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
particulartechnical 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.
