At Alex’s table: start with the flash sheets
You can come to Alex with a part of the body in mind and the pictures still undecided. Say you want to fill an arm. On the day, you can look through his traditional flash sheets together, pick out the designs you keep coming back to and try different arrangements. If you already know what you like, you can send examples ahead. You don’t have to pick every piece before you arrive.
Flash gives you finished drawings to choose from. There’s still a lot to decide together: which image gets the broadest space, which one turns around the arm, how much bare skin to leave between them. Alex can adapt a drawing to its neighbours. That’s part of what makes this a quick way to work: you can spend the appointment fitting pictures you already like to your body, rather than developing every motif from scratch.
With enough skin left open and the right selection of flash, Alex may be able to fill an arm, or work across half a back, in a day. A full back would more likely take several sittings. His chest piece completed in one sitting is a specific example, not a time estimate for the next person.
At Valentin’s drawing table: a week to build one backpiece
For a backpiece with Valentin, your first message can be as short as I’d like to start a backpiece. If there’s a direction in his work you like, send it along: it gives him something to look into before you meet. If all you’ve decided is that you want to do this, that’s enough to start the conversation. In Berlin, you can have both the consultation and the drawing reviews in person at the shop in Wedding. If you live elsewhere, you can do them by video call.
At the consultation, Valentin sorts the ideas with you. Architecture might form one group, animals another. Then comes a different question: which of these things would you miss if it disappeared from the drawing? On a cat backpiece, for instance, the cats might be the part you feel strongly about, while the setting is yours to work out together. Some elements are essential, some are possibilities, and some are ideas Valentin would like to bring to the piece himself. You can also give him a broad direction and leave the drawing open.
He sets aside a full week for the design. The rough composition usually takes a day or two, often two because he spends the first researching the themes. At the first review you see where the main shapes sit together, while they’re still easy to move. This is a good moment to say that a favourite detail has ended up at the edge, or that something you both liked on its own now crowds the picture. Some ideas come out. Sometimes a suggestion from you gives the whole drawing a better direction.
Valentin develops the agreed sketch into a more detailed drawing. Around day four or five, you look at it together a second time. If you’re local, he likes to hold it against your back: seeing where an image sits across your shoulders can settle a question that a drawing on a screen leaves open. After the last adjustments, he usually keeps a day for the clean drawing. When everything is ready, tattooing can begin on day seven. That’s the start of the tattoo, not the day the backpiece is finished.
Four to eight sittings: what does that look like on a calendar?
As a working example from his own practice, Valentin describes a backpiece planned over roughly four to eight sittings. You might arrange a full day of around eight hours and return about once a month. In practice a project can span six months to a year, or occasionally around eighteen months if you can only get to Berlin at wider intervals. Those figures describe possible schedules; they aren’t a package or a rule about how often you should come. In his backpiece completed over a year, the year describes the span of the project, not a published count of sessions.
What to send the artist
If you’d like Alex to fit traditional flash to your chest or arm, tell him which area you have in mind and whether you’d like to choose a design from his flash sheets on the day. For Valentin, a line about starting a backpiece is enough. Add a favourite work if you have one. If you travel to Berlin, the most useful extra detail for either artist is when you can come back. “I’m here for one day” and “I can come back every month” give the artist two very different calendars to draw for.
Explore Alex’s traditional tattoo work or Valentin’s portfolio to see which approach fits your idea.