show. It was pretty funny because a lot of people didn’t realize that I tattooed. After seeing the show they didn’t even know I was an artist. It was
cool. I like the business part of it. I’ve had my shop for 21 years. I enjoy the
business. I’m good at business so it was fun for me to help people and wake
some of them up and teach them. There were some people on the show
older than me and in business longer than me who just didn’t know some of
the little things they should know.
Did you guys get feedback from some of those shops afterwards
about them continuing with your suggestions or if they went back to
their old ways?
Yeah, I mean I am very good friends with a lot of the shops until this day. I
just finished doing a guest spot in Texas with one of the shops I did on the
show. The guys that I did the shop for in Philly, I don’t think those guys own
it anymore. One of them actually passed away. But I’m still friends with every guy that worked there. Out of all the shops there’s maybe one or two
that didn’t listen. They were pretty much on TV because they wanted to be
on TV. Other than that I talk to everybody. Some of them still call me for suggestions. We try to keep in touch.
Looking at your show along with the other shows what are your overall feelings on them?
My overall feelings on the whole tattoo TV thing, in general, is you have to…
listen, there’s a lot of stuff that they do with tattoo TV that a lot of us don’t
agree with. Then there’s stuff that a lot of us do agree with but you have to
take into consideration that it’s TV. So you’re not going to have a program
that’s one hundred percent true or real because then it wouldn’t make the
people watching it happy. Reality TV is reality TV because there’s stuff on
there that…reality TV is the furthest from reality that you’re ever going to
see, everybody knows that. So if you’re not giving them drama and fights
and arguments and all that stuff, it’s not going to make it. You know what I
mean? It’s not going to do it.
During a number of conversations with artists, they say they now hear
consumers almost critiquing artists’ work.
Which is one of the things that some of us feel is bad. It makes critics who
shouldn’t be critics. It’s gonna happen with anything. It happened with the
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