Great Unsung heros of tattooing (part 1)

If you are a tattooer chances are that you know the names of the people who paved the road of tattooing before us. Giants like Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy, if you have dug a little deeper you might know some of the slightly less famous folks like Cap Coleman or George Burchett upon whose shoulders we all stand. But most tattooers don’t really know about the people and inventions which have directly and pointedly changed tattooing into what it is today. These people and milestones aren’t just important because they left a legacy of artwork or an ethic we can aspire to, in many cases these folks literally invented the stuff we use daily and we don’t even know about it!

My first candidate is also my personal choice for the tattooer who has done the most for the technology of modern tattooing, Bill Baker.  Id be willing to bet that 90% of tattooers reading this right now don’t know who Bill baker is, note that i said “is” not “was” because he is still alive and still doing stellar work in Toronto at the Pearl Harbor Gift Shop. In the late 80′s and early 90′s He did the first real scientific testing on tattoo needles and eventually came up with a theory of needle manufacture that led to the first high quality, textured, really sharp pins available in various thicknesses. Today it is a given that needles made specifically for tattooing are available, but prior to Bills work the vast majority of tattoo needles were actually milliners needles or other sewing type needles.

That should be enough to consider him an unsung hero of tattooing, but he didn’t stop there, he founded a company to make and supply those needles called Eikon. Through this company he released his research for free online for any tattooer to study, also through Eikon he literally changed the way we all think of tattoo machines when he created the very first power supply that not only powered your tattoo machine, but told you real, heretofore unknown data about how that machine was running. What do I mean? Prior to Bill producing the EMS power supplies and meters it was commonly believed that a tattoo machine ran at about 25 to 50 strokes per second. Imagine our surprise upon hooking up those first power meters produced by Bills company and finding that our machines ran hundreds of cycles per second! Some power units could tell you how much voltage they were sending to the machine, but none told you how “efficient” it was (the percentage of time the needle was in the extended position vs. the retracted, Bills meters did. In short and overnight we went from a world of tattoo superstition and old wives tales to hard facts and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that most of the “common knowledge” out there was flat-out wrong!

So these things would definitely be enough to put Mr. Baker in our hall of fame if he had gone no further, but, of course, he did go further. In a series of “zines” put out by Eikon over several years Bill broke down the functions of a tattoo machine scientifically, tested, experimented, tested again and all the while he made this information public! He figured out exactly why and how a tattoo machine works, how to adjust it, and how to make it do all this efficiently and using repeatable, testable, information. Information that was only gather-able because of the meters he invented! He didn’t hide it like most “old timers”, he wanted to better tattooing as a whole, and he most certainly did. Because this blog is open to the general public I wont go into technical details, but rest assured that dozens and dozens of technical things about tattooing changed from the way they had been for decades! I can’t speak for other tattooers, but those zines were the Rosetta stone of tattoo machines for me, I could finally know exactly what I was doing when I built and tuned a machine, my tattooing got better almost instantly and a load of phony tattoo “lore” went out the window. The great shame is that Bill was forced out of the company he founded and provided the innovations for, if he hadn’t been sidelined by the ouster and ensuing legal battles how much more would he have been able to contribute to tattooing?

Every modern tattooer is using some piece of the knowledge that Bill Baker contributed to our world, if you use needles and a power supply to tattoo then something Bill created, modified, or perfected went into making them better.

To finish off this first episode of the great unsung heroes of tattooing id like to briefly mention the contribution of a piece of technology so common today that we seldom notice it, the Ink Jet printer. It’s almost impossible to imagine at this remove what it was like before cheap, highly functional photocopiers/printers were as ubiquitous as they are today. The fact is that even as recently as the late 1990s a copier was huge, expensive, and seriously limited in its functionality. One of the great advantages to the shop where I served my apprenticeship at was that it was half a block from a Kinkos copy center. I’m not kidding, this fact alone made us stand out from the more suburban places where the tattoo you got was the same size as the one on the wall and that was it! Today it is no problem for a customer to ask for a tattoo to be 10% bigger, but until the availability of the modern inkjet this meant either a trip to the copy-store or using some contraption to enlarge the image in order to retrace it.

Perhaps, then,  it is no surprise that since the advent of these copier/printers that tattoos have gotten larger and larger as the artist is able to take a small drawing and blow it up until it fits around (and with) the contours of the body. The irony is that a technology which made doing the same image over and over has actually helped steer clients away from flash and towards one-off client specific tattoos. The cheap copier made accommodating the customers preferences easier and helped to make custom tattooing the norm rather than the exception.

Newness (shop and tattoos)

So the new shop is open. Its been about 3 weeks and already I feel like I’m settling in like we’ve always been there. In addition to Cara, myself, and Jesse, we hired our good friend and fellow new dad Matt Macri .  So while I have stopped doing walk in Thursdays, we still have at least one artist almost everyday who can handle walk ins, at least until they get booked up too! Another big change is that I am now taking thursday off to hang out with Luna and Cara is tattooing all day Thursdays. I feel so lucky that I get to spend so much time with my daughter and that I have such reliable friends working for me that I can give Luna all my attention and give her mom a much-needed break from baby duty, even it its only one day a week so far.

We had a great “grand opening” party, tons of friends showed up, Kevin Sousa provided the food and Full Pint Brewing donated beer and Cara and her good friend, local fine artist Thommy Conroy hung the crazy amount of art we moved over from the old shop.  I took a second out of the busy night to snap a couple of pictures which i stitched together to give you an idea of how much BIGGER the new place is compared to our Oakland locale..

I totally based the idea for the open floor plan and oak toolcarts that we tattoo off of my trips to get tattooed in New York, specifically on the Kings Ave. Bowery location. I really liked the open room idea, and it has already been conductive to a relaxed ability to exchange ideas and critiques as well as a more free flow of conversation between artists and customers. I’m a worrier by nature, and naturally moving across town into a building with a completely different format and with new people should have really set off my panic buttons, but this time I wasnt all that stressed out. I guess I knew that this was a step up for Cara and myself and I was confident that the new space would be a benefit to all of us in the Black Cat family.

