sboyer

on my uncle kevin who works inside norad. done by sky james.

Ok, so lets set this straight "it's the indian not the arrow" stands pretty true in tattooing to a certain point. Some great tattooers tattoo with pretty crappy machines. i use a kaplan pretty regularly. i did rebuild it but the thing is so crappy they should just be disposable. secondly, spaulding and Rogers sucks.....really they do. all the previous defense is half true, paul Rogers designed the frame and ordered 250 to re-drill the geometry and only used the frame. old spaulding coils were great, the ones with fiber washers were good, the ones now would work great for a fishing weight. my first machines were a cut back supreme, which was the second machine aaron cain made, and my shader was a puma frame, both of which are the thicker older castings. i have every casting and they get cheaper and cheaper. as for the part where they sell to everyone this was true about waters, moskowitz, jenson and so on. The difference is that unlike today, where every dude that can ride a fix gear or grow a beard is a tattooer, back then the market was much smaller. they also sold veterinarian set ups. i haven't seen the work horse iron vet set yet but if there was a market they would be leading it. ha ha. In reality, there is no way i could go to college and apprentice at the same for the simple fact that when i should've been studying i would've been drawing...all night. but with todays line drawing books and the current folk revival technique, artistic fortitude can be waved as the bar is now easier to jump. sounds bitter but its true. in reality if your gonna be a tattooer your degree wont mean shit when your whip shading a jenson design. You're lucky if you've found a decent tattooer to apprentice with, and the longer you've been putting the effort, the more the tattoo community will open up to you. To me, that's always been one of the most important things about tattooing, the more you put in, the more you will get out of it.
Oh, and Nick, if you've got so much free time, shouldn't you be doing some laundry or changing a diaper or something? At least go get your poor wife a cup of coffee.

on my uncle kevin who works inside norad. done by sky james.

on my uncle kevin who works inside norad. done by sky james.

on my uncle kevin who works inside norad. done by sky james.

i like that lettering on paper or print or whatever. dont care for it in tattoos. for me personally, lettering should be classy and timeless. when im 75 i dont want graffiti or death metal letters on me.

I do a ton of lettering. If I could I would do it all day long or at least draw it for everyone at the shop. I just find that I have a formula that I like to use and it's been successful for me for te most part. The key is just practice it over and over. I have all the books that have come out and I'll reference them if I get stuck on a letter but other than that I just practice. Before I get to work inbetween tattoos after tattoos when I'm on the phone whenever.
I went and got some lettering from Mark Mahoney a dozen years ago and he showed me some cool tricks that I still use.
Like Julio I'm always looking at old signs and lookingat sign painters books. Hand lettering to
me is such a lost art. Rollo told me that good lettering can save a mediocre tattoo am bad lettering can ruin and amazing tattoo.

I agree. It's just frosting over crappy cake

These were posted on another forum, and I thought some people here would appreciate the scans.

my right arm was done by whitehead, rassier and scott sylvia. i think this most recent tattoo i got from him was my 6th tattoo from jef. when i was in rockford doing research for the zeis book he did a zeis referenced lady/snake/heart on my inner upper thigh. tender moments! ha ha.

had a slight set back. while in the process of backing up my external drive full of content for the book it crashed. total nightmare. after a few week of data recovery and anxiety we recovered almost everything. lesson learned. back things up more often. trying to get caught up and make up for time lost. we are still shooting for a early 2012 release. i would love to have them for the slc convention. Yellow Beak Press | Coming Soon! should be up in the near future. we also shot a video promo with some cool teaser shots of the repaints. that should be online at the same time the website launches. pre orders will follow shortly.

another one on my buddy evan.

had a slight set back. while in the process of backing up my external drive full of content for the book it crashed. total nightmare. after a few week of data recovery and anxiety we recovered almost everything. lesson learned. back things up more often. trying to get caught up and make up for time lost. we are still shooting for a early 2012 release. i would love to have them for the slc convention. Yellow Beak Press | Coming Soon! should be up in the near future. we also shot a video promo with some cool teaser shots of the repaints. that should be online at the same time the website launches. pre orders will follow shortly.

sky james was nice enough to tattoo an image off his flash sheet he did for the book on both kayla and i. both are zeis/bill jones referenced. they were done with a zeis machine built by steve turner.

