My journey to become a high end tattoo artist.

Part 1, Humble Beginnings

Contrast… I feel like most of my life and art is really about contrast, and it took a while to notice and appreciate the beauty that contrast can bring.

Being a high end tattoo artist was never really something I knew was even an option. No teachers or counselors or adults ever allowed me to consider art as a realistic job. I can’t blame them though, I was at least two handfuls, maybe more.

I grew up in an Army family… Don’t get me started down that rabbit hole. Needless to say I didn’t have a lot of strong connections with anyone growing up. This led to a lot of attention seeking and risky behavior.

My earliest memory or story about attempting art was when I was three and we were living in Germany. My dad came home and the neighbor kids were cleaning his car. Apparently, they were trying to keep me out of trouble as I had taken a Sharpie to his nice white Celica. Ever since that day I have no memory of ever being allowed to customize anything. No bikes, skateboards, walls, nothing. I never was even allowed to put stickers on things. To this day. All the magazines, conventions, tattooers and companies I have ever gotten stickers from… I still have them all in bags just waiting for a day to go nuts.

Young Mickey Schlick : Pre-High End Tattoo Artist

The only variation from that was one time in high school my parents asked me to take a picture of Marvin the Martian to get it enlarged so that the bake shop could make my brother a cake. Instead of doing what they asked I just looked at it, got out a big piece of paper and just did the drawing from sight. That little alien may have been the start of it all.

I did know a kid in high school that was doing these cartoon characters. They were black characters sort of similar to the show The Boondocks. Looking back it was probably not really for me to be drawing that, but I did a few and even got Snoop Dogg to sign one on a plane once. Luckily the stewardess took it up to him, so he didn’t really see who was behind the drawing but this had to be somewhere around the year 2000 and people weren’t really tripping as hard as they are these days.

In any event, the attention seeking and acting out eventually caught up with me and in September of 2001, at 19, I woke up in LA County Jail. Now, if you don’t know, then we can just say this is sort of an intimidating place. Especially the 2000 and 3000 floors of Old County downtown 20 years ago. 8 people in the 6 man cells, 6 people in the 4 man cells and out of a row of 160 or so people, maybe 2 or 4 looked anything like me.

The smartest thing you can do in a situation like this is to secure a hustle and become of value to those around you. Understand there is a reason you have two eyes and two ears but only one mouth. I really lucked out with a cell mate that was hustling cigarettes, envelopes and stamps. I saw someone exchanging an envelope worth $.32 with a drawing of a rose on it for a stack of 5 coming back. Now I’m not sure about anyone else, but 5x return is a pretty great deal.

I told my celly that I could draw a little and he got out a bag of patterns, or flash if we are talking tattoos. Really easy stuff, like a rose bud or there was a method of tearing paper and then using it to make a soft pattern of clouds and rain. Anything people could use to send to a mother or girlfriend on the streets to let them know they were special enough to get something unique even in the worst parts of the senders life. That was probably my introduction to both art and business. Life has never been the same since…..

In 2001, I was arrested for carjacking. Long story short, after a rough senior year in high school, the attention-seeking, drugs, and all of that got out of control. I was involved in moving and dealing, mostly party drugs, but at one point, I fell behind on my payments. Since this guy had been to my house, I was worried there would be repercussions with my family. When I talked to him, he said, "If you don’t pay, I can't deal with you anymore." To which I replied, "If I don't pay, I'll be dead or in jail." I didn't pay; I did call from jail.

It was September 15, 2001, four days after 9/11. The towers had just fallen, and like many Americans, I wanted to sign up for service. Long story short, I ended up in a car with someone, and they didn't take me where I needed to go. They tried to get weird, and I pulled out a knife. In the struggle, the guy got hurt and then jumped out of the car. I jumped into the driver's seat and took off. When I returned to a friend's apartment where I was staying, I told them the story. Before I could retrieve my belongings from the car, I was arrested.