I have been working on some really fun stuff and with a few more artists I have been able to focus more on the specific stuff I want to tattoo. It’s always tricky, because I don’t want to sound snobbish or picky, but at 42 years old I feel like its time for me to specialize in the kind of tattoos I can do a really good job on and let the ones that would be good but not spectacular go to people who would do a better job on them. I confess to feeling a little guilt because, if I’m being honest, I’m also a little burnt out on doing tattoos that are not in my area of enjoyment. I guess I have earned the right to pick and choose, others people certainly reassure me of this, but I still feel a little concern that by not taking any and all tattoos that I have somehow become a big-headed rock star. The mind is funny like that, as soon as you get what you want you either want something else or you feel guilty for getting it. Thats why Shunryu Suzuki called the untrained brain the “monkey mind”, jumping and running around this way and that, never stilled. One of the nice things about sitting for a few years is that I can see this monkey mind from a little distance, I still have the crazy running around thoughts, but these days I can watch them without having to pick them up and play with them, sometimes I start to go into that cycle and a little voice says , “ah, best not to go there, buddy” and I can back off.

Anyhow, here are a few recent things I’ve been working on.

A good friend and ray of sunshine in our lives has been talking about a back piece for some time. She has a special affinity for Ganesha but was torn between the elephant headed boy and a Medicine Buddha to honor her herbalist/holistic healer career. In the end we combined the two ideas doing a Ganesha but in the more Nepalese Buddhist style of art. Back-pieces are no fun for the customer 90% of the time, even folks with very heavy coverage and lots of years getting tattooed are surprised at how bad the pain can be. We ended up doing this outline in two sessions.

I finished this dragon on a long time customer and we blended the background a bit up into some tribal blackwork we did a few years ago. I think I am done doing tiny dragons on arms, this piece is a great size and allowed us to get a lot of detail and readability. I love doing traditional inspired tattoos like this nurse/gypsy, It might seem strange to do Japanese and traditional American t first glance, but in reality they are very similar in technique and graphic punch. They both have a long history of stories and meaning that a tattooer can draw on to add depth to a tattoo and if done correctly both will look good for the clients lifetime.

Some tattoos become popular and then fade never to come back, some are perennial favorites that have been around as long as tattooing and will still be getting done  generations hence. I have done owl tattoos for 16 years and they never seem to fade in popularity, like a lot of tattoos which have that kind of staying power, an owl tattoo has a visual power which affects everyone who sees it on a subconscious level, it goes beyond the simple image and into a symbol. When we see a heart we think of “love”, when we see a skull we think of “mortality, and when we see an owl we think of “wisdom“.

(Dis) illusion

It is a sad cliche that our heroes often, in time, are revealed to be all to human. Sometimes this is because they espouse something that they can’t live up to, or because they commit some action that seems to be counter to everything they stand for. Very often it is because our own expectation and ideal of them is unrealistic and after a time it dawns on is that this person we held up in our minds as a hero is simply, disappointingly, human.

Sometimes though, our heroes stop being so heroic in our eyes not because they failed, or because we weren’t looking at them realistically, sometimes they stop being our heroes because we become better than they are. It’s difficult to articulate something like this and not sound like you are giving yourself a compliment, but being honest with oneself includes not only finding our own faults, but also in seeing our own progress. If you only ever think “I suck” then you are as deluded and full of horse poop as someone who only thinks “I’m the best”.

Many years ago when I first became a tattooer I devoured any kind of information on tattooing that I could. There wasn’t so much media as these days and the few books out there (aside from Ed Hardys excellent “tattootime” books) were dated and generally full of mediocrity. So most of the best stuff came from tattoo magazines, and the best of those came from Europe since almost all the u.s. magazines were full of biker shit and shitty supplier ads.

I picked up an Italian mag called “tattoo planet” regularly. The art was awesome, featuring guys like Filip Leu, Theo Jak, Permenant Mark, and others who I idolized. One guy in particular whose interview and pictures inspired me to the point that I set my plan for my entire tattooing career on his example. This artist was an American like me but had eschewed the street shop and “low com denom” flash ( as in; mediocre art which appealed to the greatest number of uninformed tattoo public) that was my world at the time in favor of having a private studio off the street, doing large scale Asian inspired work, and generally avoiding all the trappings of cheesy tattoodom. Despite the fact that I was a pretty bad to average tattooer at the time something in the this guys approach resonated with me and right then, a mere 2 years into tattooing I decided that someday I would be doing that kind of work in that kind of environment.

Pretty lofty for a guy who couldn’t pull a straight line or draw better than a high schooler, but I knew that the goal was something for the future.

After a long time I got better at tattooing, and eventually did open my own shop off the street, doing mostly larger Asian stuff, with few of the trappings of cheesy tattoodom. In short, I actually did reach the goal I set in 1997, I never forgot that interview, and I still don’t know to this day if my life would look the way it does if I had read that piece. I was, and am, grateful to that tattooer for their inspiration, I would occasionally look for their work in books or online, but nothing really new seemed to show up.

Enter Instagram. I saw this persons comment on another tattooers thread a month or so ago and was really happy, at last I would get to see their newer work! Maybe I would write this person telling them how inspirational they had been to me. So I clicked on their name and was shocked. There was a few nice pieces but in general it was pretty average, and surprisingly, it was worse than the artists stuff I had seen in the 90′s! I kept following their work for a few weeks but eventually “un-followed” them, I use Instagram to be inspired by people who are killing it, people who I may never be as good as, but who inspire me to try anyway, and this persons work wasn’t anymore.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that this artist is “bad” or that I am better than they, I also still owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for showing me what was possible outside of the tiny fishbowl of tattooing I had lived in, but it was still a disappointment.

