Every Tattoo Has A Story
Words of Tattoo Wisdom and Stupidity by A Tattoo Artist of 20 Years.
Greetings. So like this challenge says about inner growth or personal meanings behind tattoos. For a long time I would argue not all tattoo's have meanings. Some get inked up just because they like the picture or art work and want to wear it.. forever. This is coming from myself, a man who has spent 20 years deep in the tattoo game as a tattoo artist. I've worked with the biggest names, tattoo magazines, conventions and even invented a few needle configurations in my time. I at one time truly believed that not every tattoo has a meaning.
Guess what. I was wrong. Having to force my self to reflect and really dig into what tattooing or body art means to me I came to realize that every single drop of ink on my body big or small had a deeper meaning behind it. Weather I realized it at the time or not. Ahhh wisdom. You always come a little too late. lol
Take for instance the very first tattoo I got when I was just 17 or so back in the late 1980's. Like 1987/88 I believe. Yes, I'm a wee bit aged at 48 years old. So anyways, I had no intentions of getting tattooed that day. Neither did my two homies who I was out skateboarding with. In fact I don't think tattoo's at that time ever really crossed my mind. Back then you have to realize that no one had tattoo's except bikers or sailors. Okay and a few punk rockers but they were totally taboo and there were only a few shops in Phoenix, AZ at the time compared to the few hundred today! Getting tattooed was just not a topic or mainstream like it is now.
So there we were, outside of our local 7-Eleven drinking Big Gulps and smoking Winston Reds and skating the curbs like the young skate punks we were when all of a sudden this short mullet wearing mirror glasses donning hipster comes around the corner and asks me for a smoke. "Sure," I said. Then he goes, "How'd you guys like some tattoo's? I'm a tattoo artist from Hobbs, New Mexico. Names Johnny. Johnny Mosh. I'll trade you guys some tattoo's for a couple packs of smokes."
Now we were like, "Hell yeah!" Not even a thought behind it. We were so dumb. So this was when like smokes were cheap. Like 1.25 a pack cheap. You could scrounge change from under your couch and get a pack cheap, like my unemployed at the time ass did quite often. So we were like cool. There's three of us, my homie Trent and Kevin was with me. So we made a deal with him and said we'd meet him back later at the 7-Eleven with some packs of smokes. Johnny says, "Cool. Because I live right behind this 7-Eleven in the apartments next door. I'll tattoo you guys in my apartment. Bring some weed if you can."
We haul ass home and start figuring out what we want tattooed. We'd never even thought of tattoo's before this glorious moment. We were so stoked. I immediately start combing through my pile of Thrasher magazines to find something skate related because skating was, and still is, my life back then. One of my buddies decided he wanted an image of Jesus doing a nose wheelie on a skateboard on his shoulder. My other homie wanted the batman symbol, which I still hate to this day and I chose the Fred Smith skateboard graphic of the screaming man and the name Alva for Alva boards who Fred Smith skated for.
I think you can still see the small screaming man face on my shoulder in the picture I took above buried under and near my tribal backpiece which I got many years later during my tattoo apprenticeship in New York. I know, right. Tribal. Don't judge it was 1999.
So we roll a few doobies for Johnny, buy a couple packs of smokes and we head back for our fateful life changing day at Johnny's. Now you might be thinking.. parents? lol, We were street punks and parents didn't exist in our eyes. Mine were recently divorced and I was never home, same with my friend. The third homie was cool with his folks and they loved us. They even built a half pipe in the backyard so they were pretty cool with most shit we did as long as we weren't hurting other people or property. Which we usually abided by. Usually.
So we get to Johnny's not realizing we are walking into the den of a meth head and heroine addict. In fact we hardly even new what that shit was. Sure we tried a few lines of coke or meth here and there at parties but we'd never seen it used in this fashion before. He would shoot it up. But hey, we were getting practically free tattoo's! So whatever put him in the mood was fine by us. Oh yeah, and his strung out old lady whom we later found out would turn trix for cash. Not with us thank God!
