A friend of mine had been interested in the art of tattooing for a long time. She was fascinated by the work of the Theravada Buddhist Monks. After her recent trip to the Wat Bang Phra Temple in Bangkok, she came home and decided to learn to make her own tattoo gun. She had not been tattooed at that point yet, as the smaller shops in the city charged quite a bit of money, and she wanted to be able to make her own creations.
She found a way to make her own gun at home, and this is how she did it. She took one of her old guitar strings and bent the tip of it. Then took a tube out of an ink pen and cut it do be about three inches in length and stuck the guitar string into the tube. She then took a tooth brush and cut in half and heated the piece with a lighter so she could bend it into the shape of a hockey stick. Once it was cooled down the plastic hardened up again, and she attached first an eraser, then a smaller motor she had taken from an oldWalkman. The bent part of the guitar string she then stuck into the eraser.
The motor she was using was battery operated so once she finished she turned it on, dipped the tip of the guitar string into the ink and began testing it out on various objects, such as a honeydew melon at first, which was pretty funny. She is currently looking for a guinea pig, ie myself, to try out her first pieces of work on human skin. I am not too sure about this. Perhaps I will wait and see how the ones she is staring on her own ankles turn out, before I let her use my body as her canvas.