For little while anyway.

A strange thing happens when we have our illusions dissolved, even apparently beneficial ones like the inspirational illusion I had all those years ago. Assuming that we dont run right out and fill the void with another delusion (which is what we usually do) a space is opened up for the truth to sit where the illusion had been. I found myself suddenly inspired to draw a particular set of 1/2 sleeves that had been poking around in the back of my mind, I had a weird rush of new ideas fora big project we will be announcing soon, I suddenly felt at peace with my (slow but steady) progress in my own tattooing. In short, I like to think that letting that image go opened me up to new inspiration.

Illusions (and delusion) are a part of human nature, you can’t stop them for happening but we can learn to let them go. Sometimes we can do it quickly, like when we look at a menu at Arby’s and think ” that’s gonna taste good” and 10 minutes later feel like throwing up. Other times we have been indoctrinated with them from so early on that we don’t even realize its a delusion til something happens to shock us out of it (like realizing that getting a bunch of money and power still doesn’t stop us being miserable). But the end of an illusion is a wonderful opportunity, the humanizing of our heroes is a wonderful opportunity to be inspired by something greater and one person or ideal, it’s a chance to be inspired by the truth, by yourself, by all of us (which, coincidentally, are all the same thing anyway.)

Ink Master?

I don’t watch the reality television show “Ink Master”. I have tried to watch a few episodes but it’s just not my thing, I don’t hate it or care enough about it to get riled up about its existence. I don’t expect the world to change to suit my needs and if a television show is not to my liking I simply choose to turn it off. Lots of folks in the tattoo world get extremely angry when something relating to tattooing is presented in a way they find distasteful, and tattoo television shows usually generate a ton of vitriol. However the fact that these shows continue to be made means that someone is making money off them so I don’t expect them to disappear as long as that is the case. I don’t like stepping in dog shit but I wouldn’t go around demanding that all dogs have their assholes sewn shut.  My vote it to simply not watch tattoo television shows.

Imagine my surprise when a friend sent me a cell phone picture of a tattoo that was on a recent episode of Ink Master season 2. It was a picture of this tattoo:

Which I immediately recognized as a copy of some flash I painted last year that looked like this:

Heh.

Let me state right away that I was not mad about this at all. The design in question is flash, it is designed to be sold and reproduced. If I have any beef at all, it’s that the tattooer in question should have stuck to using the clouds I put on the original (his are terrible) and that one of the episode judges said it looked “like a man in a tiger suit humping a rock”. (although that is actually pretty fucking funny.) Yes, I watched the episode online once I found out about my flash making a “guest appearance”.

Frankly I think that if a tattooer can not draw his own tiger better than me then I’m all for him or her using flash for this purpose. At the end of the day the highest we can aim for as tattooers is giving the clients something  they can be proud to wear, I’m not sure if this tattoos counts as that, but I shudder to think of what this tattooer would have drawn on their own. So, to be clear, Im totally OK with my flash having been used, in a way its flattering to think that this guy figured my version of a tiger was better than anything he could come up with himself, but that does lead to a question. . .

The (ridiculous) premise of the show is that the people in the contest represent the best tattooers out there and that by the end of the contest one of them will be deemed the “Ink Master“. In other words, one of the contestants will come out having been crowned the “best tattooer in the world”. Of course this is silly on many levels including the fact that the worlds best tattooers don’t try out for this sort of side-show and the idea that an “Ink Master” is someone who does each and every style of tattooing with equal proficiency is, frankly, stupid. There are many talented tattooers who are good at a wide array of styles, but no one does every single kind of tattoo with equal skill, the very best in fact do the opposite by focusing on one or two particular areas of tattooing.

But even granting this silly notion that the winner of this show will be the “Ink Master” should said master of inking not be able to draw his or her own tattoo? Judging by the tattoo of my flash I very much doubt that the artist in question is an “ink master” and the fact that they didn’t bother to draw their own work even knowing it will be seen by millions of television viewers tells me that they probably should still be an apprentice rather than a prospective “master”.

Things I think I think, unpopular edition

1. lets talk about aliens. More specifically lets talk about all the “science” networks non-stop marathon of shows about UFOs and ancient aliens. Put aside, for a second, the ridiculousness of putting these programs on a “science” channel and lets just look at some basic facts.

a) the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which so far has shown no signs of planets orbiting it, but lets just be generous and say that an advanced alien civilization lives in orbit around Proxima. This planet would be 4.2 light years away from us (about 93 Million miles!) Since we know, thanks to Albert Einstein, that you cannot travel as fast (or even nearly as fast) as light , lets give a hypothetical alien craft the speed of the Voyager probe (38,200 miles per hour!) and if they left tomorrow how long would it take them to reach the Earth?

2434 years. two thousand and thirty four years!

Even if we double their speed to 76,400 miles per hour (in deference to their hypothetical advanced technology)  it would still take an alien craft traveling from the very nearest star to earth over one thousand years to reach us. Do we really believe that an alien race would expend the manpower (not to mention the generations of astronauts) to come to our little dinky planet? Really, a THOUSAND years to look at our monkey faces?

b) If they decided to help the Egyptians build the pyramids (more on this later) then they would have had to have left Proxima when the Egyptian empire consisted of some few primitive traveling tribes. Which leads to some questions, like why the fuck would they bother coming here? How did they know our planet existed since they would have had to find it without radio waves which we have only been emitting for 100 or so years? We can barely identify gaseous giant planets which are millions of times the size of our Earth (and only in the last couple years) so our planet would be almost impossible to find visually.

c) Before we talk about the “ancient aliens” let me ask you this, who built the Coliseum ? the Romans, right? who built the Parthenon? the Greeks right?So, who built the pyramids? Aliens? Why is that? Why?  Because we live in a culture that is so suffused with racism that we sometimes don’t even realize how racist we are! We have no problem believing that “white” races built all sorts of amazing things like castles, cathedrals, and discovered electricity but apparently all the “brown” races required alien assistance to do the same thing!

