8 REAL REPORTS, UNEDITED

Fine-line florals on the inner forearm are the single most common design this tool sees, and 82 is roughly what a well-planned one should score. Placement 90 and size 92 are doing the lifting: the inner forearm is flat, low-friction and rarely sun-exposed, and the design was specified large enough that the stems have room to breathe.

The number that matters is aging at 70, the lowest of the six. Hairline single-weight lines spread in skin; five years of that turns a delicate stem into a soft grey thread. The fix is not a different tattoo, it is varied line weight — heavier where a petal turns, lighter at the tips — so the drawing still has structure after the ink has moved.

Worth being clear about what the score cannot know: it never saw the artist's healed work. In fine-line more than any other style, that is the variable that decides the outcome, and no amount of design review substitutes for asking to see two-year-old photographs.

Moon phases read as a safe choice and mostly are: design 82, style 92, placement 88. What pulls the overall down to 79 is size at 65, and that pairing is the most useful thing in this report. The style suits the body; the dimensions asked for do not.

A five-phase row has to fit five shrinking crescents, and the thinnest of them is a sliver of negative space a couple of millimetres wide. Ink spreads into empty space from both sides at once, so that sliver closes first and the crescent becomes a disc — losing the one feature that made it a moon rather than a dot. Readability at 72 is the same fact counted from the other end.

Scaling toward eight inches is a cheap change to make before booking and an expensive one afterwards, because there is no way to add negative space back into a healed tattoo. Nothing here is a reason not to get it.

This is the report most people do not want and most need. 58 is not the tool saying no; it is the tool saying that thin serifs, a high-wear location and 4cm of space are each manageable alone and are not manageable together.

The wrist bends constantly, rubs against sleeves and catches sun. Roman numerals are built from hairline serifs. At 4cm those serifs sit close enough that spreading makes them touch, which is what aging 50 and readability 55 mean in plain terms: MMXVII thickens into a dark bar you end up explaining to people.

Note that design still scores 68. The idea is fine and the model says so — that separation is the entire reason for scoring six things instead of one. The same date at 8cm, in blockier type, on the forearm is the same date — and not one of the three risks that produced this 58 applies to it.

Aging 18, size 22, readability 25. Realism works through tonal gradient — thousands of soft dots doing the job of shading — and the hand is the worst place on the body for anything that depends on subtlety: constant friction, constant washing, constant sun, and skin over knuckles and tendons that moves more than anywhere else.

At 4cm an eye is about two millimetres across. When that blurs it does not blur gracefully into an impression of a face the way a large portrait does; it blurs into a smudge that stops being anyone in particular. That is the difference between a portrait aging and a portrait failing.

A memorial portrait is one of the best reasons there is to get tattooed, and it is a bad reason to ignore a 32. The design survives at three times the size on somewhere stable. The hand does not offer a version of it that lasts, and a 32 is the tool being useful rather than agreeable.

Style scores 65 with the verdict “Pure style, poor longevity”, which is an unusually candid thing for a scoring model to produce. It is not criticising the execution of the idea; it is saying the idea executed faithfully is what fails.

Watercolour works through unlined washes of dilute colour. Skin heals over dilute pigment by diffusing it, and with no black structure underneath there is nothing left holding the shape once it has diffused. Aging 38 is that mechanism, not a matter of taste. On the wrist, with sun and friction added, five years is an optimistic horizon.

There is a version that survives: a structural black underdrawing carrying the silhouette, washes laid over it, saturated pigment rather than diluted. It looks less like a watercolour painting on day one and considerably more like one at year ten. That is a conversation to have before the deposit.

Bold blackwork on the upper back is close to the ideal case on every axis the model measures. Heavy solid lines survive spreading because they were never thin. High contrast survives fading because it started at maximum. The upper back is a large flat panel that barely moves, rarely sees sun and takes almost no friction. Aging 94 is earned.

What a 93 does not tell you is anything about execution risk, and here that is the whole remaining risk. A panel this size is several long sessions of solid black packing — the work in which a mediocre artist shows most clearly, because patchy black heals patchy and then only gets worse.

So the design decisions are right and the score says so. Everything left has moved to who holds the machine, which is the opposite of the situation on the micro-portrait above.

Traced handwriting carries weight nothing else does. It is the actual hand of a specific person, often one who is gone, and none of that changes how ink behaves over twenty years.

Cursive is defined by its gaps: the enclosed loop of an e, the space between a descender and the letter beneath it. Spreading closes gaps, so a faithful trace of small handwriting becomes a continuous ribbon while remaining, technically, the same shape it always was. That is aging 68 and readability 72.

Slightly larger, slightly more letter spacing, slightly more open loops, and it still reads as that person's hand at twenty years. It is a better kind of faithfulness than a perfect copy that closes shut — and it is the one recommendation here that most people resist, because it feels like editing something that should not be edited.

There, placement and size carried it. Here it is style 89 and design 84: repeated geometry is forgiving, because the eye reconstructs a whole pattern from partial information. A mandala still reads as a mandala long after its finest lines have gone soft, which is why the style outlives fine-line botanicals on the same skin.

Aging 72 and readability 75 point at one risk, and it is density. A mandala is drawn as line and space, and the temptation is always to fill the space. Because ink spreads inward from both edges of every gap, the tightest ring of detail — usually the centre — is where the pattern first collapses into a solid grey disc.

The upper arm is a good canvas and the curvature is already priced into placement 88. The real decision to make before booking is how much empty space to protect, and to say it out loud, because it is the first thing that gets negotiated away at the stencil stage.