I sort of skipped over that part in the first story, but after county, of course, I went to state. Mama didn’t raise no slacker, if you get what I mean. The judge literally sent me to the furthest possible place from my family and any possibility of a visit, about 10 hours away. When I finally got to Susanville, tattooing was fairly prevalent. If you have seen the movie “Ink Nation,” there is a clip of Freddy Negrete talking about learning there on Cascade Yard. I was on Sierra Yard, probably ten years after him, but they did a great job talking about it.

One day something happened on the yard, and they were searching the dorms. One of the guys in the dorm turned to me and told me he had a tattoo machine and that the guards were going to find it, and did I want to tattoo a cross on his leg while he still had it…

You never really know the gravity of the pivotal moment you are staring at when you are on the pivot point. That day changed my life in ways I still have trouble understanding and verbalizing twenty plus years later.

When we got off of lockdown, I had a line of people waiting for me. I couldn’t draw even a little bit. And that continued on Sierra Yard and Lassen Yard (level 3 (cells) in the same place) for about a year. At that point, I figured out that if I was ever going to be a high-end tattoo artist, then I was going to have to learn to draw.

I truly feel like tattooing found me broke, naked and alone and has brought me everything. I literally owe it my life and hope to give back more than I have taken.

One cool thing I came up on was a Punk Rock Zine called Scratch Magazine. In the back of that magazine was a recurring article about Mark Mahoneys’ Shamrock Social Club. If you don’t know, Mark goes way back to the days of tattooing being illegal in New York, and Shamrock was on the west side of Sunset Blvd in LA, which was a pretty nice area at the time. About four doors from Bel—Aire and walking distance to some of the most famous venues in the world. And the people tattooing from there were Mr. Cartoon and Freddy Negrete. From that time, I have always thought of that place as Mecca for me.

I still remember the first PROPER backpiece I saw. One of my Cellies in LA County had a neck to knees backpiece with two roosters fighting and it said “Cockfighting IS a sport” Ruthless I know, but it was really a wild contrast for me of extremely dark contend but really gorgeous work that fit super well. I’m sure he got it doing time but if he never gets out to show it to people at least people know it’s out there.

Everyone knows how risky and dirty it is to tattoo in jail. Myself more than most. When you get caught tattooing in prison (at least for me) they cuff you up and take you to medical for blood tests. While there they inform you how everyone has AIDS and Hep-C. They tell you if the bloodwork comes back saying AIDS then within 2 weeks the Goon Squad will rush in like Ninja Turtles to Hog Tie you and take you off to a special yard. One where EVERYONE has AIDS, half are dropouts ready to snitch at a moments notice and there are some big mean MFs that will knock you out and suck your dick. How true that is I don’t really know, but it was certainly scary as fuck.

That said, we did what we could. We would use a motor from a Walk-man, just a normal rotary motor. In a Disk-man there are two motors. One for spinning the disk and one for the laser. For the Cam we would find a mechanical pencil and break of the little tip.Then you cut a similar amount of the ink tube from the inside of a pen. It’s not easy but if you can do it you stick the metal tip inside the plastic tube and slip that over the spindle on the motor. Not a lot of throw but it works. Then you cut the the cap of a bic pen down so that it is just the cuff and pocket tab. Bend that tab in an L shape and then fasten it to the motor. My favorite was wrapping with thread and then using a glue but there are a few ways to do it. Now you have a running rotary pretty similar to the Spectra Direkt or an Inkjecta or older Bishop. Finding wire to connect batteries was not difficult as you can just use headphone wires. We would take the core of a toilet paper roll and wrap it around a D battery and then tape it so that it sticks. That was my power supply. I made ink by pouring baby oil into a tuna can, poking a hole in the top and running a bit of t-shirt through it to make an oil candle. From there I would find a paper bag and cut the corners back an inch or so in order to be able to set it upside down but not straight on the ground. It need room to breathe otherwise you could start a real fire in your cell. When the bag is full of soot, I would scrape it out into a bag, add some hot water and a little baby shampoo and that was the ink when we couldn’t find it later. Oddly enough in less of a DIY capacity, this is very similar to the creation of Sumi Ink in Japan. From there, everything else belongs to the client so before the first session we get all of that together and I make them a needle and tube. The tube I would make from the rest of a bic pen just cut down to be really short. The longer that tube is the more that needle will bend when it hits so that is why you see so many with short tubes. Using sandpaper you can get the ball out of the ballpoint pen which is about as tight as you can get the tip. The best needles come from a guitar string. Susanville had no music program. Most often I would snag some rubber bands and a stapler when I could get to it. I would make sure the stapler was full and then swap out the internal spring for rubber bands and it would be weeks before anyone would notice. Using the candle to apply heat, we could straighten it out. This is MUCH more dangerous than a guitar string as too much heat can make it brittle allowing it to break in the skin. Sticking that needle through a pencil eraser and using the sand paper was how I would sharpen my needle before bending the other end into an L shape. I like this method because the loop method always seems to have more give. This method was a bit harder to get together, but had less play in the action as far as I could tell. Glover are not super hard to come by but obviously you can’t get them in bulk. The client would keep their own needle and tube but I would provide it and clean it all each time with bleach and flame. Risky? Yes. Ill advised? Certainly. Luckily for me my circle was small.