The Mayans? Brown people who needed alien help. The Egyptians? Brown people who needed alien help. The Macedonians? white folks who could scale mountains with fucking elephants unaided by aliens. No one thinks Ben Franklin had alien help, but lots of otherwise smart people believe that ancient people of color couldn’t invent anything without outside help.

d)The fact is that ancient alien belief is racist and based on nothing more than our inability to imagine that anyone who came before us had the brainpower to invent and innovate. The fucked up thing is that we know how all these ancient people built their great works using manpower, math, and planning, its all there in the archeological record, no aliens required. It is also the rather egocentric belief that we are so fascinating that an alien race would sacrifice the tremendous amounts of resources to come to Earth. I do believe that in a universe as vast as ours that there are other planets with life and some with life as advanced or more than us, I just can’t see any evidence or logic for how or why they would come here.

e) Why do I care? Because one of the most destructive things is delusion, in this case the delusion robs certain people of their true history and accomplishments, it reinforces the self-centered idea that we are the most important thing in the universe, and it distracts otherwise great minds with looking for a fiction when they could be curing cancer or looking for real phenomena that could help the very real and present problems we are actually dealing with on this tiny planet. Sorry, true believers, I don’t accept that it’s just a harmless diversion.

2. The instagram app has shown me once again that the world of tattooing is more amazing than ever! Time and again a name I have never heard of is putting out work so amazing and so beautiful and every time I open the app my mind is blown. There are many things that I and others would prefer were different about the world of tattooing these days, but if the main measure is the overall quality of work then I would have to declare right now the glory days of tattooing without question.

3. Do you know what this is?

That is an ultrasound picture of Cara and my little baby at about 18 weeks! You can’t tell much by an ultrasound of the personality or actual appearance, but you can know, with startling clarity, that there is a wee human inside my wife’s body and that 50% of the little boogers genes are from me! He or she (we don’t know and wont find out til he/she is born) was going bananas inside there, kung fu kicks, spinning, back-flips and its teeny tiny heart banging away like a demon. This baby looks like its going to be cah-ray-zee active!

Cara and I also took a couples prenatal yoga class, this was my first yoga class of any sort and it definitely reminded me of zazen in some ways, the further we get into this pregnancy the more grateful I am for the stability and sanity that Zazen has brought into, I can’t imagine being ready to be a dad without having my own shit at least a little bit together. I can’t pretend to know that I’m “ready’ to be a parent but i can say without hesitation that I’m at my very best mentally and spiritually these days and that’s got to help at least a little I hope!

Defying (the) Convention

THEY are trying to destroy my love of tattoo conventions. They fill bigger and bigger halls with more like them. The crowds that are attracted to the strange ghoul of tattoo television stardom are a sad lot. Where conventions of the past focused on a few really talented artists who were known only to a small portion of folks who were genuinely interested in tattoos, these days the draw is far less talented tattooers who have had the (mis?)fortune to be “reality television stars“. The results at this weekends Baltimore tattoo convention were too plain to ignore. Moved into a cavernous and soul sucking vault from the previous years cozy hotel ballroom, the enormous number of booths were filled with a depressingly mediocre and untalented pile of shops and artists pumping out $30 and $40 dollar tattoos hoping to siphon some semblance of a living from the trashy rubs who equate being on television with some form of magic. It was silly, it was sad, it was filled with people whose only love of tattooing is based on the flawed idea that if you are on the glowing light of a television that you, somehow, must be a somebody.

Fortunately for tattooing the aforementioned core group of tattoo aficionados are still there, still loyal to quality work and still happy to go to a place where their chosen artists are assembled into one place. They gamely walk the gauntlet of hook hangers, bad “burlesque” shows, the horrible tattooers with 2 pictures of (bad)  tattoos in their portfolio and 50 of them posing with guns in front of a beemer, and the brain dead rubes hoping to get  a picture with some half talented tv tattooer, with an eye for the quality work that  still draws them to these shit shows by the fond memories of past years conventions before the organizers decided that the tattooers were to be second to the almighty dollar. I have done this show for years and the progression from a room full of talented artists sharing stories and pushing each other to newer and better heights into a grim vault of rum dumb barely skilled hacks and sideshow bullshit is nearly complete. Personally Im done doing this (and most) conventions, there are good ones out there still and if I ever wanted to do another one I  will be focusing on those rather than wasting my time and money supporting people for whom tattooing is just a paycheck.

Did I say that I wasted my time? Well, that is not exactly true since we got to hang out with a ton of our friends and to enjoy Baltimore itself, which is always really fun! Cara and I also did some really fun tattoos on great people who made it a pleasure to deal with the ocean of goofballs filling the cavernous Baltimore convention center. Before we got to the “charm city” Cara and I stayed with and worked at the fine folks of Black Thorn Gallery in Mechanicsburg Pa. Not only are they incredibly talented, but Ryan, Landon, Tim, and Tiffany are the kind of tattooers Cara and I like to describe as “our people”. All the talent in the world is wasted if you are a jerk and the Black Thorn crew are super good people as well as damn fine tattooers. One of their shop regulars Cody let me tattoo an umbrella Yokai on the side of his knee.

On day one my Sunday appointment asked if I wasnt doing anything would I mind working on his piece instead of waiting. Since neck tattoos are always the scariest for me at conventions I was thrilled to get this one going while I was still fresh and we turned out this skull and roses on Joel’s neck.

I did this lil cake on our friend’s elbow/forearm area in honor of her mom (and on mothers day no less!) I can’t say that I have tattooed many bunt cakes, but this one was super fun!

BUNDT!

A customer I tattooed in 2009 at the convention stopped by and showed me the healed chrysanthemum on her forearm, I was happy to see that it was still solid and that she was ready to turn it into a full sleeve!