Johnny pulls out his shitty little portfolio, (looking back now, thought it was awesome at the time), ahh wisdom, late again. He shows us his pencil drawings that look like a ten year old did it. Now none of us had ever even seen a tattoo machine before or a tattoo being done. We just new that one dude in high school had a tattoo of three skulls and it looked dope. So when Johnny pulled out his home made prison style guitar string contraption made out of an electric razor to tattoo us. We thought nothing of it.
When he used the same guitar string and inks on all of us we thought nothing of it. When he pulled out his dirty jar of Vaseline jelly to use for the tattoo on us, that he later, after the tattoo claimed to use when he banged his old lady in the ass, we thought.. we are fucked and getting aides. Which was the big fear of the time. HIV.
After hearing all the stories of his old lady whoring around, her ex beating Johnny up one day and Johnny Mosh running around the apartment with an even bigger mullet wig high as a kite we decided we'd had about enough of this tattoo stuff and Johnny Mosh. We went home and sweated it out for the next 7-10 years wondering if we were going to get the HIV after learning more about dirty needles, sharing bloody inks and,, gulp, Vaseline that only God knows where it's been. Yes, we literally were freaked for the next ten years often reporting to one another when any of us had a check up at the hospital or blood work done like when I went in the Navy a few years later. We'd check in and be like, "Nope. Still clean. Don't have the HIV."
And believe me if any of us did get it from that dirty ass tattoo experience neither of us would have been surprised. Once we grew a little older, a little wiser and especially after my own personal tattoo apprenticeship and learning about blood borne pathogens and how easily shit is spread. We were all damn lucky and blessed to come out of that with no HIV or Hepatitis which is much easier to spread. Hepatitis can live for a week or more on surfaces.
So even though we were not thinking of getting tattoo's and the images we chose really had little to no meaning at the time. They did though on a much deeper level I only realized much later in life. I was getting tattooed because I was pissed that my parents were getting divorced. I was getting tattooed because even though I hardly spoke to my parents I new it would hurt them and piss them off. I was telling the world to fuck off and leave me alone. I was rebelling. Doing that and much worse in those days to express my pain and anger over my parents, especially my dad for some fucked up shit he did. I was a high school drop out giving up on my dreams and myself with out realizing it living day to day with no goals in mind besides smoking and skating.
Now this may all sound a little extreme but the circumstances behind my parents divorce and my anger at my father were because of extreme events. Like finding out my entire home life was a lie and my father had sexually molested one of my sisters for years. So he was dead to me at that point. Unfortunately when you grow up loving your parents for almost two decades even through the most heinous of acts that love does not immediately turn off. I shut down though after that.
Truth is I was a lost boy in a mans body. I had no counseling, no support to deal with my anger towards my father and other issues. Honestly most of my friends had no idea how bad my home life was or what my father did. I kept it a secret for many years. I was ashamed of my father and deeply hurt. It was just me and a bunch of skateboarding friends against the world. Oh yeah, also a Big Gulp and a pack of Winston Reds.
Years later as I grew as a real and professional tattoo artist I always said most of my tattoos meant nothing and I usually just liked the artwork or the drawing the tattoo artist did. Some people would get names and dates on them that meant something personal. I could never imagine doing that in those times and just picked pictures I liked with no meaning. So I thought. Fact is they all have a meaning and they all represent a certain time in my life and there was a deeper reason behind every drop of ink. You don't just sit through hours of pain and the torturous healing process because you think a picture is pretty cool.
There's a reason a lot of people refer to getting tattooed as ink therapy. I know now that all my tattoo's mean something deeply and I wouldn't change one thing about any of them. A few tattoo's were done on me by friends that have since passed away. I found a home in tattooing, unfortunately I found the industry to be with a lot of lost souls like I was and often still am. Good souls.. just lost. I'll often look at my tattoo's and just sit back and reflect and it'll take me back to that time in my life. Every horrible savory or delicious detail. Some good, some bad but they all have a deeper meaning to me now.
Until the next one.. later skaters.
About the Creator
Christopher Robertsson
Writer, creator and artist. I write, I draw, I tattoo, I paint, I eat. Hope you like.
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.