rather than voicing my opinion on tattoos, i'm going to make suggestions for easier building. one - dark whisper's texture converter would allow you to switch back and forth between V3 and V2 textures, which, since they have seams in completely different places, would enable you to take care of edges. two- for "tribal" or plain black tatts, or anything that involves no more than a few colors, i'm betting a vector tool like adobe illustrator, macromedia freehand, or even macromedia fireworks would be much, much, much easier than drawing by hand. bezier curves can take some time to get used to, but once you do, the world's your oyster ;). you can even say get some sort of reference (say for japanese dragons) or make something general with pen and paper, bring it into a vector program, have the program trace the bitmap, and then manipulate anchor points and such to change it or clean it up or whatever.