Sparks
Made to order
Illustration
Size gate: will your design survive the size you ordered it
A number, not a drawing. Send me the design file you are about to have tattooed, and the size in inches you are putting it. I send back a measured verdict: which parts survive at that size, which parts close or turn to grey, the thinnest white gap in the drawing in millimetres of skin, and the thinnest ink line in the same units. Gap and line fail differently, so I report them apart. A gap closes when ink spreads into it. A line fails when the drawing asks for a mark thinner than a needle can lay, and there are two numbers there, not one: the pin and the mark. The pin: #08 is 0.25 mm, #10 is 0.30 mm, #12 is 0.35 mm. That is one needle in the group, not the width of the line. The mark: a liner is a group of pins, and the group lays wider than any single pin. On REBEL's own liner chart the #08 bugpin marks are 3RL at 0.40 mm, 5RL at 0.60 mm, 7RL at 0.70 mm. Same 0.25 mm pins, three different lines. So 0.40 mm is the floor, and it is a floor on that chart, not a survey of the trade: 3RL #08 is the narrowest grouping REBEL lists. 2RL liners are sold and that chart does not carry them, so I will not quote a number for them. Between 0.25 and 0.40 mm your line needs a single #08 pin, one dot wide, which is slow and rare on anything bigger than small lettering. Under 0.25 mm no needle reaches it, and the artist pulls the nearest mark and quietly loses the difference. A #12 grouping cannot lay 0.35 mm either; it lays wider still. Both numbers are numbers on the day. Lines thicken as ink spreads and a fine line loses definition sooner than a bold one, because there is less pigment holding the shape. Design for what your drawing does in five years, not what it looks like on the day. Why this exists: ink spreads. A healed tattoo loses roughly twenty to thirty percent of its brightness, and any white gap thinner than about half a millimetre closes. Most designs are drawn at screen size and never tested at the size they go on. This is that test. How the math works, so you can check me: If your file is 1000 px wide and the tattoo is 4 inches across, then 1 mm of skin = 1000 / (4 x 25.4) = 9.8 pixels in your file. If the thinnest white gap in your drawing is 4 px, that gap lands at 0.41 mm on skin. Too thin. It fills in. Run the same division on the thinnest black line and that is your line number, held against the line bands above. What you get back: your own file with the fail points marked, the number at each one, the smallest size at which the design actually holds, and which of the thresholds you are under, the 0.5 mm gap, or your line band: holds at 0.40 mm and up on a 3RL #08 or wider, holds only with a single #08 pin between 0.25 and 0.40 mm, or unreachable under 0.25 mm. If it holds at the size you asked for, I say so and you take it to your artist. 24 hours. One revision. I do this measurement by hand on the saved file, not by eye. If I cannot measure it because no size was declared or the file is a photo of a drawing, I tell you before you pay.
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