And another year later..
I hope i can get a little bit of new life in it.
Let me first introduce my project:
I've always been facinated my Berluti shoes: Shoes that have been tattooed or pierced. However, since i've been a student these $2000 shoes are way out of budget. Than the idea came up to tattoo my own shoes. These shoe became the main inspiration:
I contacted a small shoemaker in Mallorca (Spain), which was able to make shoes in raw vegano calf leather for me. A few weeks ago they arrived:
Last week i visited a Tattoo artist with 5 worked pieces of (calf)leather. The first piece (stage 1) was raw unfinished leather. The last piece (stage 5) was fully worked (Dye, renovateur (to feed the leather), crème and wax). The stages in between where partly worked(only dye/dye with renovateur/ dye with renovateur and crème).
Since i’m not known to tattooing at all, and the tattoo artist wasn’t known to tattooing leather, the main goal of the visit was to look if the the tattoo ink would stick on the leather, and if so, at which stage would it stick the best.
The answer on the first question: Yes, the tattoo ink sticks on/in the leather (like expected). According to the tattoo artist, it almost felt the same as on a human skin.
The answer on the second question (at which stage): It doesn’t mather at which stage. You can tattoo your shoes at each stage. The results where the same. Ofcourse i’m not sure yet if the durability of the tattoo is the same at each stage, but at the moment I don’t have any reason to assume there is a difference. After one night I tried to work the tattooed parts with crème and wax (to seal them). Despite of some ink that came of, the tattoo looked the same after the treatment.
During the tattoo process sadly one issue occurred. When you look closely to the pictures you’ll see dark spots around some of the tattooed parts (close uo below). At those parts it looks like the leather soaked too much liquid (dye or maybe water, used when colouring). Different techniques, needles, and depths (of the needle in the leathers) didn’t solve this problem. We couldn’t find a direct cause of the appearing of the spots (when they do and do not appear).
It almost looked like the spots appeared at random, cause at some tattooed parts the spots hardly appeared. My theory is that some of the leather parts are more dry than other parts. These dryer parts absorb more liquid with the spots as a consequence. But like i said this theory is based on my own science ☺. Any other view though is welcome! I new in leather.
My question: How can we reduce the spots when tattooing? Should we work the leather first with something else (maybe some kind of oil?) in order to reduce the spots while tattooing? Or should we use different ink? Now we used the same ink as used for human. Let me know your thoughts on it!
