I
turned down my first apprenticeship offer when I was 19.
I always wanted to be covered with tattoos, but I didn't want to use tattoos for a living
because I thought tattoos were all like little old school sailor designs.
When I went to high school, it was like a school of 5,000 and there were 30 punk rockers
out of the 5,000 kids.
Back then, everybody that was in the scene, you all knew each other.
You all hung out together.
There weren't that many of you.
And so whenever you wanted to do a project, it's like, you know, one of the 30 people
wanted to do a project and everybody else knows about it.
And I was the guy who could draw.
I painted everyone's leather jackets, I was doing young covers for band, I did political
cartoons, I was doing fencing artwork.
I got really lucky when a friend of my brother who was a painter and a tattoo artist saw
my paintings and he said, I should tattoo, he's like, that guy should tattoo and I'll
help him get started.
When he brought it up to me, I saw it in his new light so I was like, I can do big complex
detail stuff tattooing and I'd love to take you up on the offer so he'll help me out.
There's a lot of design flow with the body that you have to go with.
You can't just slap something that looks even paper on the skin and go, oh, that's
fine.
It needs to flow correctly with the body.
The placement of the tattoo design needs to flow with the muscles on the body.
A good tattoo should be across the street and more or less make out what's going on
with that tattoo.
I used to go through this thing where I wanted everything to be as detailed as humanly possible.
As time goes by, I learned to incorporate flow and emotion and power into detail and
kind of like with anything, if you put it in the right places, it does a lot more than
if you put it everywhere.
The customer in tattooing is not always right.
This isn't Burger King, this isn't You Get It Your Way and you shouldn't be an asshole
but at the same time, you have to save them from the self because they'll want stuff that
technically does not make for a good tattoo.
The guy coming on the shop I worked at in New York and he's like, I want you to hold
back for me.
I was like, oh, that's cool.
What do you want?
He's like, I want him, she's coming back to earth with all the angels that have it.
I was like, what out of my portfolio told you that I should do that?
