Origin Story: Part II

In the last entry, I left off at my time in college. Those days were more about piercings than tattoos really, and at 22 I graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing, a bunch of extra little holes all over my face/body, and just two tattoos.

I already knew I was interested in becoming a body piercer or tattoo artist, or best-case scenario, both. I’d talked to Jeremiah, the local tattooer in the college town of Farmington, Maine, but those conversations hadn’t ended in an offer of apprenticeship, so I left Maine and wandered off into the sunset. Of course, by “sunset” I mean my parents’ basement in Rhode Island. Because that’s what most of us BFA holders do after being kicked out of the warm, cushy nest of liberal arts academia…go back home and figure out what the literal fuck to do next.

Next. What an intimidating word that can be.  I was free of organized education for the first time in my life, had vague ideas about going into publishing (or being the next great American author, you know, whatever), or pursuing something in the realm of body modification.  I also wanted to travel.  Everywhere, anywhere, all the places that could be found on a map and some that couldn’t.  My hometown is one of three making up Aquidneck Island.  In addition to three good-sized towns, the island boasts about a dozen tattoo shops, a military base, and a strong sailing history.  Tattoo culture is part of the island, and there happened to be two shops within a mile of my parents’ house.  So, that’s where I started.  It didn’t go well, and looking back, I see why.  My art portfolio was an amateurish joke, and I didn’t even get tattooed at those shops before asking if they were taking on apprentices.  Of course I was turned away.

I quit trying after a few rounds of rejection.  I’m kind of ashamed that I didn’t stick with it, work harder at it…but I can’t quite regret moving on at that time.  I job-hunted constantly, looking for any kind of work that looked creative or interesting.  One day, I saw a post on Craigslist for native English speakers interested in going to South Korea to teach.  I landed a job at a bilingual nursery school in the heart of Seoul, and left home for a year.  I loved Seoul, loved travelling even more than I thought I would.  I came home for a couple weeks, and then left again to get more teacher training in a TEFL program in Madrid, Spain.  Then it was a year in Hong Kong, another year back in South Korea, then a summer in Nepal, then a few weeks in Ecuador…building my teaching resume in all different kinds of cultures and age groups along the way.  I went to graduate school in Vermont, taught in Poland for a couple months as part of that program, and then found a job at a high school in the Dominican Republic, teaching both English Lit and Social Studies.

My new goal at this point in my life was to find a good, comfortable position as a professor of English Language Studies, in some big, foreign university.  I was edging closer to that, but in my internal fantasy world, I still thought about tattooing all the time.  I was more heavily inked, having collected permanent art from a traditional tebori tattooer in Tokyo, a talented artist who worked out of a drab little shopping mall in Bangkok, a Nepalese tattooer with a shop in Kathmandu who spoke better English than me, a body-building artist in Vienna known for his script/lettering, and about a half-dozen others I met over the years and over the travels.  All of them made a lasting impression on me, and I started looking for a way into the industry, a toehold anywhere.  I wanted to be one of them.

After I left the Dominican Republic, I was back home in RI for the summer, getting tattooed by a local guy.  I asked him how he got into it, and he had a new, different answer for me.  He learned tattooing at a tattoo school in China.  Wtf.  I’d heard things about tattoo schools before, American ones at least.  They had a terrible reputation, and everyone knew they were garbage…right?  But here was a guy with his own shop, doing a nice tattoo on me, right there before my eyes.  So I went to China.  I did it the legit way, got a good job at a large university in Nanyang, Henan Province, which ended up being one of my favorite teaching experiences.  But, from the first day I was there, I was researching tattoo schools around the country, checking out the possibilities.  That was my real priority.  My Googling led me to Thailand’s Bangkok Ink, a fully operational tattoo shop off of Sukhumvit Road.  They had a tattoo school, taught by working artists, and it wasn’t very expensive, and I could even stay there instead of paying for a hostel…that was it.  Decision made. I went to Thailand during the wintertime semester break, and learned some fuckin’ tattin’ bro.

It wasn’t a perfect program.  I learned very little about cross-contamination, correct sterilization procedures, or about tattoo art itself.  Nobody made me draw flash over and over until my lines were crispy.  No one made me hustle for my own clients.  Basically, I spent a week tattooing pigskins (this was pre-veganism for me, so it wasn’t as horrifying as it would be now), and then another week tattooing humans.  I was hooked—tattooing had me.  I was using shitty machines I purchased at their shop, and doing shitty work, and it was an unquestionably shady start to my career.  But I loved it, dude.  I loved the vibe of the shop, the other artists there, and most importantly, the act of tattooing another person.  It was exciting, intimidating, stressful, and awesome.  After that first two-week session, they encouraged me to keep tattooing, and I became a scratcher back in China.  More shitty tattoos done in an un-sterile environment, and I’m profoundly embarrassed by that.  I went back to Bangkok again, for six weeks that time, and learned more from the artists there.  They took me more seriously this time around, and I saw some marginal improvement in my abilities.  Still a fucking scratcher though. 

Overall, my main takeaway from the whole experience was that I love tattooing.  It wasn’t an idle daydream anymore, it had grown into an obsessive passion, and I felt that I had finally found my place in the world.  After the second stint at Bangkok Ink, I fully intended to quit teaching and go back a third time, and stay for as long as possible.  But I kept doing research, considering options, and eventually came across an ad for an apprenticeship program back in the States.  It seemed more legitimate, like it would be more challenging, and therefore more worthwhile.  I just wanted to be the best tattooer I could, and some kind of official apprenticeship seemed more valid.  I left China at the end of my teaching contract, relocated to Philadelphia, and started my new life as a tattoo apprentice.

It’s now two years and three months later, my apprenticeship is over, and I’m a junior tattoo artist at Body Art & Soul Tattoos.  The risk I took in leaving my teaching career, a career I spent a decade building, is paying off.  It would have been great if I’d become an apprentice at 22 instead of 32, but I don’t regret the delay in chasing the dream.  That decade was epic.  I lived and traveled on four different continents, visited well over a dozen countries, met amazing people and then had to leave them, taught and learned languages, drank too much, went clubbing in Honk Kong, visited Buddhist temples in Korea, got sick a lot and learned to meditate in Kathmandu, got lost in the Louvre, planted yucca in rural Ecuador, went vegan in China, cried at Auschwitz, stood in silent awe at the Taj Mahal, and took a hundred snowy nighttime walks in Poland.  That time, those experiences, made me who I am.  Tattooing is the next chapter, and I hope to bring all of that, the different styles of artistic expression, the experiences, the cultural influences, into my tattooing.  I hope to be worthy of the long road I took getting here.  I hope to be successful as fuck. I hope to tattoo you one day, person reading this right now.

Thanks for stopping by, see you again soon.