1- Doing It By Yourself
Doing it by yourself without someone experienced to help you. I did it so I appreciate this may be hypocritical.
However, having had that experience I can now see how it affected my confidence and led to me learning bad habits which took long to undo.
2 - Running Before You Can Walk
Using a tattoo machine before you can even draw a smooth consistent line with a pen or pencil.
Think about it, if you can’t do the basics with a pen what chance do you have with a heavy machine on a human who moves and bleeds?
3 - Use The Correct Equipment
Not using the correct equipment, again getting advice on this can save you money and a lot of frustration.
4 - Lack Of Confidence
Tattooing someone when you aren’t confident will only make your lack of confidence worse!
Confidence will come from doing the work, the practice, the drawing, after drawing, after drawing.
5 - Overworking And Underworking The Skin
YouTube can be helpful but unfortunately it can’t give you the real depth of feel and instruction a trained tattooer in person can.
Lack of confidence and experience will have you go over the skin too much because your not being efficient with pressure, technique, speed etc or under working again through lack of experience in knowing how much is enough and being able to see how well the ink is in.