I noticed that you said you are using 7's to line with. I'm in ky, AMD we have quite a few farmers and country boys in my area. Many of them have skin like rhino hide from years of out door work. I've run into the issue of poor lines and lack luster saturation when using some groupings that are tightly packed ,but itseemed to go away when I dropped down a grouping size. Lining with 3's and 5's and packing with 5's , shading with 7's . It really helped. This was using a bishop, so very simmilar to neotats. Dunno if this will help ya. But hope it will