We did a couple little ones on some very cool folks and I tattooed one repeat customer who apparently has an orgasm every time I tattoo her (I cannot guarantee these results for every customer) and who brought her own towel in order to “keep your chair from getting all wet”. Keep in mind that this tattoo was just on her shoulder not in any “erogenous” zones.i feel like I should have added an extra $50 for the happy ending. . . . the things we do for our art!

On the last day I ended the whole thing by tattooing Heather’s hand! Not only is she engaged to a Pittsburgh tattooer, and part of the tattoo was a coverup,  but she has two really awesome sleeves which puts the pressure on high especially tattooing a hand at a convention where the light isn’t quite what you are used to and the distraction factor is pretty substantial. But I did my best and both of us  were happy with the result.

Other highlights included getting a grip of maternity clothes and baby furniture from the amazing Jen Reid, eating with our good buddies til were ready to blow up 3 days in a row. Being in the same booth as Ryan and Landon, being able to spend time with their awesome wives and kids, being next to Cyn and the whole Cirque du Rouge crew and being inspired by folks like Timmy Tats, Krooked Ken, Tahiti Gil, Jakoh, and dozens more who are true tattooers and keep the flame alive for Cara and I to be inspired by. We wont be working this show anymore, but we will definitely be using it as an excuse to hang out in Baltimore with some super cool and dedicated tattooers and friends.

The Treehouse

Believe it or not this started as a reaction to one of the dumbest controversies I have ever witnessed. Recently the folks who make the Instagram app for Apples Iphone made a version available for users of the android phone operating system. TONS of tattooers use instagram so I was considering buying an Iphone when my contract made it available this fall. Now I don’t need to spend money on a new phone since I can use the app as well, but when I got on there I saw a flood of people, people whose only claim to exclusivity is the cell phone they bought, decrying the influx of android users. They were fucking angry that people who used phones from a different company could now use the same application that had been their own private club. This is indescribably stupid, but it did make me think of this whole notion of secret clubs and a belief that there are those better than others.

If you have been around me for any length of time you will have had the misfortune to hear me rant about exclusion. I’m not just talking about the really obvious shit like groups who ban gays (like the boy scouts) or women (like the entire catholic church structure), but the smaller, pettier kinds. In fact, it is these that drive me even more bonkers than the ancient and archaic ones whose elitism and exclusivity are merely the dried dangling dingle-berries of their history. It makes a kind of moronic sense that the Klan would not admit black people or that the fundamentalist religions of the world would exclude people who were born gay, these kinds of groups have been stupid and backward since their inception. I get it, I don’t approve of it, but I get it. If you have been dumb for 400 years the chances are that you aren’t going to be smart any time real soon.

I didn’t used to be this way, in fact I was pretty into being elite, I enjoyed feeling like I was smarter, cooler, or just plain better than other people. When I was a punk I took great pride that me and my few friends were the ones who were too smart to listen to Journey and Hall and Oates, but eventually I begin to feel that I and my even smaller group of friends were even better than the other punks. WE didn’t drink or do drugs, WE cared about how fucked our government was, WE were not the loutish morons who acted like idiot frat boys only with mohawks and spiky jackets. Eventually I began to listen to really weirdo culty sounding doom folk and pseudo gothic creepfests and decided that even my straight edge friends were not cool enough for me. I became the sole member of a very select and exclusive club of one.

I always wanted to be in the group, I wasted no time in shitting on those who weren’t, everyone around me did the same things with their own versions. When I became a tattooer the trend magnified into a truly frankenstein-esque monster! Here, I was now part of a trade that had secret knowledge, arcane masters that only those “in the know” were even aware of. We had, almost automatically, a disdain for the customer who “didn’t get it” and demanded our wonderful genius be put to use tattooing tweety birds and old English. Were were the pirates, everyone else was either a victim or a rival pirate and either way we were the best and “they” (i.e. everyone else) were the worst. Heaven help the poor kid who wandered into our shop asking about being a tattooer! We told them that our talent was innate, that we were “born tattooers” and that if they were not already touched with the golden light like us then they would be nothing, or even worse than nothing, that they would be “scratchers“. (imagine a small, rat like creature clutching a cheaply made tattoo machine in the dingy dirty kitchen of his trailer spewing hepatitis and bad ICP tattoos onto its group of equally despicable cronys). Never mind the fact that I was, at best, a mediocre tattooer and that all this shunning and decrying was to cover my own secret fear that someday, someone, would call me out for the phony I was. The fact is that secret clubs work because most of the members don’t really believe that they are worthy and that only if they hate on enough of everybody else will they be able to keep the spotlight away from their own failure.

Embarrassingly, I even felt like I had joined a cool kids club when I became a Buddhist, but when you begin to actually do Buddhism (as opposed to talking or reading about doing it) a funny thing happens. You see, we all have that voice we use to talk to ourselves. When were making a tough decision or debating two choices, when we doubt our path or actions  it is the voice that use to compare, to literally have an internal dialogue. It’s the voice that calls us stupid when we lock the keys in the car or pats us on the back when we get a wicked zinger dig at someone we’re arguing with. Well if you sit zazen regularly a funny thing happens. That voice gets quieter, it gets replaced by something far more sure and something that doesn’t have to convince you its right, you know in your bones that it is the truth. When that happens the bullshit starts to fall off pretty quick.

Years ago I read a Koan that baffled me for a long time in the beginning. In it there is a monk who would wake up every day and talk to himself. He would say

“Master!?”

“Yes Master?”

“Dont be fooled by anybody!”

“yes master!”

“Dont be fooled by yourself!”

“Yes master!”

I thought it was just a funny little story of guy trying to stay on his guard against delusion or something. But the longer I practiced the more I began to see that we do talk to ourselves as a separate person, and that most often the person deluding us is US! Once I began to stop and see the world as it really was instead of how it could/should/used to be  those two voices turned into one and it was not patient with delusion and bullshit. I dropped a lot of my self flogging/congratulation, I stopped arguing over stupid shit (mostly) and most of all I began to feel that I was the same as everyone else.

