If all you can draw is skulls then you are useless as a tattooer. So you have gotten that one skull down pat? great, now draw a fairy, a beaver, a motorcycle, a flower, and a face. Frankly, most tattooers won’t even entertain the idea of teaching someone who can’t be bothered to get tattooed themselves.ģ. Getting a lot of work also shows a prospective mentor that you love tattooing and not just the image of it. Even clients with no intention of being a tattooer become knowledgeable after getting hours of work in the tattoo shop environment, it’s like learning a new language by living in a foreign country instead of just reading about it in a book. Getting tattooed is a secret door into understanding tattooing. No one is born knowing what makes a good tattoo, its an acquired language, you need to be exposed to it personally before you even consider tattooing others. DO start the whole process by getting tattooed yourself! I mean a LOT. Everyone has a story about how so-and-so awesome tattooer just started scratching out of their crib, but even these (extremely) rare exceptions will tell a newcomer that an apprenticeship is the way to go.Ģ. The reality is that it’s far more likely that you will blow yourself up, and in tattooing you will be fucking up on real live humans who deserve better. Sure you could ‘figure it out” the same way you could “figure out” how to defuse a bomb. DO get into tattooing through an apprenticeship. You don't have to agree with this article, I don't care either way, but you should at least appreciate that this article is something I've never seen given out, for free, by someone who has the experience I do, its a gift for the 1% of prospective apprentices willing and able to someday become, not just tattooers, but good tattooers who are a positive boon to the world of tattooing.ġ. I took on my own (and only) apprentice in 2008 and learned a ton from that experience as well. Some did apprenticeships that were good, some bad, and some folks just winged it. This article is my point of view based on 18 years of experience, having done an apprenticeship, and on seeing the results of dozens and dozens of fellow tattooers stories. What if, instead we showed folks the right way to get an apprenticeship, not how-to tattoo, but how to seek the proper training? I actually believe that just by saying “fuck off kid” that we professionals are causing more people to order crappy kits and tattoo out of their house, we don’t show these prospects that there is any “right” way to go about it so it should be no surprise that they choose the only way they see available, the wrong way. This has been borne out over and over again through ancient history right up to today's photorealistic, pneumatic/rotoriffic masters, and when people eschew an apprenticeship, when they try to “figure it out” or find a “short cut” the result is the same some poor sod (or hundreds of poor sods really) get shitty, unsafe tattoos.įew tattooers would write an article like this, it is considered best to slam the door in the faces of people who want to become tattooers, and if that worked I would slam the door myself. These rules and traditions are not arbitrary, they are not there because tattooers are mean or afraid of competition, they exist because tattooing is an old-fashioned art form (even the newer forms) that is best taught in an old fashioned one on one, mentor/student way. Unfortunately, the same kind of personality that is attracted to tattooing is often the same type that resists any sort of rules or tradition and tattooing, despite what anyone tells you, is full of rules and traditions. A lot of people want to be tattooers, and I can understand why, I seem like one of those jobs where one doesn’t have to follow “the rules”, even as tattooing has become more mainstream it still retains that cache of being by and for the outsider.
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