Toucan!

The Toucan was a real cool piece to do but difficult to not make it look like a Guinness tattoo.

Burberry DJ Zombie

A few years back I had the idea to infill tribal design tattoos with Burberry. It seems the idea has caught on but with a twist. This is the start of a Burberry clad zombie sleeve on Gareth. Tricky stuff to do but proper fun. I’ll post more as we progress.

Vanitas!

Vanitas is a style of painting from the Netherlands circa 1500. It depicted the transience of life and how everything is born to die.
Vanitas has become a style that I am very interested in as most of the images used by this Dutch collective of painters can be found in modern tattooing. The piece above is my interpretation of the style as a morbid black and grey tattoo

Everybody’s on Top of the Pops!!!

It seems to me that more and more tattooers are losing faith in our craft. Not the craft of tattooing itself but the influx of new people getting in to it. Mostly, all for the wrong reasons. Tourist some might say. Turning what I have called before ‘The last great rebel art form’ into a media circus. Like most forms of art, music etc the cool lies within the underground and as soon as this surfaces into mainstream culture it is then set on a path to its demise. It seems to me that whenever the light shines brightly on anything it will begin to decay before your eyes.

With this concept in mind I would like to address a subject that has been grinding my gears for some time now. It is the advent of fan boy pages on social networking sites like Facebook etc. Currently, there are at least three of these pages that I know of and there are probably more that I haven’t seen yet. To name a couple we have The UK Top Tattooists page and another called The Best of British. They are set up by fans of our craft for whatever intention, good or bad but really have no basis in reality at all. One person’s opinion of a very vast wealth of talent doesn’t to me have any bearing on what is good and bad. For sure, there are some undeniably great tattooers on these pages but there are also ten fold who are left out simply because the page organiser hasn’t come across them or has chosen to leave them out for some reason or other. Also a publication by the name of Skin Deep ran a Top 50 Uk tattooers supplement a while back but was careful to leave out certain individuals who are known supporters of other tattoo publications.

This entire farce, to me reminds me of how little relevance there is in any kind of chart or list associated with any art form. Quite often I liken back to the days of Punk Rock when the two major music papers of the time, NME and The Melody Maker would run their weekly top twenty. To get to number one in either of these charts was meaningless unless you were top of both. The readership of both of these papers was quite different in attitude so it all became pointless. The Punks knew this so they had their own fanzines like ‘Sniffing Glue’ that were created by the bands themselves and stuck a prominent middle finger up at the mainstream press. Making it to Top of the Pops certainly spelt the end of Punk for its creators and innovators. It would be a shame to see this happen to tattooing.

The point that I am trying to make is that even though it might seem great to revel in the limelight for a moment or two. Is it really doing anything positive for out craft? I’m sure not and I’m also sure I’m not alone in this thought.

I hear more and more about how tattooers are taking themselves ‘back underground’ so to speak. Not working conventions anymore. Not sending in work to magazines. I have to say that these are two things that inspired me when I first began on this road and it would be a sorry loss if it continues but with an over saturated market of magazines and shows I can see their point.

I myself am concentrating more on a local level. It might be great to look at all the hundreds of fans on your shop page but do these people actually come into your shop to get tattooed. I think not! My shop page is close to reaching a thousand fans. This is a great status symbol for my studio and what I set out to achieve but it certainly isn’t putting food on my family’s table. I’ve had a lot of interest recently from the tattoo press and I have had a lot of my work published in books over the years. So I am no stranger to the tattooing limelight. Please don’t get me wrong, I love every minute of it but I won’t allow it to inflate my ego. Today’s news is tomorrows chip wrapper, as they say.

Some might say that this is all just sour grapes on my part. The why am I being left out concept when others are added. I personally can see nothing to gain from these Top of the Pops style charts except to boost the ego and form a pedestal to fall from, and it’s a long way down. I want no part of it.

I think it’s dangerous to let what we do define us as people instead of us defining our craft. It would be better for us all if the tourists who set up these fan boy pages, for their own recognition and glory as I see it, moved on to the next big thing as will many of the fans on these pages will do as well.

I really would like to see an end to this but I think it will carry on and on. So I’ll finish with a twist on a quote fro The Fight Club ‘Your not how many likes you get!’

Shameless self promotion!

There is a five page interview with yours truly in issue 20 of Tattoo Revolution this month. Lots of insight into what I do and loads if pics.

Gizmo!

I recently tattooed this piece at the Bournemouth tattoo convention and I have to say that is one of the most fun tattoos i have ever done.

