Tattoo Care & Tattoos in General

I need to make this clear up front, that I am no expert on tattoos.  All I can impart here is my own experience which may not be the same as yours.

Make sure its what you want

I can't stress this enough. Before getting any ink on your skin, make sure you know what you want. Even more important is making sure your tattoo artist knows what you want.  A good artist can help in so many ways but it all starts with you. 

Find the right artist

Artists are not all the same and I don't say that to disparage anyone. What I mean is they have their own specialties, styles and techniques. Some artists are interested and excel at American traditional but may not be the right artist for portrait work.  Others may specialize in line work, cartoon styles, anime etc.  The list is long and varied.  The trick is to follow artists on platforms like Instagram and find ones that do the sort of work that you are looking to have done.

Once you have identified a number of artists, start conversations with them regarding what you want, Some may be busy and not able to accommodate you, some might have suggestions of other artists to talk with and some may be exactly what you are looking for.  If you are having a larger or custom tattoo done, take the time to get to know your artist; it is absolutely worth it, 

Aftercare

Tattoo aftercare is important,  A tattoo is effectively an open wound and in some cases it might be a very large wound.  It needs to be looked after as it heals up.

Once the tattoo is finished, your artist will usually put a layer of skin cream on the fresh tattoo, and then cover it with some sort of wrap.  I usually keep the wrap on and don't mess with it for 24 hours.  After that I clean it and reapply skin cream.  I use a cream I get from Amazon; Stories & Ink Tattoo care cream, and it seems to work very well.  

When I had my back tattoo done, I needed to shower with warm water (Not hot! That will hurt) and I just let the water clean it, I didn't scrub it or use anything on it.  I lightly towel dried and then apply a good layer of the cream.  I did this every 24 hours and in between I added cream if it felt like the tattoo was dry.   As a consequence I have a number of t-shirts with a picture of my tattoo on the inside!  I am surre that will eventually wash out.  

Generally I find that tattoos take about a week to heal up, and yes occasionally they itch but I think that has more to do with the hair growing back in my case.