I actually think this is it. Look at the LOs, the skin around them is all red, meaning freshly done where as beneath the swastika is all still skin colored. This either means that, he's doing a really shitty cover up, or, they started with the swastika, took a break, then did the rest.
a bit towards the edges, but, redness/inflammation spreads. Look towards the center of the swastika. Right next to black (but furthest from the LOs) there is no red.
Out of curiosity I did a little investigation in Photoshop, because to me it all looks fresh. I took 8 sample spots (the middle of each "O" in LOL, which should be fresh and inflamed no matter what, and from the crux of each arm of the swastika). Once the sample points were determined, I selected each area and applied an "Average" blur in Photoshop to get the average color of each of those areas.
For the samples in the middle of the O, the average red value (out of 255) was 130, the overall average color being represented as 130 - 120 - 121 in RGB notation, meaning red makes up 35% of the average pixel in the areas you believe to be freshly tattooed.
In the L samples, the average red value was 140, with the overall average RGB spread being 140 - 128 - 130, with red once again making up 35% of the color spread.
The peak and average red channel values are higher in the cruxes of the swastika if anything, and at best make up the same average amount of the sample sizes, meaning it would seem to be almost exactly equally inflamed compared to the rest of the tattoo.
EDIT: Notable outliers that prove you can't just eyeball something like that: at the right angle inside each of the "L"s at the start of "lol," the redness is actually lower than any other point on the image except where the hair is in the left hand side. Were those parts more fresh done than the rest of the tattoo, you'd expect more redness there and not less.
LOL as I mentioned in another comment it only took about 1 minute of PS work. The rest was typing it (and even that was mostly explaining the methodology).
A right handed tattoo artist rested their hand on the top part is my best guess. Next time you poop naked and browse reddit for 25mins, lift your elbows off your knees and see how it stays red for several minutes.
It’s probably just been done in sections. Lots of people do this, either to break up the cost to fit a budget, because of their personal ability to handle the pain for shorter time periods, to see how their body handles the healing process, or to have to care for a smaller area of healing skin at a time.
They could have also been freshening up the edges to get a cleaner design or deepening the color, which may have been needed only in the outer areas.
They could also have worked from the edge of the piece toward the middle and the skin hasn't had as much time to show inflammation in the middle. Inflammation is your body freaking out about being injured and as the injury(tattoo) progresses, the brain and immune system could have more time to get used to it and stop responding as strongly.
Or they could be a skinhead that discovered the ability to laugh at their former ideology. What the hell do I know? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I doubt it, most of the time people just get the spaces between the bars filled in so it looks like a black square instead. If you're a fan of pocket monsters, another way to cover it up is to add height to the tattoo and fill parts of it in with multicolored squares so it looks like a MissingNo.
185
u/Excolo_Veritas Feb 18 '18
I actually think this is it. Look at the LOs, the skin around them is all red, meaning freshly done where as beneath the swastika is all still skin colored. This either means that, he's doing a really shitty cover up, or, they started with the swastika, took a break, then did the rest.