 

Starboards show Liverpool tattoo convention 2012

This piece was my entry for the Starboards show at the Liverpool tattoo convention this year. Over seventy tattooers from the UK donated their work to this great show and the charity auction, organized by Chris ‘Fucking’ Jones of Physical Graffiti in Cardiff. The general idea was to combine his love of Star wars and skateboarding.

My piece is of Darth Talen from the extended star wars universe (Dark Horse Comics) and is a mixture of sraycan and stencil and acrylics applied by brush.

The End Of The Tattoo Apprenticeship?

I’ve been reading a great deal recently in other tattooer blogs and in the general tattoo press how the availability of apprenticeships is becoming more and more limited. The obvious reason for this, is the fact that tattooing has become widely mainstream due to media coverage and TV. Generally meaning we all have more and more people knocking on the door of the tattoo studio asking for one as they have seen how easy it is to tattoo and see it as a career option.

This sudden rise in wanna-be tattooers has created a monster in the eyes of most seasoned professionals. I hear more and more stories as of late how guys have opened up their doors to individuals who, on the outset seem to be motivated and loyal, only to find out that this is far from the truth and get burned.

The apprenticeship for me, was always about how much I could give back to tattooing and my mentor, as much as how much I could gain or learn. It seems to me that nowadays it is more the case of how quick somebody can plunder your wealth of knowledge and give nothing in return so they can move on and do the same elsewhere. The kind of modern fast track to the front of the que approach. Or worse still, open up a shop in the same town and try their best to take as many clients with them by underhand tactics and general bullshit! This has happened to myself personally twice in the last six years. About the same time that a certain TV program first aired.

This has caused a rise in professional tattooers shutting the door in the face of anyone who comes knocking. I currently have an apprentice who I feel I can trust completely. She is hard-working, dedicated and has no agenda other than to take the craft of tattooing to the limits of her ability. However, this will be the last person I open my door to and teach. I am sure many others feel the same and are taking the same direction.

Tattooing, for me has always been a craft that must be passed on by a teacher or a series of mentors happy to pass on knowledge in exchange for dedication, hard work and loyalty. It now seems to me that this is a thing of the past and this can only be bad for the entire profession.

We now have shops run by so-called professionals who have been tattooing for a matter of months, not years. Also, most of these people are living with such delusions of grandeur and inflated egos that they have apprentices as well. So we have a kind of blind leading the blind scenario. These shops are popping up everywhere and to some it has spelt the beginning of the end. A kind of over kill of poor quality rubbish. The kind or  poorly executed work that many of us have tried so hard to eradicate and show the public what was actually possible with the craft of tattoo. This has also been made possible by an influx of pre made products that can be bought cheaply through the internet. I have maintained for a long time now that if pre-soldered needles disappeared from the market tomorrow we would lose over fifty percent of the wannabe’s overnight. Separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.

I read a piece recently in a blog by Myke Chambers, how he likened the current situation of apprenticeships in tattooing to a movie he had seen of which I have forgotten the title. Sorry!

The story of the film was about the over population of the planet. How the intelligent of our race could see the problem and make a conscious decision to only have one child or none at all. Where as the less intelligent were still breeding like rabbits. The movie’s climax is  set far off  into the future where all intelligence has been bred out of the human race and it has de-evolved. If pro tattooers are shutting the door on future apprentices, then even the talented and hard-working aren’t going to get the knowledge and skill building they deserve and so over a long period of time tattooing can only de-evolve too.

This over time may even push tattooing under ground again, which may or may not be a bad thing, and see a cull in all these low quality shops cashing in on its popularity. I personally would like to see a downtrend in media attention and the so-called spotlight coming off out profession. A burst in the bubble so to speak. There will always be a hardcore contingent that will raise it from the ashes like the phoenix and I am sure that tattooing will continue to evolve well after my time has passed.

If you are looking for an apprenticeship and you feel you can really give back to our craft as well as take, then don’t give up. I’ll finish this piece on this note. It has always been my firm belief that if you were born to tattoo then you will find a way. Even in a world where many of the people currently tattooing were really born to do something else that requires a lot less skill and effort.

Flatcap skull, feather & compass!

This was an interesting composition to work with. I especially like the flatcap. We are going to add a pirate treasure map as a background to finish the piece. 🙂

Orchids in smoke!

This piece is Holly’s first tattoo. It’s lucky her dad is a client of mine and she had his advice when planning her first piece. Brave girl, well done. She sat like s rock! 🙂