Bram Adey<br>Tattoos - Photography: July 2024

Hi, welcome back to the blog! I'm gonna let the tattoos be all mixed up with the daily life photos this time, and I think they uploaded in chronological order, oldest to newest, so let's see how it goes!

Back at Garbage hill... The blackbirds always harassing my dog!

I've been shooting on my Tamaron 500mm Reflex lens for a few months now, and literally just started using the Macro capabilities of it, so good! The lens isn't amazing, almost always soft, and the depth of field is super thin, but it can hit pretty good if you try hard.

Midnight

A nicely settled flash piece from a couple years ago. I'm booking mid-August 2024 right now, email me at bram_adey@hotmail.com to book a tattoo.

Great Blue Heron? Yes Please! Custom outer-forearm piece.

Photography-wise, I was glad for the wet, overcast spring, these full-sun summer days aren't as pretty by a longshot.

Flash Bluejay with freehanded pine-bough to fill an inner arm.

I low-key love shooting in the pouring rain... guilty-pleasures and all that...

I'd never really noticed Kingbirds before, was hyped to see this one at Little Mountain last week.

Last-minute cancellation filler. Some gussied up flash designs.

For the win!

Off the walls of Ritual Winnipeg.

Still not letting me get too close, but I was super stoked to get a bit of time with this pair of hawks being taunted by the blackbirds. One of these days i'm gonna get a sick lens, but for now i'm happy shooting this reflex lens and just checking out wildlife and what I actually like to shoot...

On that grind...

Lily season is in full effect!

I feel like this is probably a relatively polarizing subject, but I've been wanting to address it for a while, so here goes:

Here in Manitoba, professional tattooers are legally allowed to tattoo people 16 or 17 years old, with a consenting parent present. For a long time it didn't feel good, it never felt right in the first couple years of tattooing, so I stopped tattooing minors altogether.

Around four years ago, when I had been tattooing for ten years, something changed. I started to have my friends and clients asking about their kids getting tattooed. This was so different than working at a walk-in shop and relying on people who were just looking for anyone who would tattoo them. Now, I've developed a strong foundation in my community, and a good grasp on how to make a tattoo well, and I'm so happy to have young people come to me on the recommendation of their older family members, or trusted community members.

In my heart of hearts, I think that tattooing is a wonderful rite of passage, and that the young should have access to it. I'm not super hot on the consent laws, but am bound to them and am happy to comply as necessary to provide tattoos to teenagers looking to mark themselves.

I have hesitated for a few years to make a post like this, because I'm really not looking to have my inbox flooded with requests from young people, but I do feel strongly that we should be building strong communities that include the young and this is one little way that I think I may help in that.

We did these two tattoos, the little boquet, and this Dr. Seuss quote on a seventeen year old who came on the recommendation of their Aunt (I think that's how it went). I was able to have a quick phone call with their Mum on the phone a week or two before the appointment, and their Dad's sibling was the one who recommended me. It was a good feeling, that's totally the kind of position in my community as a practitioner I want to have.

I was sad to just have a 35mm on the camrea when this mama rabbit sat and nursed her bunnies right in front of me for a good ten minutes the other day, it was sooooooo cute!

This is the first tattoo I've made that is fully-based on a wildlife photo I took, a female Red Winged Blackbird, Shot at Garbage Hill and Tattooed at Ritual Winnipeg.

Got after it with the crew this weekend!

Jared - Tailslide to Switch Crooks.

Cain - Front Board

Thanks Tyler for picking up my camera to shoot this Wallie, I was inspired to have a photographer and true skate-rat show me a good way to approach skate-photos, I don't do it a whole lot and I was stoked to see him get in close, try different things... make it good!

Jeff - Boardslide

Jeff, you rule! He did a bunch of stuff at this spot that is super hard to skate, including a boardslide pull-over to fakie, which I think is absolutely sick.