I would be remiss without bringing up that I really did learn some very good and basic business lessons at this time. Tattooing has existed since before any modern border or language and will be here, rain, snow or shine, regardless of regulations and shame. Value transcends social strife and poor environmental situations. Micro-economies exist everywhere, and, most importantly, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I remember this guy showing up on Lassen yard while I was there. He was a black guy, but I never knew his name. Just that he was indigent without a lot of connections. When he came, he had nothing. Of course, it wasn’t really my people, so I don’t actually know all the particulars, but this is what I have carried with me for all these years. I believe he may have gotten nicer clothing issued from the state, luck of the draw, and then traded that to someone who liked looking nice. Someone traded him, and he got some shoes, stamped envelopes, and a jar of coffee. He put these things in a laundry bag and threw it over his shoulder. For the next year and a half, I watched this guy walk laps on the track and be in and out of every building on the yard. Every time I saw him, the bag grew. He was just trading things and making deals. Sort of like these guys who start off on Craigslist trading a pair of glasses and end up in a car just from making different deals and trades with people with opposing value. Understand that you can produce and identify value, and hustle can exist, in any environment. You just have to outthink everyone else. Also understanding the relationship between effort and value has been vital to me through the years. The guys working in the Boot factory made like $0.15 an hour or something like that. The guys in the kitchen didn’t make anything but got to eat real well and often had goods to trade. I was sitting in my cell drawing for people making $30 a contract; sometimes it was even sent to people outside for me. In LA county the guy shining the deputies shoes walked around with a dollar between each bible page. And this guy just walked around talking to people and making deals and ended up being probably the richest guy on the yard. You must have goals and direction, but if you’ve got the will, there’s a way. That way may not be what everyone else is doing, and the road may be lonely, but humans are capable of great and extraordinary things. Unfortunately, this experience also drained my empathy for a lot of the people I was in with. Seeing people come up from the dust really only proves that it can be done and must be undertaken by the individual needing the change. It’s great to want to help people, but some of the worst of us had help their whole lives. Change must come from within and does not happen without effort from ones self.

I wound down those years with a focus on drawing and learning about art, although Susanville had no art program at that time. At first, it was basics like storytelling and color theory (which took me forever to learn). Soon, I happened across an article that told me that if you wanted to practice realistic drawing, every problem you could possibly run into you can run into between the ears. My love for portraits and portraiture was born in that moment. Becoming a high-end tattoo artist just got that much closer.

I had a good friend during that time. Dreamer. He had at least gotten out and tried to tattoo on the streets before. Not that he really knew what he was doing, but he had a lot more experience than I did. I remember making a little drawing of a character holding a tattoo machine with fish bones inside the coils. I had literally no idea how things worked. Looking back though, I guess I was on rotaries from my very earliest days, which does say something about my early adaptation of those machines.