Everyone.

Even people I despised, people I knew nothing about, everything. It made sense why a total stranger would risk his or her life to save someone even if it put their own lives at risk, it made sense why vegetarians couldn’t eat meat because they identified with the animal, I got why when someone cut down a tree for no good reason it made me mad. I finally began to understand that exclusion wasn’t just mean or prejudiced, it was delusion. It came from the myth that we were different and caused harm not only to those left out of the “club”, it deeply wounded those who were the “in” crowd as well! The problem is that this is something felt at a level that language can’t express, so saying “I felt like we were all one” doesn’t actually exclude the reality that were are separate bodies with separate t-shirts. But I knew at that gut level that the part of me that wanted to be the cool kid, who wanted to set aside a little piece of the world and call it minewas fading fast, I felt like I had a little tiny taste of reality and there was no room in it for fake partitions and snobbery. I began to feel like all the problems we have in this world are a result of believing in and trying to reinforce the lie that you or I could really separate ourselves from the whole universe like that. It would be like a leaf deciding it didn’t need the tree and jumping off to form a secret club of independent leaves. (when that happens not only does the leaf wither, but the tree suffers too!)

New work Q1 2012

For no real reason I have not been updating the shops website as often as usual, I think this is mainly due to the (not very) laborious task of pulling things off my camera, cropping and grouping pieces and then resizing them, putting them on the website and all that. its not really all that hard, but when I get home from work I often turn off the tattoo part of my brain altogether and ignore things like all that stuff above.

I finally did get off my ass the other day and put a bunch of stuff together. there is more on the website but here is a little of what I’ve been putting out lately.

 

First up is a 1/2 leg sleeve (sock?) in the bottom left of the picture you can see the very faded tattoo we are covering up under a leaf. She had the old piece lasered and so calling it a cover-up is almost cheating. The customer originally was starting with a much smaller mnore abstract type tattoo but like a lot of folks, the more she explored what was possible and didn’t limit her ideas to a “cover up” she found her idea expanding into this lil guy. We will be adding color  but I like the look of it in progress so i thought Id throw it up as it is now and then post the finished piece when that happens. As a funny side note, this clients 70 year old father is apparently a big Japanophile and trains bonsai and the like down in florida, when he saw her leg sleeve developing it inspired him to go get his own arm sleeved in a japanese style!

this piece actually started off as a painting and when our good buddy jason saw it he decided to get it as a tattoo. However, like many of us, he is mostly covered with tattoos already so the only spots he has left are less than “ideal” places. In this case the only availible area left was a patch on the back of his thigh! He cant see it without looking  at a picture of it and to show it off he is going to have to invest in some daisy dukes.

So the idea of a dragon koi is thagt moment when a koi fish jumps that last waterfall over the rainbow gate and transforms from a lowly carp to a noble dragon. This client wanted one that wasnt as gnarly and scary as they usally look so we made it look a little more friendly and finished it in two sessions.

10 bits of Advice for beginning tattooers

I look back at my tattooing career and a couple of things are pretty clear. One is that I sucked for a really long time at tattooing and didn’t realize it, and two, that I could have had about 5000% less stress if I had sought out the advice and knowledge of people who had been tattooing for a lot longer than me. Instead,  I spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy worrying about shit that was, in hindsight,  the exact wrong things to be spending that energy on. I hate to see people making the same mistakes that I did and if my experience can help one person not bang their head against the same walls I did then I can feel that at least my learning the hard way was not completely in vain.

So, if you have already been tattooing for 10+ years what I’m about to write really wont come as much of a surprise to you,but these are the things that I wish someone would have shared with me in my first 5 years of tattooing, it would have saved me a lot of headaches!

1. Get critiqued!

Of all the things that we do to improve the most important might be to get critiqued on your tattoos. It hurts to hear that you are failing at certain aspects, but the amazing thing is that until you hear it you almost never see it! If you can take a critique without getting butthurt then your work will begin to improve immediately. I had been bumbling along for a couple of years turning out mediocre crap when I stumbled across an online tattooers forum where they were exchanging critiques, I blithely put a couple of my tattoos that I thought were pretty good and proceeded to get my balls so thoroughly busted that I seriously considered quitting tattooing (as several critiquers had suggested) It really hurt to hear how bad I was and yet that very hurt opened my eyes to several bad habits I had and were not even aware of. It also revealed that not only did I not do good tattoos, but that I didn’t even really know what a good tattoo looked like! The critique was the first step to opening my eyes, and as he years have gone on I still ask for critiques all the time, in person or online I find that knowing a fellow tattooer will be looking at my work keeps me from taking lazy shortcuts with my tattoos since I know a tattooer will spot them!

When getting critiqued sit down, open your ears, and shut the fuck up! A critique is a chance to see your work with a new pair of eyes not a place for you to defend your work! The tattoo you apply to a client will have to stand or fall on its own merit without you there to explain it for the rest of the client’s life, so if it needs to be defended or explained then you have failed to do it correctly. A fellow tattooer who takes the time and effort to give you a critique is giving you a gift, you should receive it that way, with humility and grace. If your fragile ego can’t take hearing someones opinion about your tattoo then you might be in the wrong line of work.

2. The secret to tattooing is repetition.

I have heard the old saying “art is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” hundreds of times before I finally actually understood it. The fact is that very few of us are such prodigies that we can draw everything a tattooer needs to on the first try.  I finally began to understand that the way to improve me work was repetition (practice). In order for our creative ideas to flow effortlessly from our minds to our hands we must have trained those muscles to the point where they can do what we ask of them without having to think about it! In martial arts the training is repetitive and ritualistic, musicians play scales and practice chords over and over, in both cases the reason is not so that they can be really good at practicing martial arts or playing chords, it is so that when the time comes to fight (or play) that the person will do so automatically without having to consciously decide what to do. If a jazz musician had to think about his next not he would never be able to play the improvisational music that he or she does, it is the result of muscle memory that lets them play so effortlessly.

