how to do, one can save a lot of money. Getting tattoos is an expensive activity but when you actually buy the supplies by yourself and tattoo yourself, it is a lot cheaper and more fun to do. Another reason for me to decide on teaching hand poked tattoo is that the activity has become very popular recently in the pop culture. Although I have not been practicing on real skin for very long, I see my skills to be comparable as some of the professional tattoo artists. Images on previous pages are works I have done on my boyfriend.
Practice tattoo on my boyfriend 1
Practice tattoo on my boyfriend 2
First tattoos I did on my hand and my boyfriend’s elbow
Designing & Planning the Lesson
After deciding on teaching the skill of doing hand poked tattoo, I started to consider how I shall carry out my lesson. Together with my students (group members), we decided to use practice skins during the lesson for them to work on.
First of all is safety. As this will be the first time for the students to use a tattoo needle and they did not have a very adequate experience in tattooing, it is extremely difficult for them to master the depth to poke and the angle to hold the needle. Other than that is consent. Although both group members were over 18, the legal age of getting a tattoo in the State of New York, I still don’t think it is appropriate for them to get a tattoo because of a school assignment in sharing skills within the community. So we three agreed on using practice skin for the lesson.
In order to teach hand poked tattoo, I did plenty of background research. I have listed the aspects that I considered crucial for students to know when they are thinking of tattooing (whether making tattoo on real skin or simply getting a tattoo.) My research topics were as the following:
- consequences of bad tattooing techniques
- layers of the epidermis and diagram for demonstration
- sanitation necessities for tattooing on real skin
- professional tattoo aftercare process
Although with my previous tattoo experiences (both as a client and a tattoo artist) I am confident of my knowledge, I felt necessary to conduct a focused research into each topic to ensure I provide valid information to my students. Even if such information and guidelines may sometimes sound long-winded sometimes.
It was during the research process that I realized how important it was to do so. When I was learning to do hand poked tattoo, all I needed to do was to Google the step by step instructions and purchase the materials. However, now I have learned the whys behind the use of each material.
For example, the tattoo needles have three main types in terms of the shapes the single needles form. The numbers used to distinguish the thickness of the needle is actually the number of single needles a tattoo needle has. This was something I did not know and probably would not know if I did not have to teach my students.
Now to actually plan for the lesson, we were asked to create a lesson plan in the Studio class. This plan includes the materials, estimated times, goals and objectives, and assignments for our lessons. It was actually simple for me to create the lesson plan after the background research I did. I was very certain on what I should cover in the lesson and how I should deliver my lesson.
The objectives and goals I listed were not very grand and it turned out to be just the right amount to the right degree. Most of them were achieved through the presentation I created for the lesson.
I found it very effective to use images on the slides to draw attention from students and to better illustrate my points. Especially when I am talking about consequences of inadequate tattooing techniques, the images I took from online were effective to warn the students of the dangers and unwanted results from random tattooing.
The material list was very helpful to me when I was preparing for the lesson on the day because it provide dme a guide of what I need to bring to school. This also proved the importance of planning ahead. It is always good to do the work when you have the time to thoroughly think about what you need for a project than grabbing what you think you will need on the day of the project.
The second half of the lesson plan consists of a timed step by step instruction of the lesson. This is an opportunity for me to actually rehearse the lesson on my own before conducting it with my students. I found it extremely helpful during the actual lesson because it tells me what to do at any point when I was lost.
This timed plan also gave me a sense of time and the amount of information I can cover in the lesson. It was to my surprise that the lesson went exactly like what I wrote on the lesson plan. However, one thing I would like to improve on if I were to do this again is to have more control on my students. As tattooing is a really exciting thing to learn, despite we were not doing it on a real skin, after I talked about the safety and health issues on the presentation everyone was eager to get into the action of poking on the practice skin.
I wanted to let my students do what they want to do so I rushed through the demonstration part. I wish I has the courage to pause my students from doing what they were doing and use a little patience of them to walk through the different feelings of poking at different depths. All I did was demonstrating the various effects the needle would create under different techniques. The lesson plan was constructed based on a template provided. It instructs me what I need to think about when planning a lesson. Although I am rather familiar with the skills I am sharing with my group, I am not an expert on teaching.
One thing I am proud that I did was the extra time I spent on introducing the potential harms of incorrect tattoo making and aftercare. At the end of the day, tattoo is something that becomes a part of our skin, a part of our body. To take care of a tattoo is to take care of our body. Therefore, by showing my students what could go wrong and ways they can prevent such things from happening, I am confident to say that they are perfectly sure what they were engaging with. Below is the lesson plan I constructed for the 1.5 hour lesson.
Teaching the Lesson
The overall experience of teaching the lesson was really fun. Before this, I have had experiences in babysitting, teaching English and art at the migrant children school, and teaching my classmates play volleyball. So I have some expectations to what it would be like to teach a group of people a certain thing.
However, I did learn through this teaching process that I need to consider all possibilities to my subject of teaching. When students are engaged with the lesson (which is awesome), they will be asking many questions. As the saying goes “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes,” my students will always pose things or questions I haven’t considered before.
Both as a temporary teacher and a skill possessor, I would say that I have learned a lot throughout the process. As a skill posesser, I learned more about the WHYs behind the materials involved in hand poked tattoo (and just tattoo in general.) For example, I learned that the solution used to clean excess tattoo ink from skin is plant based and water soluble. The solution has a soothing effect on the skin due to the natural oil contained, while it can also effectively remove dirt, blood, and tattoo ink. I have always been calling it green soap but had never known what it actually is or why would tattoo artist specifically use it.
Another thing I learned by teaching hand poked tattoo is that the amount of time one takes to practice doing so really varies. Prior experiences in tattooing, which getting a tattoo also counts, can contribute to the learning of doing hand poked tattoos. One of the learners had several tattoos on her body and she got along with the needle pretty soon. The other learner did not have much experience with tattooing so she required more practice time and explanations.
Moreover, as a temporary teacher, I learned that patience is VERY important–not only in making tattoos but also in sharing a skill with others. Everything takes practice and practice takes time. I learned that as someone who already knew the skill, I have to be responsible for breaking down the skills bit to bit in order for my learners to take in and understand. However, merely taken in and understood is far from actually being able to carry out the skill (not to mention like a pro!) Therefore, I need to put aside some of my eagerness and excitement for tattoo making and try to calm my learners down as well.
Overall, I enjoyed my skill sharing experience very much. Both the planning and teaching parts taught me something I did not know before. Sharing a skill that I have with others was also an exciting experience because I get to go over what I went over before and further dissect the experience into smaller pieces for my learners to understand.
