Haven’t posted on here in a while. Sitting in the backseat of a car driving through Illinois. When you’re on the highway and all you can see is highway sometimes you want to write about shape and form.
When I started tattooing I put a lot of focus on quality of line and overall quality of craftsmanship. I still do, but I’ve come around a little bit to understand what tattoos really are. When your initial exposure to the current “scene” happens largely on Instagram, looking at pictures of fresh or one year healed tattoos, it’s easy to think that the details matter a lot.
If someone gets a tattoo when they’re 25 and they live to be 85, for half of the time that tattoo exists it will be over 30 years old. It’s ridiculous to think that your lines will look good after 30 years. The largest portion of a tattoo’s lifespan is spent being old and faded and dusty. The lines bleed together, the colors turn into different colors or disappear entirely, and the only thing left over is the silhouette of the original drawing.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot when it comes to my work lately. Essentially I try to imagine that the whole entire design is filled in with an 80% opaque grey. Most of the time people see tattoos from 10 feet away 25 years after you did them, so it doesn’t matter how well you blended the purple into the pink or how well you shaded the chrome.
This isn’t to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re good at tattooing, you should always do the best job you possibly can. It’s more of a desire to do work that enhances the body in a lasting way. When you see a tattoo on the street that’s 40 years old and looks terrible, it’s still cool because it’s a tattoo. If that tattoo flows in an interesting way and fits the character of the person wearing it, even better.
Another thing I think about a lot is how much more important Swag is than ability and technique. I know lots of people that have an exceptional ability to use a tattoo machine but their tattoos suck because they have no swag. I also know a lot of people that are terrible at tattooing but it doesn’t really matter to me because their work is fluid, intuitive and human.
Not everyone who gets tattooed shares my feelings on this. I’ve heard plenty of stories from other artists about clients that came back unhappy with the application of a tattoo. It’s the tattoo artist’s job to do what they can to fix it! We provide a service and you can’t let your ego wrapped up in your work. However, I do think people need to understand that getting tattooed is not that simple.
Because of how accessible tattooing has gotten, and how much the stigma against wearing tattoos has diminished, the expectations placed on the artist have grown to be much greater. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of old tattoos by legends that are super fucked up. I haven’t spoken to the recipients of these tattoos, but it seems to me that the tattoo simply existing at all was enough to make it cool.
None of this is to say that it isn’t important to strive for greatness in every tattoo that you do. Obviously you should do that. Part of the reason that tattoo artists have so much greater expectations placed on them now is because tattoos have gotten a lot better. People are constantly exposed to high quality tattoos, which is awesome. We’re pushed to make the highest quality work we can by our thousands of global contemporaries.
Another aspect of the time-based nature of tattoos I’ve been thinking about is meme tattoos or that style of rage-baiting text pieces. Doing a huge black text piece on someone for the purpose of an Instagram post is so ridiculous to me. Not even because I feel bad for the guy who got “Bonnie Blue’s 1000th Body” tattooed on his chest. (No hate towards the guy who did that, I don’t know him and I’m sure he’s great.) People have always gotten dumb tattoos, and people have always been dumb. It’s more that the momentary relevance of the joke takes away from the permanent beauty of tattoos. They last forever! Don’t forget that.
The longer I tattoo and the more time and energy I put into thinking about tattoos the more magical they seem to me. I live to tattoo, there’s nothing else I’d rather do. It’s important for me to treat them with reverence and respect. When my freehand Biomech pieces are 35 years old, they’re still going to have appealing shapes. Keep that in mind.