The same holds true for tattooing, we must perform the same action over and over until our muscles respond to our imagination without having to go through the brain to do it! Years ago I wanted to learn to draw Japanese finger waves, every time I would try the image I saw in my head as beautiful graceful arching waves came out looking like shitty goo and no amount of trying seemed to help! I looked for shortcuts, asked other tattooers for “formulas” and tricks, I tried to figure out the “secret” of masterful Japanese tattooers like Filip Leu and Horiyoshi 3 all to no avail. Eventually I gave up and, like I had so many times before resigned myself to the fact that I just didn’t have the talent to do these fuckin’ waves like my heroes did. Instead, I began doodling waves every chance I got. little ones, big ones, when I was on the phone or eating lunch I would jot down a few sketchy finger-waves and an interesting thing began to happen. My waves began to  get better! Not immediately, and not in big leaps, but I began to notice that slowly I was beginning to make the waves on paper look like the ones in my head. I probably drew several hundred waves that year and these days I can freehand them onto the clients skin without thinking about it. All because of Practice, boring old tiresome practice.

It may seem like common sense to you, dear reader, that practice makes perfect, but I really believed that if I tried to draw something and it came out badly the first time that I was simply not able to do it. Almost all of us artists act like we were born with the abilities we have now, but it is simply not true, we all got to wherever we are by repetition. And if you want to really excel at something the best way is to draw it over and over again til you are sick to death of that image, until you can see it in your sleep. Fortunately for us tattooers the act of drawing uses the same muscle-memory as the act of tattooing so that each minute spent drawing is almost the same as a minute spent tattooing.

3. There are trends in tattooing, and you will follow them.

There are years that owls are popular and there are years that fairies are popular and no matter how cool and unique you are, you will be doing these trends. You could be the most exclusive, visionary, custom tattooer in the history of tattooing and you will find yourself wanting to do a lighthouse tattoo because you saw 15 of them on people’s arms around town. The trick is not to try to force a client out of their idea, it is to bring your own signature into that image. Doing the 300th switch blade tattoo is only dumb if you are looking at the last guys version of it and doing the same thing instead of drawing your own. Which brings us to #4

4. Use reference.

When I say reference I’m not talking about tattoo magazines, instagram, or your buddies arm either. Other tattooers art can be a reference, but really should only be used to see how he or she solved a particular technical problem (like “how did they do the shading on that wing so it didn’t blend into the background?”) Far too often we see a tattoo that is a copy of another tattoo (which is a copy of a further tattoo etc.) The result of this is the same as taking an original painting and then photocopying it, then copying the copy, etc. After just a couple of generations the spark, the detail, and the structure of the original are lost and you are left with a play-dohy looking half assed version with little to no of the bits that made the original so appealing.

If you are going to draw a rose then look at pictures (or even a real one) of an actual flower not a tattoo of one. When you look at real reference, our brain picks out the subtle details it likes and these end up in your drawing making it unique and distinctive in a sea of copycat artwork. How many times do we have to see the same koi fish that has anime eyes, goofy kissy-lips, a dorsal fin that looks like a mowhawk plus an overall resemblance to a flaccid dick!? Just look at a real goddamn koi for 30 seconds and you will notice that most tattoos are missing half the fins, have tiny tails and giant hydrocephaly heads! And, no it is not just your “artistic interpretation”, it is laziness. There is an obvious difference when someone knows the correct way to draw an object and deliberately chooses to tweak it versus some goofball just half assing it because he or she is too lazy to go to a real reference point before beginning.  Even the most conceptual artists in the world , the Dalis and Picassos, had learned the basics of anatomy and rendering before they went off on their own trips, and without that fundamental grounding their work would not have looked “right” even at their most expressively unconventional. If you want to be an artistic innovator then first learn the fundamentals, and you do that with reference.  Do just 5 minutes of reference and your drawings will be improved dramatically almost instantly. With the internet at your fingertips you really have no excuse for not pulling up a picture of a real object before you draw it (even if you are not drawing it realistically!)

5. Your style will come on its own.

I used to really worry that my work didn’t look unique enough, or that it just looked like “everybody else “. Like most of us in the western world I wanted to start making masterpieces and monuments to myself on day one. The fact is that I didn’t even have a basic handle on the technical aspects of tattooing and here I was wanting to be someone who people would recognize from my “style”.  Like a person who wants to sound like they are from Britain affecting a fake accent, there is something clearly phony which always comes through when you are trying too hard to be unique. It was only when I began to study Japanese tattooing that I understood that style is something that develops rather than being created. In the ShuHaRi method is a concept which also shows up in martial arts,  Zen training and now, tattoos as well. It’s deceptively simple, first you learn the tradition the way you are taught (SHU or “Obey”), Second you perfect that method until it becomes your second nature (or to put it in modern terms, until it is in your “muscle memory”) when you can then begin to do your own version and this is “HA” (or “break”) and finally you go beyond both your tradition and your own style into something transcendent of what came before (“RI” or “leaving”) . Put into tattoo terms I realized that I was trying to transcend before I had even learned the traditions, trying to run before I even knew how to walk. As you practice your artwork your effort should be in perfecting your drawings first, your own personal “style” will be there naturally, but only when you quit trying to have it! Otherwise it is like someone telling you to “act naturally”, as soon as you try, you end up being awkward and stilted. Even worse is copying another, better, tattooers signature moves. We are all influenced by the best in this art form, but it is painfully obvious when someone is trying to consciously emulate one of the greats.

Style is something that comes when your mind and hand work in unison effortlessly and the natural variations your unique mind comes up with can show up in your work, it takes time, but by working on the fundamentals it does come on its own.

