Well, it is exactly 1 week since I have done my tattoo (well, to be exact, 7 days and 1 hour) and it is healing nicely partly thanks to the Rosken Dry Skin Cream which the tattoo studio recommended (and which I immediately bought at the nearby pharmacy for about RM12). The dry skin on the cactus and the upper roots area it has totally dropped off, and there you can see it in all it’s glory!

Well, for my first two tattoos, a thin bandage was applied to my tattoo after the tattooing was finished. The bandaged was removed after about two hours, which then the tattoo was washed with tap water, dried with a facial tissue, and some petroleum jelly was applied to it. As mentioned in my previous post about my third tattoo, a nice frizz of alcohol was sprayed onto my tattoo after it has been done, sanitizing it and effectively killing all the microbes that were hanging around it while giving me a nice rush of pain and adrenaline.

The tattoo is like a fresh wound, although you can’t see blood seeping out of it (maybe 1 or 2 tiny drops), there’s some white-ish/yellow-ish plasma oozing out of it (not much though). Good care must be given to the tattoo on the first few days to make sure that the wound doesn’t get infected (puss, puss!!).

I washed the tattoo about 4 times a day, and after washing, a nice thin layer of dry skin cream (Rosken, as mentioned previously) was gently applied onto it, providing it with nutrients, accelerating the skin regeneration process and moisturizing it. Yes, the skin on the tattoo is really really dry, you gotta keep it moisturized so that it can heal properly and seal the ink inside the skin (epidermis?). Failure to do so might lead to the skin cracking prematurely, which may not be good for the ink. If the skin cracks and peels to early, it will expose the new skin underneath it, which is not yet fully developed.

So, yeah, to avoid that, I moisturized the tattoo everyday and it only started to crack yesterday. After taking my shower last night, some of the skin started peeling off and when I woke up this morning, a lot of skin was peeling off. I managed to get about 60% of skin off the tattoo by slowly rubbing the flaky skin of it. No, don’t peel the skin off, if it is loose enough it will be able to drop off if you rub it. Peeling the skin off is as dangerous as peeling the scab off when you have a blood wound. There are chances that you might peel off the layer with the ink on it as well.

So now, there’s about 30% of dry skin on my tattoo and hopefully it will fully drop off in the coming weekend. After the all the dry skin has gone, I will go back to applying petroleum jelly onto it, but now, to some more moisturizing.