I traded my whip with my tattooist a while back because I was mistakenly trying to use it as an all-rounder and got frustrated with it. Now my tattooist is doing a large dot work piece up my arm covering many sessions, and she is using the Whip for the job. We discuss our machine choices often while she works, and some interesting things have come up. My artist is also a sound technician and uses her ears with the Whip to feel out her adjustments and techniques for the varying skin thickness and density from my underarm, outer arm, arm crook and wrist. Now I also listen closely when she works and have begun to hear all of the nuances in the machine as she works. She reckons that it makes the Whip one of the most sensitive and flexible machines ever made. I have since tried listening for these variations during my work with the Bizarre and NeoTat, two totally different machines...not a chance. The Bizarre, obviously, dances to its own tune and delivers what it is set to deliver without a lot of tonal subtlety, and the NeoTat is just steady. I love my Bizarres very dearly (and the NeoTat), but last session with my artist I started to miss the Swash and its soft bouncy purr. And the whole experience reminded me that it isn't so much how the machine runs that is important, but how we run the machines and how much we get into the experience of using them. I'm getting a Whip again, even if I won't be using it every day.