6. Progress seems to be connected to humility.

In short, the point where a tattooer begins to get cocky, to feel that he or she knows what is the “right” kind of tattooing or when they decide that the customers are impediments to their creative genius is the point where they seem to stop growing. I’ve seen young tattooers who were getting really good very quickly suddenly plateau and stop improving and it was always that moment when they decided they were king shit on the turdpile. It’s sad to see because any tattooer with a pair of eyes can recognize that the very best tattooers in the world are also some of the humblest, and the rest of the guys who are “almost there” are the arrogant dicks. Humbleness and hard work are worth more than all the talent in the world in tattooing.

7. Dont chase money

Very few of us had any sort of success immediately. I had about 10 years of barely making ends meet and every winter was a terrifying balancing act of living on one or two tattoos a week and trying to make up the difference with the meager savings I had from summers (relatively) busier times. However if you can build a reputation as a good artist without being a dick and without being hard to find then eventually you will find yourself with a clientage who love your work and support you. Its like starting off at the bottom of the ladder in the normal working world and eventually making your way to being a CEO, it doesn’t happen quickly, but if you don’t sabotage yourself it does happen. One thing that helps is to stick around the same area for a while, traveling is fun and builds experience that is invaluable, but it makes it hard to build a name for yourself with the folks in your area who will come to see you as “their” artist.

8. “Keep your head down, do your best, don’t worry what the other guy is doing.”

I read those words in the excellent Sailor Jerry letters book published by Hardy Marks. Like many tattooers I spent a lot of time and energy worrying about, being mad at, and bitching about what other people were doing. I complained that tattooing was being ruined, that this or that guy was making “us” look bad, that this or that new trend was not “real” tattooing. In short I was a bitchy tattooer like 80% of tattooer still are. Every second I spent writing angry cry-baby shit online or sitting around belly-aching is time and energy I should have been putting into my goddamn art! I am convinced that I would be a year ahead of where I am today if I had spent all that effort on what really matters, namely,  getting better at tattooing. The fact is that tattooing will never look like we think it “ought” to, if you really want tattooing to be a certain way the ONLY thing you can actually Do about it (and bitching is not doing anything about it) is to do your very best to make your little corner of tattooing “right”. Believe it or not, you putting effort into your own tattooing changes the whole thing more than a years worth of gripe sessions and online rants can.

9. That “AHA!” moment will happen to you.

One year I was at a convention and was crying to a fellow tattooer (who had much more experience) that I felt like I still didn’t get “it”. I still felt technically inadequate, I didn’t really understand tattoo machines, and I couldn’t really draw the way I saw in my mind and I had been doing tattoos for a whole 5 years at that point! He just smirked and said “fuck man, none of us knew what we were doing at 5 years!” and it hit me! Here I had been thinking 5 years was a long time to be tattooing and to this guy that was just getting started! From that day on I relaxed a little bit and began to realize that tattooing was going to be a looooong road, the rest of my life! There were other Ah ha! moments as well, like the day I realized I was no longer afraid of any tattoo on any part of the body, the day I realized that drawing a sleeve or back piece was no more intimidating than drawing a small piece, the day I realized I rarely fiddled with my machines looking for that “perfect” tuning anymore, and the day I told a customer I wouldn’t do their tattoo and they thanked me for being honest.

There will come a time when you are confident in your knowledge and abilities. It will be the result of years of hard work, tiny bits of knowledge piling up, and of all the lessons that setbacks and mistakes have taught you. The coolest part is that if you keep your head out of your ass, that upward path never needs to stop.

10. Have fun

tattooing is fun, hard work, but still fun. Take a moment now and then to stop, smell the green-soap and take it all in. The years begin to fly by as we get older and those shitty, stressful, early years begin to look  pretty sweet in hindsight.

Some things

Sometimes what looks like a bad day can turn into a good one in the blink of an eye. On the first day we were back at work in 2012 I had a full day of appointments cancel with less than 12 hours notice. It was kind of a bummer because I have many customers waiting for an appointment and when someone is a no-show with so little notice its hard to get one of those people in. It’s not really so unfair to me, but it is very unfair to the people who have been waiting to get in and can’t just take off work or rearrange their live to come in on such short notice.

Anyway through the magic of Facebook we put the word out that I had some time open and two great regulars were able to step in on short notice. Not only did I get a couple loyal regulars in, but I was really stoked on both tattoos I did!

First up was N. One of those clients who I just knew from the first tattoo was going to become heavily tattooed! Some people just get that sparkle in their eyes the minute they look in the mirror at their first lil tattoo and you know that they have fallen in love with tattoos. He is also one of those customers you can really have a conversation while you are tattooing, one of the great side benefits of being a tattooer is having one on one time with people from all walks of life and philosophies. So we started a squid about a year ago and due to his job was only able to get an occasional session here and there on it til yesterday when we finished this bad boy. . .

As we were working on this another long time shop buddy called and asked if I would have time to do a portrait of their dog. Now i do a lot of kinds of tattoo but portraits (and portraits of dogs especially) I don’t do, not because I don’t want to, but because it’s just not my thing and I can’t do an amazing version of it the way some other tattooers in Pittsburgh could. In this case though he insisted I could do it more “traditional-ish” and since he is a shop buddy I told him to come down and let me look at what he wanted. As soon as i saw the picture of this adorable little guy I was in! T’s dog is part corgi and part dachshund and if that isn’t a formula for the cutest dog in the world then his little smile surely makes him a contender for the prize! I wanted to get his lil tweaked paw (don’t worry, he apparently runs on it just fine) and smiley demeanor so I kept the background very simple and greywashy and put all the blacks and contrast into the pup itself. I was stoked to see it done!

So a day that started off looking like a wash-out turned into one of the more fun days I’ve had lately, yet again I’m grateful and conscious of how lucky I am!