Tattoo blog 6/7/12

I wanted to start this tattoo blog to document my experiences.  I've always wished I would have kept a journal when I started tattooing.  Now that I'm pretty much starting all over I think I'll do that this time.  I'm going to start out with sharing my story and later I'll post some art and stuff.  One of the main reasons I want to document this info is because of the technical information about tattooing that is easy to forget and some of the technique experiments that are successful or a failure.  Being able to look back at my experiences will hopefully help me to develop a superior style.

A lot of tattoo artists would never put technical information out there for everyone to see because they're scared that it will damage their competitive edge.  It also gives house tatters (AKA "skratchers") the skills they need to steel work from shop tattooers.  I don't care about any of that stuff.  I don't care if it makes you mad either.  It's petty.  Tattooing is a competitive industry, there's only a couple ways to win the competition, either be the only one, or be the best one!  Anyone willing to work hard enough to be the best isn't scared to share their information (notice I said share, I'm not going to deny the true reason I tell what I know is to learn what you know).  If you know you suck, you're scared of no name scab pickers coming out of the shadows and taking your lively hood and you really don't deserve what you have anymore than they do.

I post regularly, at least a couple times a week.  I often post daily.  In fact I try to post every tattoo I do.  I ask myself 2 questions every time.

 1. What could I have done to make this a better tattoo? 

2. What makes this a strong tattoo? 

My goal is to force myself to analyze every single piece no matter how simple or insignificant it may seem so I don't get into the habbit of just half-assing things that I'm not passionate about.  Nothing walks this way, it's out there for everyone to see and criticize... that is if anyone ever sees this!
 

How did you get into tattooing?

I get that question a lot now.  That and "how long have you been doing this?"  Here's the long answer to both.

My dad was pretty heavily tattooed, he's a "biker dude".  I always thought that was awesome when I was a kid.  I would tell the other kids my dad had a lot of tats and I thought that made him the best dad.  I don't have a lot of memories of him before I was about 9.  He lived in Las Vegas and I lived outside of Rochester MN.  But I always imagined he was pretty amazing and told the stories I imagined up as if they were true, no matter how ridiculous.  We started going out to Vegas for the summers when I was about 9 or so (if you can imagine that, 20 below 0 winter days and 120 summer days.  I think I forgot there was such a thing as a nice day for a few years).  On a trip out to Vegas one year we stopped in Craig Colorado to stay with my dad's friend Pudgy (AKA Beatlejuice) who was a tattoo artist.  He had an apartment in the back of the tattoo studio and I got to sit and watch him work for a while.  Then I got my first tattoo.  It was my initials, on my fingernail.  When you tattoo the fingernail the design just grows with the nail and eventually you cut it off.  I spent a lot of time mapping out my adult body and the tattoo designs that would adorn it after that.  When asked as a child what I wanted to do when I grew up I just said "something with art".  I didn't know or care what but at the time I could always color inside the lines better than the other kids and I liked the attention I was getting for it.  Art always was (and still is) an escape for me.  When there was crap going on in my life that I didn't want to deal with I could get lost in focusing on some lines and shading and people would more or less leave me alone while I was doing it.  They also tend to think that everything I do with art is important... even when I know it's just something I drew to get my mind off what ever was bothering me.  I believe art has saved my life in that way.  I don't doubt for a second that I'd be psychotic, addicted to drugs or both if I didn't have paper to turn to.

     In High School I spent more time drawing than hanging out with friends or talking to girls.  I had like, 4 art classes my senior year.  In 1999 (summer between my Junior and Senior year) my dad asked me if I wanted to tour with the Ozzfest painting women's boobs with an airbrush.  I had never even seen a real airbrush at the time but when I told him yes, he handed me one.  He said, "You better start practicing, I have to send some pictures of your work to the tour manager in 2 weeks."  I thought he was crazy, there must be a thousand other artists competing for this job and I was just a skinny punk kid with no clue what I was doing and no one to teach me.  He invited some women over to the house to take their shirts off for me, which you'd think would drive a teenage boy pretty wild but it really didn't.  I was honestly more focused on the art, besides, I had this girl friend at school that I was crazy about and every other female was invisible to me.  I'm still married to that girl today actually.  So, I painted strange women, tag board, my brothers (over and over and over).  My brother Adam would be raw from scrubbing the airbrush paint off of his skin so many times.  But it worked.  My dad sent the pics in and we got the job.  That was probably the craziest summer of my whole life.  We traveled across the nation from state to state working every other day and \driving on our days off.  Some states had laws that wouldn't allow us to paint boobs, so we would paint fake tattoos or do face paint.  Not like the stupid crap you see everywhere today where they paint a tribal dragon stencil on someone.  I was doing full colored dragon sleeves or flames or painting the face to look like a 3D skull.  Not that I was honestly very good at what I was doing, but I was doing something.

