Josh Webb’s grandfather had a degree in aerospace engineering and helped build Disneyland‘s Space Mountain. He inspired Webb’s love of science and astronomy. All of that meant Webb wanted to get a tattoo with a central theme of space. He took that setting and decided to work with his tattooist and friend Aaron Bowholtz to populate the space sleeve with Marvel characters. It turned into an Infinity War design.
“The design process was a little crazy,” Webb told Nerdist. They knew Thanos was going to be the center piece for the tattoo and went from there. They worked with artist Javier Avila to use an image of his for Thanos and after that, Webb said, “We just kept searching for images of characters and chose the ones that were set in space.”
They used cosmic imagery and easter eggs such as Loki‘s helmet to fill in the area around the characters. It wasn’t always possible for Webb to visualize how the finished product would look. “I had to leave certain sections open for the next session, which means at times it looked like certain things were just kind of floating there for no particular reason, but after the background and outer space was added everything made much more sense,” he explained.
The Thanos portion of the tattoo took 12 hours since it was the most detailed and has the most line work and easter eggs. “Vision took about seven hours, Galactus took about nine hours, Eternity took around eight hours. All in all, it took about nine sessions, ranging from 4-12 hours. The vast majority of them were late nights, though.”
Make a trip to the gallery below to see the sleeve from different angles and to get a closer look at each character. Be sure to visit the tattoist’s Instagram feed to view all sorts of tattoos.
If you have nerdy ink on your skin or you’re a tattoo artist that applies pop culture, STEM, music, or other nerd-inspired ink (tl;dr: I want to see basically all of the tattoos) on a regular basis, then please hit me up because I’d like to highlight you in a future Inked Wednesday gallery. I’m especially interested if you have a sleeve or other large tattoo. You can get in touch with me via email at [email protected]. Send me photos of the tattoos you’d like me to feature (the higher resolution, the better) and don’t forget to let me know the name of your tattoo artist if you have it, as well the name of the shop he or she works out of. If you are the tattoo artist, give me links to your portfolios and/or Instagram accounts so I can share them with our readers.
Images: Josh Webb
