More Nipple-ing
If you know me or you have been around here for any amount of time you know that I tattoo nipple/areola reconstructions for patients who have had mastectomies.
For a long time I was working on a book to teach people about these techniques. For a variety of reasons I have put the book on an indefinite hold. This does not mean that I have lost my desire to teach these techniques. Quite the contrary. I would love for every tattooer who can, to learn how to do this. I think the more we raise the bar on this type of reconstruction, the less people will wind up wandering around unhappy with their results.
To that end I occasionally will have someone come and shadow me to learn about how I do this. This week a lovely couple came up from Delaware. She is a breast cancer survivor and he is a tattoo artist.
We saw several people during the time that he was here. One of them is a dear friend of mine who volunteered to have an unnecessary nipple added so that I could demonstrate the techniques and so that she could share the results with people in the medical field (and patients thinking about having it done).
Photos were taken during the process. I am sharing most of them here so that artists who are interested in this kind of work can see how it goes.
There is another one of these step by step demonstrations here.
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me directly at teejay1@frontiernet.net (please note, that is a #1 after teejay).
Now I am going to add a bunch of keywords here which won’t read as a sentence, but I would like them included for people who are searching the web looking for assistance with this kind of work
I did not watermark these. Please be respectful and do not take them for use else where.
thank you.
TeeJay
mastectomy, tattoo, nipple, 3-d, reconstructive, areola, areolar,post-mastectomy,3-d illusion, breast cancer tattoo, nipple replacement options,
Just TeeJay's Blog 
Hi Teejay
Thank you for this. Could you please share what colors you used?
Tanya
I use Eternal brand colors for this work. For every 3-d effect nipple I do, I will lay out a palette of 19 colors. Most of the time I have used at least 12 of them. Most areola matches (which are matched individually to the patient directly on their skin) will be A combination or at least 4 colors.
So even if I gave you a list of every color that I used, I couldn’t tell you which combination went where and how they were mixed. There are far too many. When teaching this I stress to concentrate on working by eye and adjusting as necessary rather than tying to memorize colors.
If I was going to guess based on experience. With a fair toned person such as Bec I would have used: light skin base, cool skin base, medium skin base, flesh tone, sea shell, rose satin, papaya, white, almond, bisque, deep red, brown and sable.