     As I think back that really prepared me for working in the tattoo industry, people would come in, tell me what they wanted and I would do my best to put it on their skin, collect some money and send them on their way.  I wish I would have gone straight from HS into an apprenticeship at some BA shop.  I didn't.  I got in a fight with my dad on that trip and decided I couldn't live under his roof anymore.  When we got home I moved out right away and rented a room from a buddy of mine that was a little older and already living on his own.  His name is Erik and he's still one of my closest friends.  I had to get any job I could so I started cooking at this bar around the corner and sat in my little booth drawing on the backs of all the tickets between orders.  That was my first exposure to "real world" adults that wanted to fill my head with dream shattering discouragement and starving artists bullshit.  It was a hard time for me, but I finished High School and never stopped drawing, when I had the time.  I went from that job to a construction job digging ditches for a plumbing company and then started learning how to fix Air Conditioners.  Now somewhere in the middle of all this I got my hands on some terrible tattoo equipment and started making these ungodly needles.  I started tattooing myself and Stephanie and then anyone who would bring me a case of beer, which of course we would drink during the tattoo.  I had more confidence then than I do now.  We were all so stupid.  Thank God most of my friends were punk rock kids that liked the prison tattoo look because that was just about what they were getting.

     That didn't last long though, well at least not at that quality.  I went around to a few shops to ask about a real apprenticeship, but they all required me to work for free and with no other financial support that just wasn't an option. My dad (who is not an artist, but a hell of a business man) opened up a tattoo shop called Precious Slut about an hour away from where I lived in Pahrump Nevada.  I started spending as much time as I could afford to spend out there, which wasn't nearly enough because of the 2hrs of round trip travel time and fuel expense. I had to talk someone into coming with every time too so I knew I'd have a canvas.  I certainly couldn't afford do drive all the way out there just to sit around. When I wasn't at the shop I was on the phone with his artists talking tattoos.  I met another lifelong friend at that time John Bates who is still the guy I call for advice on tattooing.  Eventually he did open a shop in Vegas and I was able to quit my job and apprentice there.  I was able to make a little money in his shop because they were letting me do solid black tattoos (the ones that are easiest to fix).  And that pretty much sums up the whole "beginning" thing.

 

There was a stage there when I got sucked into the Vegas party life.  The call of fast women, good drugs and bad friends was more than I could handle and pretty soon I was tattooing high and taking the money to the bar instead of home to my family.  It was pretty hard to build a clientele with that mentality and really hard to maintain my relationship.  My work was not my priority and I was taking my skill for granted.  I also didn't get along with my old man the whole time I was on his payroll and that ended in a heated argument and me packing boxes.  This resulted in a pretty eye opening slap in the face from reality.  I arrogantly believed my loyal customers would follow me where ever I went and that my portfolio was strong enough to walk into any shop and get a job.  I was wrong on both accounts.  When there's 200 shops in one city you kinda get the impression that there's enough demand out their to support them.  

Where I've worked

I worked at two other shops in Vegas.  I worked with Fred Giovannitti at Tatlantis and Absolute tattoo, which I think is not around anymore.  In fact, I know my dad is now running another shop out of that building.  By the time all this was going on I had done a fair job of getting my head out of my ass.  That was also when we decided to move back to my home state of Minnesota.  Mainly we were tired of living in the same place for so long and we were losing our house anyway.  So we sold everything we had accept what would fit in the smallest U-haul trailer and headed East.

Moving to MN- and getting a square job

I didn't want to tattoo when we got to MN because of the associated lifestyle and also because I had scoped out all the shops in the area and since MN didn't have health regulations on the tattoo industry at the time I saw some incredibly scary and  gross things going on.  Plus, I was sick of doing kanji and lower back butterflies.  I thought hell, I'd rather have a square job and tattoo huge awesome stuff for free from my house and do it with higher health standards than what I see going on in the shops.  

It was a good theory, but it only "kind of" worked.  I started a few tats but mostly got caught up in this frustrating life of daily grind and cooperate American psychotic frustrating BS!  I worked at IBM as a maintenance guy fixing toilets, doors and machinery for 5 years and I hated every minuet of it.  OK, that's not true.  When I first started I was working in their machine shop fixing lathes and milling machines and that was really awesome,  when there was work to do.  I learned a ton of stuff their and it's exactly the type of things I'm going to need to know to build tattoo machines.  Like how to weld, properly measure, basic engineering stuff and metallurgy.  Also I spent a lot of time snaking toilets and playing video games there.  I always said it was like being paid to go to jail.  One day an announcement was made that someone had to get laid off to meet financial needs and I volunteered.  Apparently I was the first person ever to do that, which was just as shocking to me as my volunteering was to the management.  I seriously thought I was going to have to fight for it.  I got on unemployment and used the money to go back to school.  As unemployment got low I started thinking about work and cringed at the idea of going back to that world.  I was making dependable money (not much really) and had health insurance, but I was dying inside.  I know it sounds corny but I was not spiritually fulfilled and was having a really hard time enjoying life.  So I dusted off my old ass picture album and hit the street.  Now I work at Rochester Tattoo.  For the first time in 5 years I don't feel like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not.

 

So that's the back story.  I might add more of that stuff later but from now on I really just want to use this blog to share my experiences, ideas and opinions about how to be the best tattooer I can be.  Thanks for reading it.