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When I got interested in having a tattoo I was heavily inspired by Anthony of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, wearing a huge inka style eagle at his upper back side.
But, instead of choosing the symbol of an inka eagle, I wouldn't simply copy the tattoo, but would like to create one of my own expressing my individuality. It would be also a mythical creature, but different. …
… And for a lot of reasons I would not like to explain here, my final choice was Garuda (the vehicle of Wishnu, "the creator"), a winged hybrid of a bird and a human (study "indian myths" for further details).
Fortunately, I am the proud owner of a sculpture of Garuda (what a coincidence!), but the real problem was to generate an image to be used as a template for generating a tattoo out of it. How this could be done? It's a real challenge, isn't it?
The first problem was to transfer the 3-
… I took the simplest approach and just "scanned" the sculpture with an ordinary scanner, assuming the missing information could be retrieved via heavy image processing. Here is the result of the scan!
The sculpture is covered with so much details and it looked like they could never be captured by a simple scan. But, let's see what image processing can do! …
… As a first step, I justified the brightness and the contrast of the image to get this result.
Yeah, this was looking much better, offering plenty of more details than the original scan would. But there is still a huge bridge to gap before getting a usable template.There's much mor information contained in the image, but it's still hidden.
Let’s work it out. …
… The human eye is capable of detecting lots of shading details, but a tattoo primarily consists of contours.
Therefore, the key to accomplish this task would be "edge detection"!
In order to achieve this, I have converted the image into grayscale (this eases the task a lot, dropping useless colour information away!) and inversed it as a first step. …
… After edge detection has taken place, the contours were "not very continuously", but they were usable and 3-
… With this step, the computer aided processing of the image was at his end and the manual drawing of the template was an outstanding task.
But, in order to adapt the image to the conventions of the human eye (black lines on white background), the detected contours were inverted once again. …
… A print-
… A further scan of the image and a further redrawing was necessary to reduce the noise still inherent in the image: …
… This exactly was my personal input to my "tattoo artist".
He adjusted some parts and the work began: it took 7 hours! The first 3 or 4 hours were bearable, because the adrenaline protected me from the pain.
It is really nothing special and evreryone is able to do it. But after that time, adrenaline stops to flow or it couldn't help anymore (I don't know either), but somehow the human body reaches it's limit and is not willing to cooperate any more and starts to heavily resists the attack. At this time the "real" pain begins.
But since I "never again" wanted to go for a second time to earn so much pain I resisted to finish the tattoo at this first (and last!) Session.
Isn't it worth all that pain?
Well, my second tattoo (a winged thing, too) is surely not dedicated to the public, if you know what I mean.
Guess it's location! ;o)