In central Philly, you could walk a half dozen blocks just on South Street and see a dozen tattoo shops.
I sent for cheap a shit kit to be mailed to my house. I bought green soap online and some kuro sumi ink with rubber practice skins. I tore those machines apart and put them back together to learn every piece. I read a book on basics for the apprentice. I pounded lines into dozens of practice skins preparing for my own fist tattoo on myself. i bought slightly better machines online for 50 bucks a piece.
My plan was to tour the Philly Tattoo convention with my sketchbook to show tattoo artists with plans to tattoo myself on the schedule.
But tattooers from all over the county scoffed at my "cute" drawings. There was so much expensive merch, so many supplies and varieties of tattoo machines from a dozen different builders. Hundreds of artists and people getting tattooed flooded the venue. I left the party half drunk and absolutely overwhelmed. There was no way i could do this at home. So I planned a second trip to Philly but this time to the local shops. I wanted to know more about apprenticeships.
My good friend Yaakov stumbled aside me although he was coming down from some seemingly prophetic LSD trip the night before. He didn't like to pass up an adventure though. I wrote my name next to my phone number several times to be torn out the back of a notebook i brought with me on the train. It was too late after design school to still have business cards left. The wind was biting but the whiskey in my coffee kept me warm.
The first shop I entered was close to the subway stop. A frail, long grey-haired man with ample height reminiscent of Alex Grey saw me enter and dropped his tattoo machine. His shop didn't hire apprentices. You needed to have tattooed for 15 years to work there. He'd been tattooing for 25. However to my surprise, he narrated what the rest of my day would be like.
No one was going to look at my work, artists are going to condescendingly tell me to leave. Shops around here were exclusive. They hired artists when they're family friends. You need to be in the loop. I didn't know anyone.
No was going to give me the time of day, except Trey. I showed him my book and he told me what he liked. He gave encouragement, with a client sitting in his chair waiting to be tattooed. Of all the places I visited that day, he was most helpful in showing me the way and sent me on down the crouded street.
The red-head gal in the shop a few blocks down told me I'd never get in a shop around here. My work was too contemporary. If I happened to live in New England, I'd be more welcome.
This is an old-school town. She said if i became a tattoo artist I could forget about my social life, pets, family, girlfriend because I'd be a slave to the trade.
I sat with a smile for 40 minutes as she tried to intimidate me. Not this time. She seemed to have been pleasantly surprised not to have fazed me though. I wondered how she had so much time to waste trying in vain to chase me away. An Israeli looking beauty with a reaching widows peak peered with interest and a smile as she tattooed her client.
A fat guy with black sunglasses told me to leave his shop. I sat in someone else's lobby for 20 minutes before the told me no one one was going to talk to me. Someone else told me to try a place across the street where later found out they only hired women. Some were closed for the day and others on my list were empty buildings. I had achieved pretty much what i set out to do. There was no way I was going to get an apprenticeship in Philly but i knew from the start. My next list was of shops nearby the sign company where I worked during the day as a graphic designer.
Next week I stopped at a place I scoped out at lunch. It was in the same building strip where I got lunch everyday. After work I paid them a visit. Justin, the artist on duty, enjoyed looking at my work. However, the owner wan't there. I left my name and number and moved onto a place 10 minutes down the road.
Lucking out I caught the owner a few minutes before he left.
Duff hadn't been there for long and he shop hadn't actually opened yet but. He had been adjusting the finishing touches for opening next week. I showed him my work and it happened that he was searching for a new apprenticeship for the shop where he was sending an artist from his home base to manage. The next Tuesday after work I started my first day on the job, officially as a tattoo apprentice.
Thanks for following my story! The goal is to summarize my adventures as an artist loosely in order but I can't help but to recount flashbacks. We all like to think our experiences happen in some fashion of cause and effect. In reality, we can only begin to imagine what the lapses in our stories have to do with influencing how we interact with reality. Are they really trivial intermissions, or do they play a bigger role in our experience than we can imagine? We can find infinite causes to the effects under infinite levels of analysis
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