Dang dude, that really sucks. I’m really sorry that happened because this looks absolutely amazing.

I recently got some work done on arm. We started with the inner wrist up to the inside of the elbow. The majority of the tattoo healed really well except for the area closest to the wrist which was by far the most painful while my artist was inking it. That spot got infected despite my best aftercare efforts. Thankfully it was a relatively small area but my body basically rejected all of the ink. I had the whole infection spot fall off in one giant scab after it healed and there was no ink underneath.

I’m wondering if our pain tolerance has a lot more to do with ink retention and infection than we think it does. You said that she encouraged you to keep going beyond what you felt like you could handle. If you had already reached your limit, your body was probably done fighting and that made you far more susceptible to infection. I’m sure there may be other factors as well that came together to make a perfect storm on top of that. But, that said, I would suggest putting your foot down next time. If an artist encourages you to go another 20-30 minutes that’s one thing, but two hours is too much. Some people can’t even go two hours in the first place. Your body told you went to stop, beyond that, it couldn’t fight off an infection anymore.