Hi I'm manuel from germany. I have a few tattoos I gathered over the years, most are self designed and mostly bold black. I started learning to draw a few years ago and feel confident enough to design a bigger piece. I definitely want a dog on my lower left side (pelvis up to a bit above the lower ribs. I came up with the doberman while drawing with kid's pastels (that cheap stuff, so fun!), but I fear this one will be difficult to tattoo due to the shading. I like the black and white contrast, so I may just trace it in black and white. 

I really like texture when painting / drawing, so I wonder how something like this would translate?

I also have a big affinity for line drawing / ink drawing, as I usually draw with my fountain pen. I have some dogs I really like that are just a thin line, so they are much easier to tattoo (and so much faster, no ouchie). I am not sure if it may be just to thin for a tattoo, on the other hand it is not meant to be seen by most people anyway. If I do it line style, I may get funky with crazy colors. I love drawing the same outline multiple times in a kind of "shaky scribbly way". I have one tattoo with cyan, magenta and black that I really like.

Here's a line dog:

The final option is to make it really graphic and black and white, with more geometrix shapes, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. I am too tired to do ink right now so I will post a version of it tomorrow. Here also I start to like colors. This is one I have on the right side (you can see i'm quite skinny. those tattoos on the ribs, oh my).

As you can see it was more a matter of luck that this course came along, because I have already been thinking / designing this one for a while. It's mostly a master of style than meaning (I don't attach that much meaning to my tattoos. It's rather than in retrospect they mark individual parts of my life).