Tattoos!
So I am very excited to see what other people put in here! But to start off, I thought I would show how I made fake tattoo sleeves! (For those of you on tumblr, you may have seen a similar post floating around, but I wanted to show you my spin on things!)
So on the left and right we have my two tattoo sleeves! I cosplay as Newt from Pacific Rim, and he has full arm tattoos. No way was I going to try and draw those on my arm for every day of the con. My alternative? Create sleeves. This way, I could just slip them on when I needed to!
The materials for this is where I differ a bit from that tumblr post. Yes, I still used nylon stalkings, although instead of just cutting pantyhose and hoping it wouldn't roll down my arm, I actually got sheer knee-highs! You can find these in with the pantyhose section (i got mine at target) and they are sooooo great because you don't have to cut the main leg at all and risk the sleeve rolling down your arm or getting runs in it from snagging on the scissors! They have a sort of elastic band (tho it might be spandex now that I think about it...) at the top that keeps it in place which it's good for thicker arms too since they stretch like a dream b/c they are meant to be worn on legs! The downside is that they don't come in the most variety of skin tones and are esp lacking in darker tones...
You will have to cut out finger holes at the toe part, I just sort of stuck my arm in there and stretched out my fingers a bit and made tiiiiiny incisions with hair scissors (or those tiny sewing ones) about where my fingers were and trimmed from there. Just be careful of your fingers and not making too much of a gap and risk the fabric running!
My next deviation from what other people have mentioned using, is that instead of sharpies to draw the design, I used fabric markers. I was lucky and that Michael's craft store happened to have a set of basic colors for relatively cheap (I think about 12 USD). Make sure to get ultra fine! The difference between the fabric pens and the sharpies is that the fabric pens made the tattoos look more realistic. They bleed a bit into the fabric and are less saturated in color than sharpies, so it doesn't look like you just colored all over your arms. Most people that talked to me at the con assumed I actually had real tattoos, and could only see that they were fake once I stuck my finger in the thumb hole to show the fabric!
From there, it's easiest if you have an image that you can print out and trace over. Using some heavy paper to make a tube and getting it to be roughly the width of your arm was probably the hardest part. Though if you don't care much about sizing, you could always use a paper towel roll! Once you get that though, you tape on the picture you want to copy to the tube, pull the stocking over it, and trace!
The most difficult part of the tracing process is how the pen actually reacts to the fabric. The tip (esp if it's a fine-tip) will be prone to snagging and you risk getting runs before you've even worn it! To minimize this, I found doing short strokes, in an upward motion (surprisingly it didn't matter about the nap of the fabric for this, just that I was always going up compared to the ground) really helped. The fabric did slip a bit, but using masking tape helped a TON to keep it mostly in place. At this point it really is just PATIENCE. I think it took me a total of three hours to do each one completely.
You definitely want to give it 24 hours to dry before touching it once you finish. I know the temptation to try it on immediately will be great, but trust me, it will BLEED HORRIBLY AND SMEAR if you don't let it dry for the proper amount of time! Even then, the markers are still prone to rubbing off onto other fabrics so be careful since they will most likely be permanent on fabric (since that's the point of getting fabric markers...)
But there you go! You now have cool tattoo sleeves for any occasion! You can fill them up like I did for my character, or you can have just one little tattoo that you don't feel like drawing every day. Heck, you could even use it for everyday wear, just to shock your parents, co-workers, classmates, etc! I will edit this if I forgot anything, but feel free to ask me questions!
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