Let's get this out of the way. I am a hardcore gamer. Whatever you think that means, I don't care. I play video games. I love video games. I am steeped in video game culture and I always have been and always will be. (You can read my gaming blog if you want to get more insight on that) Anyway growing up I was always a Nintendo first kind of guy. Their games were the best Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. The list goes on. Now everyone loves a Mario game but to me I had always thought Luigi was better. Can't exactly put my finger on why though. More personality, better abilities, cooler color scheme, I don't know maybe I just liked rooting for the underdog and I was sick of all the attention Mario was getting. Whatever the reason was the bottom line was I liked Luigi better. So much more in fact that my homage to Nintendo tattoo was going to start with him.
I didn't really have a plan for this I just know what I thought I wanted. I figured the tattoo guy would allow me to describe what I was thinking and he'd be able to interpret my mental image into something awesome and I'd just go with that. My friend Gary told me he knew a guy named Heasley that lived close by in his trailer that did tats. I brought a picture of Luigi from a Mario game manual. He didn't exactly use that picture to make a lot cooler version on my arm like I thought. He straight up made a photocopy of that on some stencil paper and pretty much just duplicated that exact picture on me.
Although I was hoping for a little something better, I didn't think it was horrible or anything and I was fairly pleased with it. Yay for me and my first tattoo!!Luckily my close friend Dan was learning how to be a tattoo artist himself and although there were a series of events that caused us to not hang out for a few years it was around this time we were becoming good friends again. I quickly went to him with what was going on and he introduced me to Tom Sinnamond the tattoo artist who was mentoring him. He totally scoffed at what I had already gotten and told me that he would fix that mess and give me a real tattoo.
I was astonished when I saw what he intended to do. It was very large but he assured me large was best. I sat there for 6 hours and he did a marvelous job with it. I made another appointment and he did the piranha plants which finished completely covering up the old little Luigi.
From there on Dan took over the project. In the next few years he added more piranha plants on my shoulder, the lava flames down my arm and the Giga-Bowser that is underneath. There are still a few things I want to get done on it but I am not in a hurry. It took so long to get this much that I was eager to start working on a new design elsewhere. Enjoy this video of the whole piece and watch for the upcoming uwvark27's Tattoos Part 2 - Weird Al
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