My journey to become a High End Tattoo Artist... part 2

Hollywood Nights…

On the busy part of Hollywood (Highland to Vine) at the time there were like 6 shops. You would think this would create a lot of tension but in fact they were all owned by the same people. Iranian businessmen with a ton of shops ironically directly over the LA subway. 50/50 may not seem so great to some people but stepping out of prison and into $50/hr for whatever I could land was alright in my book. Of course it’s not ever 40 hours and you only get the $50 because there is homework and longevity involved, but it does sound good. I had spent my college years hanging with the fellas, avoided the war, and got out with a career and no college debt. Hard to go wrong… Eventually, I found a way.

Hollywood Nights…I worked at OZ Tattoo, the only one without a headshop or selling shitloads of t-shirts on the block. I took the seat of the illustrious Madison Tattoo who was upgrading to Devil Dolls Studio. For reference, at this time just around the corner a couple of blocks down was the crew of True Tattoo with Clay Decker, Chris Garver, Tim Hendrix, Kat Von D, and the rest before Miami Ink blew up. I met one of the owners, Ray at LA Tattoo on Hollywood Boulevard, told him I was tattooing and brought a few of my photos and he told me I could bring a customer and do a tattoo there. If it went well, I would have a job somewhere on the strip. It didn’t go well. I forget what the tattoo was but the guy was flopping around like a fish and acting like he was giving birth. A real bitch move in one of the highest pressured situations of my life. In any event, Ray did like how I was able to wrangle and calm the client (even though I wanted to put him to sleep) and that I didn’t bring in the most simple thing possible. Three days later I was working at OZ from noon to 2 am at 50% of $100/hr for any hour I could book. I had taken the seat being left vacant by Madison Stone. I was in!

I learned a lot there. I had to, I knew nothing at all, was fresh to using traditional machines, and wound up like a firecracker. I stayed on the grind for the better part of the year and met a few cool people. Bought my Mickey Sharpz and my Brass Swing Gates from National which are still at the top of my list of favorites. We would work until last call and then sit in the lot out back with a case of beer until the sun came up a couple of times a week.

Having just gotten out, I, of course, wanted to date. Apps weren’t a thing yet so I found someone on Craigslist. Kimmy was not a good person, just not my person. Kimmy lived with Cytherea. If you don’t know who that is, she was popular at the time. Trigger warning though, it’s dirty. I remember going over one night to help Kimmy with her puppies who had shit all over the house. Everyone there was playing cards and they had asked me how I got myself into the situation to help clean up the dogshit with the fat chick downstairs. My only answer… “the goddamned internet”. Ultimately I became pretty decent friends with one of those guys even getting busted with him later on. If you want a laugh sometime, ask me about Dick Tracy and the Stolen Puppies and I take you on a journey.

One of my favorite people from that time was an older guy down the street named Dusty. Now, I don’t know the whole story but, as I heard it, Dusty had been around on Hollywood and the Venice Boardwalk since the dawn of time. The story I heard was that Dusty had the first shop in Hollywood, it was upstairs near where LA Tattoo was. He told me about an artist who worked for him with a horrible addiction issue. One time he fell out in the bathroom which was covered with blue tiles. He made some artwork about it and that later became the Dr. Feelgood album cover. In any event, around the time that I was ready to leave Hollywood for something closer to home, he was building out his private studio and opened his doors to me.

Around the same time, I met Mark. Mark ran Skin Candy and made ink for a few different supply companies. I have some stories about that but at the time I was able to learn a lot about ink and mixing powder pigments. My favorite story for that time was getting to go to True Tattoo (old location) and meet Clay Decker upstairs where he had some pretty good stories about conventions back in the day. For whatever reason they loved the skin candy yellow. I forget what made it great but back in the day yellow was mixed with yellow Listerine and that did something to the mix. His was a generation down from that if I remember correctly but Clay loved that one specific mix. In the early episodes of Miami Ink you could see the ink bottles with the bright pink labels in the background that were prior to the label in the photo above. I used to ship it out to them. I even got to put out some fires between the boss and Gil Montie when some ink got held up after a hurricane one year.

That didn’t last too long as in January of 2006 I got stopped for making a right without fully stopping and having that contact with police got me a 5-month parole violation. They were arresting me and pulling a ton of dirty flyers out of my trunk. I had gone to the porn awards in Vegas (which was hundreds of miles outside of my allowed radius)and had gotten a ton of flyers signed by the girls at the show for all of my buddies still locked up. My heart was in the right place, but I’ve always been one to test the realities of my boundaries.

By the time I was doing parole violations I had already been tattooing professionally but I got deep into portraiture on this trip. My first trip through the system was hanging out with buddies, but by the time of the parole violations, I started realizing that I was meeting a lot of the same personalities and hearing the same stories and meth recipes. I knew I had to figure something out or I would be doing life on the installment plan like everyone else.

The California Prison System, at this time, was pretty segregated. If you have a hustle, that means that your customer base is highly limited to the people to whom you are bound to give the best prices when it comes to tattooing. This is because when you are locking yourself in a cell with a person you are opening yourself up to a lot more risk. Luckily the rules aren’t nearly as clear cut for artwork. Enter, William Maughan. Someone sent me this book when I was down. Had to be my boy Art or my Dad. This was one of my first forays into portraiture. It’s more about blocking in shadows and the envelope method rather than the construction method where you are looking for lines measurements. I highly recommend it as this is not really what I see when people are drawing portraits. If you are like me and certain artistic concepts that seem very mainstream are hard to grasp or understand for you, this book discusses a great way of looking at the head and portraits. I read, and maybe it was even this book, that any problem you could run into in realism you would run into between the ears. That’s what makes portraits one of the better study subjects in my opinion, because the principals can be applied to damn near everything.

I used to charge $30 for a portrait drawn from a prison ID or a picture. Know who has $30 to send a drawing home to Mom? Shot callers. People who are all big names in their community. Great people to know if you are keeping track. Friends in low places. I wasn’t doing any sort of business I had to worry about other than getting ripped off for my labor. I ended up realizing at this point that I had found myself in a really good place. Yes, I was in prison…. Again. But I was able to deal with 4x of the population, all of the important criminals, with basically no risk and living as well as anyone could in the situation. Getting out was always harder for me but in the last couple I would have my girlfriend Christina pick me up at the gate and bring my machines so I could hear them again. It’s so funny to remember from this point.

Now the trick was learning how to apply this to life on the streets.