and Joe Sorren. I had this idea for
a painting then I went and did a
guest spot at Cleen Rock’s shop. I
had a client out there and he asked
if I had anything in my sketchbook
that I had been thinking of doing or
looking to do. So I pulled out some
sketches of my paintings that I had
no intention of tattooing. The guy
really liked them because they were
different and nobody was doing stuff
like that back then at least not in tattooing. I did that on e and all of sudden that’s all I was doing. It took off
really fast.
Now knowing that, would you
rather work with most of what the
client wants or would you rather
have the freedom to do what you
want once they give you an idea?
Ideally my preference is…I don’t like
having freedom; take a drawing and
I’ll take that. I never know what to design for people. So I always like having a loose idea. I have a career that spans almost 20 years now so when I
was doing the creepy cute new school stuff it was nice because I got known
for it. It was all I did. People really started trusting me and it was almost at a
point where people started to try to out-weird each other. It was fun. It was
always like a challenge. So I got really fun ideas from my clients; I had really cool clients. I was living out in California for a while then when I moved
back out to Ohio I ran into a problem where a lot of the clients out here…I
don’t know if they just weren’t into the style that I was doing or they didn’t
want what I did. They hired me because they knew I could put in a solid
tattoo but they weren’t hiring me to do what I did. That was like a struggle
because I lost my voice as an artist for a long time. It made me not want to
do art. I almost retired from tattooing because of it. Although I like the idea
that we are a service and you’re trying to do the best for your clients but it’s
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