Soldering Tattoo Needles (Part Two)

(Continued from Part One, which you can read here.)

You may be wondering how tattoo needle manufacturers group individual needles in a configuration like a flat, and how they’re made loose or tight. Loose and tight needle groupings are created with the jig. A jig can be as simple as a tool the size of a drill bit, or you can buy custom jigs specifically designed for tattooing. When you build your own needles you’ll use solder, heat, and flux, so your jig will need to be a type of material to which the solder and needles won’t stick. Choose your jig wisely.

Here’s how you create a loose or tight needle grouping. You lay out the needles and then place them in the jig where you’ll do the initial soldering with soldering iron. If the needle grouping needs to be tighter — like when you’re building a liner configuration — you’ll need to remove the grouping from the jig and place it in a smaller or tighter hole, thus compressing the grouping. After the needles have been compressed, you resolder the needles.

The distance from the tip of the needles to the point where you solder the needles together will influence whether a grouping is loose or tight. A higher solder point will give the needles a little more flexibility, softening the tattoo. Because you need a stiffer configuration, a typical liner will be soldered lower down the grouping with more solder and flux than a shader or loose grouping will.

Let’s take a second to outline how you identify needle groupings by looking at the manufacturer’s blister pack. A 1214RS needle consists of twelve-gauge needles (12) in a group of fourteen individual needles (14) in a round configuration that is loose or a shader (S), so a 1215RS is a fourteen round shader. A 1215CM consists ofsoldering fifteen twelve-gauge needles in a curved mag configuration.

When you know how manufacturers commonly group needles, you can use this information for soldering your own needle groupings. With the right soldering equipment, knowledge of needle groupings, and a little practice, you will be able to solder your very own tattoo needles.