MedusaQueen
03-20-2005, 09:18 AM
The best way to keep your stencil while lining is to start from the bottom; and wipe down. If you are left handed, as I am, you should start from the bottom left, so that your tattooing hand doesn't rub away the stencil while you work. If you are right handed, you should start bottom right. If there are a lot of little things throughout the tattoo that I fear may be gone before I get there (becuase, after all, when you stretch, your hands will be all over the stencil anyway), I go ahead and zip them in fast and light, just to get the line there, then I begin again at the bottom until the whole peice is lined. Once the lines are there and you have no worries of the stencil, you can go back over any lines as necessary and "clean them up." Also, when I am zipping in those lines higher up in the tattoo, I try not to wipe them at all; I blot them with my papertowel, so that the lube and ink doesn't mess with the stenciled lines all around it, but again, once they are there for good, I jump right back down to the bottom to take my time on those lines and work my way up. Sometimes, you're gonna lose lines from your stencil for one reason or another, in that case I keep a regular ink pen handy and catch them as they start to fade (pens are cheap, you can throw it away after the tat, keep some handy just for disposable purposes, that way you don't have to worry about cross-contamination). Pen ink doesn't stay like stencil ink, though, so right after I draw them in, I zip them in quickly, return to where I left off, and go back and a clean up. Remember, only WIPE over things that are already lined for good, BLOT over lines that have stencil still around them. Give it a try. It's very handy.