Most young artists dream of making tattooing their job. But what happens when tattooing actually becomes your job?
There’s a phrase — Familiarity breeds contempt — which I think is true for any professional who goes from being the new kid to the OG. The journey from naive young creative to jaded old fart is fairly common and one that I fully intend to avoid.
When Everything About Tattooing Feels New
When you first enter the industry, bright eyed and bushy tailed, you don’t really know what’s going on and, because you don’t know what’s going on, almost everything feels exciting and new.
Your first tattoo convention feels enormous. Mine was Tattoo Jam in Doncaster. The people, the noise, the machines, the artwork, the weird characters wandering around. It feels less like going to work and more like you’ve accidentally discovered some secret world that you didn’t know existed.
Getting your first award. Doing your first guest spot. Meeting someone whose work you’ve admired for years. Being invited into a studio you’ve only ever seen in photographs, like the time I found myself chatting with Paul Booth in his room at Last Rites in NY. Like seriously, what the actual fuck?
You haven’t developed any context yet, so you don’t have anything to compare it with. You’re the new kid.
When you’re new, you’re not walking around thinking, This isn’t as good as it used to be. You don’t know what it used to be like. You haven’t heard the argument about apprenticeships and scratchers seventeen times. You haven’t watched the industry tear itself apart over the same problem, over and over again.
You’re just happy to be there.
I remember that feeling. That sense that tattooing was this enormous thing happening all around me and that, somehow, I’d managed to get through the door. You discover a world, find your people and gradually become part of something that feels much bigger than yourself.
There is a kind of magic in that.
But there’s also something else happening.
Why Tattoo Artists Become Cynical
Because while you’re learning how everything works, you’re also learning what everything is supposed to mean. You’re learning the language, the hierarchies, who the important people are, what the accepted opinions are and which arguments you’re supposed to have.
And you don’t necessarily notice that happening. You’re just learning.
The trouble is, eventually you know enough to stop being the new kid. And that’s when things start to get interesting.
Years spent travelling to shows and guest spots, along with a decade of writing and filming content – being behind the velvet rope if you like, have given me a fairly unique perspective on the world of tattooing. I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly parts of both the trade and the industry. I’ve heard the gossip, the tall tales and the hearsay.
There’s a scene in The Wizard of OZ that sums up how I feel about ‘the powers that be’ in tattooing and there’s a reason why so many of us refer to conventions as The Circus.
At this point it would be not only easy, but almost expected for me to become cynical old bastard.
So, how do you stay engaged and passionate about the whole thing when you’re starting to feel like you’ve heard it all before, seen it all before and, perhaps worst of all, convinced yourself that you’ve already seen the best period of tattooing come and go?
When Experience Becomes Certainty
You don’t become cynical because tattooing got worse. You become cynical because you became familiar with it.
When you’ve been around something for long enough, you start to see the machinery behind it. You recognise the patterns. You know what happens next.
I’ve been around long enough now to have watched the same conversations come around again and again. Apprenticeships. Scratchers. Tattoo styles. Machines. Conventions. Social media. The death of tattoo culture. The death of good tattooing.
Because familiarity gives you perspective, but it also gives you expectations. You start knowing what a tattoo convention is supposed to look like, what a tattoo artist is supposed to look like and what a proper tattoo is supposed to be.
And once you think you know all of that, something strange happens. You stop looking. You stop being surprised.
You walk into a convention and instead of thinking, Jesus Christ, look at all these people making amazing tattoos, you start thinking, Same shit, different venue.
Someone tells you they’re doing something new and instead of being curious about it, your brain immediately starts looking for the thing you’ve already seen.
We’ve done this before.
And perhaps we have. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong.
It might just mean we’ve been here long enough to recognise the shape of the conversation. I think that’s where cynicism creeps in. Not as some dramatic decision to become miserable, but almost as a form of efficiency.
You’ve seen enough to know that not every argument needs your attention. You’ve heard enough bullshit to recognise bullshit quickly. You’ve watched enough trends come and go to know that most of them won’t change the world.
That’s useful, until it isn’t.
Because somewhere between developing good judgement and becoming completely fucking dismissive, there is a line. And I’m not always sure where that line is.
There’s another thing that happens when you’ve been around long enough. You become invested in the version of tattooing that you understand.
Experience matters. You learn things for a reason. You develop standards and work out what you think makes a good tattoo.
But there’s a subtle difference between knowing what you believe and believing that what you know is the only way things can be.
We Were Once “They”
Because eventually someone new walks through the door and starts doing things differently, and suddenly you are the person saying “they”.
They don’t understand tattooing. They don’t respect the history. They don’t do things properly. They’ve never had to work the way we did. They’ve got it too easy. They’re not really tattooers.
I’ve heard all of these arguments in one form or another for as long as I’ve been around tattooing, and I’ve probably made some of them myself.
But here’s the strange thing: we were once they. Every single one of us.
Experience isn’t automatically wrong just because it’s old. Sometimes the person who’s been around for thirty years really does know something that the person who’s been tattooing for three years hasn’t learned yet. But the reverse is also true. Being around for thirty years doesn’t mean you’ve got a thirty-year monopoly on what tattooing can become.
Every generation thinks the generation coming after them doesn’t understand tattooing. But perhaps that’s simply what happens when you mistake your experience of tattooing for tattooing itself.
Your version of tattooing was shaped by the time you entered it, the people you met, the technology that existed and the opportunities that were available to you.
That’s your experience. But it isn’t necessarily the whole thing.
Becoming overly invested in the version of tattooing you already understand means that, if the tattooing you’re looking at today doesn’t resemble the tattooing you fell in love with, you’ll conclude that tattooing has changed for the worse.
But what if it has simply changed?
What if the thing that feels like the death of tattooing from one perspective looks like the beginning of something from another?
Because I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years standing at the edge of the room explaining why everything was better before they arrived.
How Do You Stay Curious About Tattooing?
I think the answer is to deliberately remain curious, particularly when my first reaction is to dismiss something because I’ve seen it before.
Take the whole 3RL thing. Every time I hear someone talking about the 3RL technique as though it’s some new development in tattooing, there’s a part of my brain screaming, It’s fucking single needle. We’ve been doing it for years.
And maybe I’m right. Maybe there really is nothing new about it.
But that’s exactly the moment when I need to shut up and look at what they’re actually doing.
Because maybe they’ve taken something that existed twenty years ago and pushed it somewhere we didn’t. Maybe the techniques have changed. Maybe the tattoos they’re producing with those tools couldn’t have been made in quite the same way when I first encountered single needle tattooing.
Or maybe I’ll look at it properly and conclude that it really is the same thing with a different name. That’s fine too.
Remaining curious doesn’t mean abandoning everything you’ve learned. It means not allowing experience to make the decision before you’ve actually looked.
Whenever I find myself saying, We’ve done this before, I need to add another question: Okay. So what are they doing differently?
When somebody approaches tattooing in a way I don’t understand, rather than explaining why they’re wrong, I want to understand why it makes sense to them.
Perhaps that’s how you avoid becoming the cynical old fart.
You don’t pretend you’re still the new kid. I’m not. I’ve spent enough time around tattooing to have opinions, standards and a pretty good bullshit detector, and I’m not interested in throwing any of those things away.
But I can choose not to confuse experience with certainty. I can keep walking into the room expecting that there might still be something in there I haven’t seen before.
And maybe that’s enough to keep a little bit of that new kid feeling alive.