John Raftery Tattooing

I did this painting of a fairy last night. 11×14″. I’ll have prints of her soon.

Here are some new ones- The crow I did on my friend Eric and has a lot of tiny stuff that I don’t usually do in it. A nice change of pace. The horse is on tony who has the gypsy woman from earlier, and I did this pigeon on Vincent at Under the Needle during my last trip back to Seattle.

In 28 days I will be hurled into the sickening New York summer. I cannot wait. In the meantime I’ve been working like crazy trying to get as many tattoos finished as possible before I leave. This is one I did on Vincent, I could have drawn a wolf head but this old one is perfect so why bother.

This is a new tattoo I did on my good friend Metalmike. It’s from a Merauder song which is hilarious. The tattoo looks like it would be on the side of your step dad’s motorcycle so I think it was a success. He has a lot of really amazing tattoos like the Seth Wood chest piece you can see part of in this picture, so I was flattered when he asked me to tattoo him. The Mexican skeleton I did on a guy named Chris who I had never tattooed before, he was a nice guy and I really like how his tattoo turned out.

The rose is on my ladyfriend Heather, it’s from a painting I did a long time ago and we just got around to tattooing it. It was a lot of fun to do despite the fact that tattooing your partner is really stressful. The two paintings are from old Doc King designs, I had some new paint I wanted to try out so I did these.