I don't feel like it's slowly passing or things are passing me by necessarily because I'm
too locked in my world.
I feel like it gives me a strange sense of time in general.
I don't really know how old I am or anything usually.
Forget.
What else would I do?
I mean, it's all everything I like in one thing, whatever.
There's aspects of it that are just work work.
A lot of old dudes don't understand drawing everything because that's less of a job.
They're more used to like just a workhorse mentality, you pick this stuff and you get
really good at efficiently applying it and that keeps you doing a good job because you
stay right in that zone and that's what people want.
Thinking about it that way and knowing about it is great to feel like designing it or to
help like relate it to people but people don't really need to know about it.
They're drawn to it anyway.
That's why Good Flash was so good.
People just saw it and liked it and wanted it.
It's part of that cycle where things get so out of hand and so far away from like what
tattoos look like and where they came from that it kind of falls apart and then everybody
starts to look back.
This last little while has been like the first post-modern era where you're actually trying
to quantify the value of tattooing itself.
And there's the romantic ideal who doesn't want like a girl on their forearm, especially
when you look back through like old black and white photos like that and has everything
you want culturally.
The setting is great, there's crazy texture to it, the people are interesting and interesting
looking, it's hyper-sexualized and like sexuality and tattooing is there, you know, you can't
stop it.
Things like this are really good stuff.
Okay, good.
The one we did on you is DC Paul's back piece.
He learned to tattoo from Huck Spalding and Paul Rogers.
They did the back piece on him.
The design I'm using is a rubbing of the actual plastic acetate that they would have used
on his back.
Like same scale, same everything, obviously with like my own little takes on it.
So this would be DC Paul, the man himself, Dave Paul.
But this would have been exactly to scale for his back, which is about your size and
he's probably about your age.
The oldest one I've seen was a George Burchett back piece.
He was really in contact with Japanese tattooers who were kind of fleeing post-industrial Japan
to go to Europe.
So this guy, Horayuno, had a shop with George Burchett in London.
So I think he got a lot of his sensitivity for the imagery and how to think about it
from Japanese tattooers.
It's very self-contained.
It has its own context and all this stuff going on, which is pretty rare for like a European
or American design that's more of a Japanese thing.
I mean now you'll see a lot of takes on it.
There's kind of two main ones, this one and then one that Percy Waters tattooed in the
20s or 30s.
But I mean those two things were recycled all over the place and so complex compared to
what everyone was tattooing at the time that of course the design was loaned out to anybody
that could use it, you know.
Well everything was a mystery before and it's been far enough and long enough away from
like people with significant ties to like the real roots of tattooing.
No one really has that anymore and they want it.
Even the ones now are influenced by it and they might not even know why, but you can't
figure it out now.
