Progression of a design – Praying Hands, Cross & Rosary

Mitchell turned 18 this year and had been wanting this tattoo for a very long time.

This is the reference photo that he brought me:

He said that it didn’t have to be as dark, that it was okay to make the cross more dimensional and that he wanted the rosary to go around his forearm somehow. I know that this is one of those designs that has been done a lot (and done poorly a lot) and I wanted to try and do something nice for him.

First step was to go online and get a nice copy of the original Albrecht Durer version of the praying hands. They have been copied and redone so many times, that I figured best to try and start from the reference source.

Next was what to do with the rosary. Since this was going on a guy, I wanted to avoid the straight around the limb look that winds up looking too much like a bracelet. I found a nice high resolution image of a real rosary to work off of. I personally prefer the rose beads on the rosaries, but again, for a guy I didn’t think that he would appreciate having 50 plus tiny roses on his arm.

I didn’t know how receptive he was going to be to so much of the tattoo being rosary, so I stenciled them up separately so that I could adjust the size once he got here. As it turned out he was fine with leaving them larger (yeah!)

Some very basic research resulting in a much better tattoo than I would have wound up with if I tried to work exclusively off of the reference that he had sent me. Mitchell sat fantastically well for his first tattoo and got this done in one sit. The only breaks that we took were at my request.

Here are some photos of the end result: