Four things that actually ruin a tattoo
Sun before it heals. A sunburn on a two-week-old tattoo takes pigment with it permanently. After week six, sunscreen forever: ultraviolet is the single largest cause of fading across a tattoo’s life, ahead of everything else combined. Seattle makes this easy for nine months of the year and people forget it entirely in July.
Soaking. Showers from day one are fine. Baths, pools, hot tubs, lakes and the Sound are not, for three weeks. Submerged skin softens and a softened scab lifts, taking ink with it.
Picking. Universally ignored around day six when the itching starts. The flakes carry loose surface pigment that was leaving anyway; pulling them early pulls settled pigment too. Slap it, do not scratch it.
Too much ointment. The most common and the least expected. A film you can barely see is the right amount.
The two-week photograph
We ask for one on every piece. It is not a marketing request and it is not going anywhere public without asking you separately.
It exists because two weeks is when a heal has gone right or wrong and when nobody thinks to mention it. Patchiness that shows at fourteen days is fixable at three months for nothing; the same patchiness discovered at eight months is a conversation about whether it was the tattoo or the healing, and nobody wins that one.
When to actually worry
Redness creeping past the edges of the piece after day three. Heat coming off it. Yellow or green discharge rather than clear or straw-coloured. A fever. Any of those: ring us and then see a doctor. We are tattooers, not clinicians, and the honest advice at that point is a clinic.