March 5, 2005, was my first parole date. I was so scared, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at me. Getting out is so much worse than going in. I literally had nothing to do but sit and worry about what I was going to do and where I was going to live for 15 months before I got out.

I tried working at a local motorcycle shop, Butch’s Cycles in Simi Valley, CA, and also an auto body shop, but unfortunately, those didn’t work out too well. Of course, at this point, I was looking for an apprenticeship, and the local HA shop let me know I could get my foot in the door. Unfortunately, I felt that having just gotten out, it was not very likely that I would be able to accept the structure needed to thrive there.

Before I got out, Dreamer gave me his mother's address. I’m not sure how to convey the importance of this gesture, but it is something that you really just don’t do in the system, give out family member info. I was out a month or two before I made it out there, but when I got there, she gave me a tackle box of his old equipment and a power supply. I ultimately never used any of it, but it was a gesture that lives with me today. Sometimes a person just needs a life preserver and to know that someone, even at their worst, believes in them.

Looking back it’s pretty wild. When I got out, EVERYONE I knew at Susanville told me to send their respects to Freddy Negrete at that time. Eventually I tried to seek him out as well as my homeboy Al out at George Christie’s shop in Ventura at the time. Unfortunately I was greeted by the piercer in a way that almost got us bith in a fight right there and ultimately left. I’ve never spoken to Freddy but have been to Shamrock a bunch with him there and should have made a better attempt to reach out. He was integral to the Tattoo Nation movie and later I would work with James Strickland who was also involved in that production.

I hit the San Fernando Valley, and especially on Ventura Blvd, and asked anyone that would chat with me at all. Of course, that is not really how it works. It’s not really a purchase like that. You can’t just say, "Hey, I wanna learn," and pay the man and learn it all. Maybe you can buy your way in and prove yourself, but what you are taught in that time is rarely everything. I also don’t believe a person could process “everything” in the first 5 years.

There used to be a shop called Art to the Bone on Ventura Blvd, and there was a guy there. Spoon I think was what he went by. We spoke a time or two. The thing is, by the time I had brought out some of my drawings, he had dropped a bomb on me. He noted that I was already doing tattoos in and out of prison, and he was just recently starting to do his own drawings. He asked me why I didn’t just go down to Hollywood Blvd or Venice beach and take my work and get a job… I had no answer for that. I just had to explore that as an option.

Now, to this day, walking into a new tattoo shop is one of the most unsettling and anxious experiences for me. I have no clue why this is. I’ve almost never had a bad experience. Even as I write this, I have a friend opening a new shop, and I haven’t made it over. I mean, technically, I haven’t been in the area, but it’s something I need to do. You would never know this in the moment, of course, but at some level, there is a feeling of being around people who can call you on your bullshit and reject you if you get things wrong. I’ve never actually dealt with that, I can bullshit as well as I can back it up, but that ability only comes to me from deep seated anxiety. It kills me to go into new shops even today.

Around this time, I also met Rick. I met Rick at 5150 in Van Nuys, CA when I came in looking for an apprenticeship. Rick had been through it over the years. As a former convict dealing with addiction, Rick was tattooing and owned some sober living homes as well. After being told that there were no apprenticeship opportunities and leaving the shop, Rick caught me outside and told me to follow him home. Once we got there, he basically told me how he sort of identified with where I was coming from, told me his story, and took me out to his little stucco, air-conditioned tattoo bungalow behind his house.

Rick had a giant tool chest of stuff from the CAM catalog and let me buy whatever I wanted from him and then put the word out to the sober living homes and NA community that I was looking for guinea pigs.. Pin cushions if you will, depending on where you come from I guess. He even let me use his little studio to get my first few clients in. I’ll never forget my first. It was a David Boltt piece on the thigh of some old SFV biker chick. I did a little bit of work there. Took my photos, went to Hollywood. Immediately upon visiting Hollywood, I felt I was going to have to go to Venice. Once I visited Venice, which I remembered from my childhood as the best place ever, I felt like I needed a shower and a ride back to Hollywood.