Right, hi there, this is Ryan with Better Test Hearing. It is really hot out here today, but I had this weird dream about flowability, and I figured I gotta go outside and make a video about this after I wrote the email and did the little paper that I did, so I'm gonna share with you a little bit stuff that I have going on in my head. Today we're gonna talk about how ink flows out of the tubes. Now you can control it. Rock it roll. Okay, now that's over, you can tell we're prepared today because there's actually diagrams, and this is weird. So let's get into this. This is basically a cross section blown up thing of, you know, what a tube, and this is a model, and those things I didn't draw at the scale, some of your artists out there, be like, oh, right, it looks like crap. Now, just to illustrate a point here, right, what we've got is your standard tattoo tube, reservoir tip, opener closed gap, either either at the top. Sometimes it'll be open open, but we're just gonna have a closed tip here, and then a cross sectional explosion of zimden space of actually where the needle is coming out of the tube, and this reusing around versus a mag because it's just easier for me to illustrate it this way, and because I like to draw circles. So I can ask this a lot, how do you better control the pigments that's actually going to be flowing out of the tube, and how can you make sure that you're keeping the area clean when you're doing a tattoo, or make sure that the pigments being delivered in a consistent manner, which will turn consistently improve your lines, right? So, if I go just to a quick video, I shouldn't take too too long here, but this will also refute a lot of stuff that you may see online. The first thing we always want to address is direction, right? And this is probably the most hotly contested aspect of how to do a tattoo, and if anything else, you'll find out mine. More often not, you're gonna see people when they're doing a tattoo pulling backwards against the front of the tube, right? They're going to be pulling against the well, and we'll call this the well, let's just go ahead and or reservoir, you can call it too, I'll just call it well, because it's easier to spell, and I probably won't mess that up, rock and roll. I'm going to be pulling backwards against the well, very, very slowly, especially with rotary machines, I'll see that rhythm moving very, very, very slowly, while the recording, and you can just see how crisp being cool that line is. Now, I'm not saying that it doesn't work, which is kind of inefficient. The reason why everyone is moving so slow when they're going backwards is because the actual flow rate of the pigment is going to be controlled more effectively going backwards. And this is really sketchy, especially for people who are just starting to learn how to tattoo, because if you move too slow, with your machine moving it too high of a stitch rate, you know, or a cycle rate, then what you're going to do is have a needle sitting this skin too many times before the pigment is fully saturated, which, you know, will cause massive damage. So it's difficult to try and measure that stuff, and this is why we, you know, not only on the podcast or on these videos or on the website, we're always telling people to push their lines, not pull them. You can tell if you're doing a pull incorrectly, because what you're going to get is a massive amount of ink is going to drop out of the tube, right, when you start. Why is this happening? This is where we get the needle is actually going to be pressing someone against the back of the tube, right? What this does is it controls how fast the pigment can come out. Now as you're moving forward doing something with the tattooing, right, the needles when they go into the skin, they're going to be lifted away from the back of the tube just a little bit, which is going to allow some of the pigment to spill out, and then it's going to also be pulling it down as this is happening, right? It's going to be creating a small cavity at the end when it deposits it into the person's skin, and that's going to be able to give enough room as this needle comes back up to grab more pigment and start pulling it back down the tube, just like a sewing machine, right? Now if you decide to mess with this flow by changing the direction of the machine, right, which way it's going, and not changing the fact that you know you want to be keeping it back against the well, you're going to be moving these needles to different sides of the tube, which is going to increase or decrease the amount of flow that's actually going to come out of it, right? If you have something in here, your needle's coming straight back, the pigment's going to be being pulled down and running along the sides of it as it's going into the skin. If you decide to push left and that needle rolls up to the side, you have a larger cavity here, right? Which is going to force more pigment down increase in the flow rate. If you go way up at the top, it's going to create a very large cavernous space, which is why a lot of people, when they're using large groupings, tend to pull things backwards, you'll see this anything like