My favorite tattoo book of all time is Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos By Samuel M. Steward, PhD. At some point I'd like to write a review of this book. Sam Steward is also known as Phil Sparrow in the tattoo world. Steward played a hand in starting out two of the greatest tattooers of the second half of the twentieth century, Cliff Raven and Ed Hardy. I could go on and on about this book so I'll try to limit it here. Part of the book focuses on Street Shop tattooing in Chicago and Milwaukee during the 50's, Along with Oakland in the 60's. The other part of the book looks at tattooing from the psychological side. All in All a must read for every tattooer or anyone curious about tattooing. Its available for purchase on the interwebber.

This was done on my good friend/mentor Tom before he went to Vietnam in the late 60's. It was done in Kenosha WI by a guy named Greg May. Greg was murdered by an ex employee in 2000 but from my understanding was know as a very fast solid tattooer in the chicago area. I saw the flash sheet Tom picked this image off and it was very well done. Tried to get him a copy of it as a gift but no dice.Tom has a few more tattoos from Greg. I will try and get some quality pictures next time I see them.

I think we're all (tattooers, that is) standing on the shoulders of giants. I've often thought about putting that on my business card.
I sort of agree with your point but any 'fame' that's bought or achieved through brown-nosing will be short lived. The guys who stick to concentrating on doing the best work they can, regardless of any fame or notion of celebrity are the ones who have the respect of their peers.
Fame is pretty easy to achieve, like you said, you just show up in the right places, shake everyones hand and make sure you get your photo taken.
Gaining the respect of your peers is another matter entirely. That takes hard work, effort, some intelligence and stamina over years or decades.
I know which one I'd rather have, although I did just spend a hell of a lot of time speaking with some heavy-hitting tattooers this weekend but maybe that's different at a convention. At least I hope so.
I think there's still plenty of blood sweat and tears in tattooing, it's just outweighed by the fame hungry party-tatters, starfuckers and endless bloggers.
I guess the only thing I disagree with and I may be opening a huge can of worms I'd rather not be involved with but, I wouldn't lump Picasso with 20th century shitty conceptual art. Though I have no desire to discuss "what is Art". Pollack made the mental leap that your brush didn't have to touch the canvas. Much like Zulueta and Hardy made the leap that a tattoo design didn't have to be a recognisable object. What happened after that is the problem, not what those guys did.
At the age of 14 Picasso could draw and paint like the old masters, Rubens included. The advent of photography meant that artists were no longer commissioned to create realistic likenesses, so they worked on creating more expressive or abstract art. Personal taste or preference aside, Picasso (and other modern artists, particularly cubists and impressionists) changed the way the rest of us perceive the world, wether we like it or not.
A Sailor Jerry (or Coleman) style pinup works much the same as a Picasso line drawing: there is perfectly the right amount of lines and detail. If you add more, you spoil it but if you take even a single line away, it doesn't make sense. One of the goals of cubism is to reduce the real world into the simplest geometric shapes and sometimes to show more than one dimension or time at once. Traditional tattooing is good at that too, I think.
I'm not a fan of the look of Picasso's more abstract stuff, but I love that he existed and changed the way we could view the world. I think that most contemporary Modern Art, certainly since the 1960's is total shit.
Luckily, Art (with a capital A) becoming conceptual pushed painting back into to fulfilling it's role as a craft, which allowed 'low-brow' or counter-cultural, craft based art (like Crumb, Williams and Greg Irons) to exist. And for that, I'm surely grateful.
But I certainly agree, 100% with the statement that there is no substitute for hard work.

I think the extras with Ed Hardy and Lyle Tuttle talking about Bert Grimm and other old tattooers and the interview with Doug Hardy on the extras was the best part of the whole DVD. Oh and the part when Ed was talking about his dad and his photography. The movie was okay, but that stuff was amazing to hear.

Tattoo Zeke featuring Daniel Higgs « Occult Vibrations
Excerpt from Tattoo Zeke featuring Daniel Higgs.

Unfortunately I only brought a fixed lens, I'm really kicking myself for not bring a wide angle lens but it is what it is.
Here's what I got for those of you that couldn't attend.....
Shige tattooing, I heard him say that he worked on this guy for 8-9 hours


Tomo tattooing



our own Mario Desa tattooing

Chad Koeplinger

Oliver Peck

Chris Trevino

Kim Saigh

Shawn Barber

Henning Jorgensen

With color:

a friend's father started getting tattooed in 1949. he was the first guy i remember as a kid seeing tattoos on. he told me his first few were from Dad Libertys' in old Scolley Sq, Ma. i had my friend send me some photos. these are a few of my favorites. unfortunately they are small phone pics, but you can still tell what's going on.

obvious lieber influenced some pretty heavy hitters after him but it seems his name is often left out. one of the greats in my opinion.

dan rick