Designing a chest piece

Sometimes I'll come up with a design and feel it's basically the right solution for a custom piece. So I'll send it to my customer to get their thoughts on it (I value the opinion of the person getting the tattoo - first and foremost, it's going on your body, forever. And secondly, I view this as a collaboration, and customers are usually right, and offer valuable perspective where I can feel a little stuck in one viewpoint) and go from there.

Other times I'll have a few ideas I think are viable, and sometimes will be particularly perfectionistic because of the placement - like a chest piece. It's important to me that my customer has all available options to explore before settling on a decision.

Here are a few process images for this chest piece. It was more of a challenge as a design than I anticipated - Olivia asked for antlers on the collarbones, and many of the antlers-on-collarbones pieces I researched seemed too small.

Scale is a funny thing with tattoos, it doesn't always matter, but when you make matching antlers quite small, they can look a bit odd, in my opinion. There is a reason they tend to come up small, though - antlers aren't really the right shape for a collarbone, naturally. I had to use a bit more artistic license than I anticipated.

I originally submitted these clean and minimally shaded ideas, but also suggested the looser, inkier version on the offchance

I didn't think my customer would go for this version, though I did like it and think it was more impactful. She did, though - I'm very glad! It looks amazing on her and I hope she's still happy with it years down the line. I try to keep in mind how a tattoo will age. I focused on a good silhouette for this piece - if that's how it ends up, it should still look good.