above a nine round, right? Because they don't have enough ink actually coming out, because they don't have their needle set, right? Which is going to decrease the actual flow ability, which is going to make it really hard to make it look like they have clean lines. So what they have to do is literally open it up, dump a ton of pigment onto the skin, and then drag it backwards to get saturation. So we'll be able to do an inch, stop, grab more, and keep going. It's waste. It's not very efficient, and it can actually increase the chances of scarring that you're going to see a client. So how do we fix it? We're always pushing against the back of the well, right? This means if the needle is always sitting against the back, it's always pushing against the back, and we don't have too much of a rotation coming around one side or the other, you're going to have a steady constant flow, and you're not also going to have a bunch of spillage. Does that make sense? So there's another way that you can deal with this if you need to. Pass just direction. If you're just like Ryan, I don't care what your science says. Everyone says you should go backwards. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. That's fine. I'm not going to sit here and fight you on that really fighting you, but I mean maybe fighting you. But what we can do is we can change the viscosity that pigment, right? So at a point, viscosity is how thick something is, right? It's more complex than that, but just to break it down so we don't have to get into some heavy, you know, chemistry or physics, the viscosity is how thick stuff is. So if viscosity is increased, the flowability, right? We'll go flow rate is going to put that in our decrease. Why? If something's thicker and you hold it up to the end, it's going to take longer. If I take a ramp and I pour water down it, the water is going to go down pretty quick, right? If I take that same ramp and I pour maple syrup down it, it's going to go, you know, take a longer time to get down. It's because that's a higher viscosity. So if we increase the viscosity of these fluids, like the pigments, right, that are mixed with fluids, it's going to decrease the rate that they're actually going to be able to spill down into this, which is going to, in turn, increase the fact that you're not going to get as much spillage. But what does that do? It forces us to slow down our hand, right? So the only time that we can really work doing a pull backwards is when we have those increased viscosity fluids. This is why a lot of like newer tattooers are like, oh, I only like this one brand. It feels right. It seems it's a little bit thicker, et cetera, et cetera. It's usually because you're running machine one way, right? The thinner pigments that you may get that are not as viscous, you're not going to be running your machine maybe a little bit diagonally to get the line in a little bit, you know, not as straight up and down, you know, you have to be tipping it straight up and not actually get some of those really high viscous fluids to actually flow. But this is a simplification, right? This is the other things we can do is like gravity, right? Gravity is a constant. And if our machine is facing like, we'll go, uh, we'll 45 degrees, we're going greater than 45 degrees up, right? Where we actually were lifting it up. Now pull, it's like taking that ramp with our maple syrup and our water and we start tipping it up and up and up, right? As our needle is coming up, it's going to be able to flow faster. If you have a really thin non viscous fluid, it's going to spell it really quick, like certain blacks that have really no additives in them that we know of. That's another video. So usually what you'll do is you'll end up pulling your needle back to do some flow rate, right? It's pretty simple. So use this. If you're having trouble getting the ink into the skin, you can do a few things, right? If you want change of viscosity, add some viscous glycerin. Food grade, 99.9 percent, right? Like food grade vegetable glycerin. You can increase the viscosity, which is also going to thin the pigment. So you've got to be careful with that stuff, right? Also, when you start mixing the bottles, you're going to have to probably get a mixing solution that includes isopropyl alcohol or ethyl alcohol, depending on if you're in the EU. Some type of viscous fluid, usually vegetable glycerin, right? And then something else, whatever you want to put into it, in your rose water, just something like that. This is a biosidol agent. The other thing you can do is just change your elevation, right? The other thing you can do is just push right. You're going to have to find a sweet spot. This is also going to be dependent on client skin, their age, how good your stretches, location, where you're doing the sad habit skin must prep. There's, I mean, it's so complex, but if you're having trouble, this is the easiest and first way to try and just like beat that, right? Watch the way that your pigment's actually flowing out, watch the angle that you're going, and if you need to, make a little bit thicker. Rock it well. This is Ryan from Better Tattoo and SignoOff.