u/Majestic_Manager2048

Been thinking about getting my first large-scale tattoo and I’m trying to find the right artist/shop in Vegas before moving forward.

The general direction is a blackwork / negative-space piece across the left chest, shoulder, and upper arm — more abstract/flow-based than illustrative. Kind of inspired by things like topography, energy flow, magnetic fields, etc., with a lot of emphasis on bold contrast and something that will still age well 20+ years from now.

Definitely not looking for super fine-line or trendy Instagram-style work. I’d love someone who’s really good at:

• large-scale composition
• body flow/anatomy-aware design
• blackwork & negative space
• custom symbolic/geometric work
• creating something unique instead of just copying reference images

If anyone has artists or shops they’d personally recommend in Vegas for this type of work, I’d really appreciate it. Bonus points if you’ve actually gotten a large piece from them yourself.

Just to be upfront: I wrote the original version of this post myself, but I was lazy and used AI to clean it up for grammar, punctuation, and clarity. The thoughts/frustrations are mine.

This might be a dumb question, or maybe just proof that I’m a complete beginner, but I’m curious if anyone else has had this experience.

When I’m working on apps/websites, I try to plan everything out as much as possible with ChatGPT first. I’ll create goals, break things into detailed epics, generate tasks for each epic, keep project logs, set communication rules, and basically build a whole workflow around it.

Right now my process is something like:

ChatGPT helps me create a plan-only prompt for a task → Replit Agent creates the plan → I paste that back into ChatGPT → ChatGPT approves or revises it → ChatGPT creates the execution prompt → Replit Agent does the work → I paste the project log update and Git SHA back into ChatGPT so it can review what changed → then I move on to the next task.

It’s very structured, which is probably good, but honestly it’s also incredibly boring. I don’t feel like I have much real oversight into what’s actually happening.

One of the things I have ChatGPT do is translate every plan, execution prompt, and recap into plain-English summaries because the actual prompts can get really long. That helps, but I still feel like I’m mostly just copying things between tools and hoping the process is moving the project forward.

In general, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels without really seeing much happen. Part of that might be because the epics are set up to do a lot of backend work first before the frontend UI gets built out. So aside from occasional smoke tests, I don’t have a great feel for what’s actually been accomplished.

Does anyone else feel this way?

I’m usually the kind of person who wants to understand every little detail so I can picture how everything works and fits together. But I have basically zero coding knowledge and almost no understanding of tech stacks, architecture, backend/frontend stuff, etc., so the whole process makes me feel completely lost.

I guess what I’m asking is: is this normal when you’re building with AI as a non-coder, especially early on when most of the work is backend/setup stuff? Any tips on how to improve my understanding (within realistic constraints; I'm not going to get a degree in this and I barely have enough time to work through about 2 hours/day on Replit)