Tales from the Tattoo Shop

By Chris Walter

Tales From the Tattoo Shop is for anyone with a twisted sense of humour—not just for lovers of tattoos and tattoo culture. More than just a collection of crazy yarns and wild anecdotes, this book also profiles the contributing artists and explores the paths they took to become successful. From the bizarre to the insane, these true stories will leave you shaken and stirred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781927053317

Chris Walter

A hope-to-die drug addict, Chris Walter began writing full-time in 1998 after realizing that his life up to that point had been largely meaningless. His first published novel, Punk Rules OK, went mostly unnoticed but inspired him to take a DIY approach to the game. With help from his partner who worked at a printing shop, he launched GFY Press and began to write, publish, and distribute a steady stream of novels and music biographies. Incredibly, he found a small measure of success. After kicking drugs to the curb in 2001, Chris expanded GFY Press to include unschooled troublemakers Simon Snotface, Stewart Black, Drew Gates, and Ali Kat, drawing further criticism from the established literary industry. More than thirty-two titles and twenty-four years later, Chris Walter and GFY Press remain unrepentant and committed.

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defibrillator.

Kelly Rothschild

Machine-Gun Molly’s

Toronto, Ontario

Canada

I was a bartender when I met Ace Daniels, who owned the Way Cool Tattoo chain and lived above the shop on Queen Street. Ace was a wild man who ran around the neighbourhood, sometimes wearing nothing but obnoxious neon pajama pants. I lived across the street, and we became friends while chatting over cranberry juice. Before long, he started walking me to work. When the bar eventually closed, a friend who worked the counter at Way Cool told me they needed a girl at the Yonge and Sheppard location. Anthony, who ran the store, was an intimidating dude—not at all like the hipsters and un-tattooed business types who seem to dominate the industry these days. Tattoos were still partly the realm of misfits and bikers back then, and Anthony was the creaky bridge between the old school and the present corporate model.

Working the counter, I became increasingly inspired by the artists around me, so I began drawing more in my free time. I’d done a fair bit of painting, drawing, and sculpting as a kid, and loved the creativity that was happening in the shop. Then one day Anthony called me to his office. We almost never saw him except when he came to pick up the money, so I was a bit nervous. He’d said he’d seen my drawings, and just sat there smoking a cigarette and looking angry. I started to apologize, but he cut me off with a curt wave and said, You’re going to make me a lot of money. He was right: I did make him a lot of money. I was shop bitch and scrubbed tools at first, but I learned how to tattoo fairly quickly. I made good money for myself as well.

Way Cool was great. I mean, sometimes work could be tough, with the egos and all, but the shop was such a fantastic environment. We worked hard and we played hard; everything was simple and Anthony took care of us. Shops are different now, and it seems to me that something is lost in Toronto’s current explosion of tattoo shops. I worked at one place that sold ridiculous bedazzled clothing and tacky overpriced belt buckles. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think tattoo shops should be about tattooing.

I love tattooing, and people will tell you all sorts of things when they’re in pain. You don’t necessarily want this information, but I remember one guy telling me that getting tattooed was healthier than blacking out and waking up in Las Vegas after blowing $120,000. I’d just nod my head and murmur reassuringly when people said stuff like that. Bartenders don’t hear the crazy confessions we do.

Everyone handles pain differently, and some big guys aren’t as tough as they look. I had one client who was holding his breath and doing all the wrong things, so I stopped because I could tell he was going to pass out. He got up from the chair and stood there looking green for a minute, and then he just sort of slid down my arms and pinned me to the floor, completely unconscious and doing the chicken. This guy was probably 6’ 4 and 300 pounds, and I’m only 5’1 and 115, so I was totally trapped beneath his bulk. I couldn’t roll the guy off, and the other artist was in the basement, which meant all I could do was pound the floor with my free foot. My associate finally realized something was wrong and ran upstairs to drag the client off me. The big guy was okay after a few minutes and we finished the tattoo, but things were a bit dicey there for a minute.

One of the artists had a girl who barfed while sitting in his chair, and she managed to hit almost everything in the shop. She seemed a bit tense beforehand, so we told her to get a light snack or something. We didn’t tell her to totally pig out at McDonald’s, but that’s exactly what she did. The artist started the tattoo, but the client suddenly expelled a huge geyser of puke. That would’ve been bad enough, but she put her hand over her mouth at the last second, so it sprayed between her fingers like a barf sprinkler. Because she was on a raised chair getting her lower back done, the puke went everywhere. It was like that scene from Stand by Me, but with McChicken instead of pie. We had to temporarily halt operations and clean the shop from top to bottom. I was picking bits of McChicken out of my pencil box.

Another guy puked while I was tattooing him and passed out immediately afterwards, falling face-first into the garbage can. He was another big guy, and I was trying to hold him up, but he went down so fast that I got puke all over my arm. That happens fairly often actually, so don’t feel too bad if you’ve done that. Just don’t put your hands over your mouth or fall into the garbage can. Not unless you want to clean up the shop later.

Most customers don’t come around looking for trouble, but we had an incident with a redneck who arrived with his underage son. We had consent forms for sixteen and seventeen-year-olds, but it was always at the artists’ discretion. No one wanted the job (maturity is a big thing we look for in those situations), but the father got very upset when we wouldn’t tattoo a rebel flag on his kid. He kept posing different options, except everything he wanted was racist. Our manager was gay, and he and his Asian boyfriend were starting to get very frustrated with this asshole’s racial slurs and homophobic jokes. The dad was arguing loudly and being a total dick, so I told him, Listen man, if I have to call my boss, its going to be a lot worse than if I call the cops—your choice. The dude was acting all snarky and said to me, What kind of tattooer won’t do a swastika? I told him that maybe a Jewish artist wouldn’t do it—someone like me. He stood there staring blankly, and it took him a good long while to process what I was saying. I was just about to phone my boss when he left abruptly, banging on the windows and bitching about Jews and fags as he went. I often wonder what the outcome would have been if I’d called Anthony? Messy, I’m sure.

Mostly, though, we didn’t get too many assholes, but one chick came in and argued with us for a while before dropping her pants and pissing all over the floor. She was wasted and probably a little mentally unstable, so it didn’t pay to go to war with someone like that. But we kept a baseball bat and an extendable baton under the counter, and anyone who wanted to start shit was not going to win the argument.

One customer who didn’t puke, pass out, or pee on the floor was Corey Haim. He got his appointment by phoning all the Way Cool shops in Toronto trying to find someone to tattoo him for free. I happily agreed: partly because I was a gothy broad and loved The Lost Boys, and partly because I thought this train wreck would be highly entertaining. Corey was a total disaster, of course. By the time he arrived with two female presidents of his fan club, looking somewhat the worse for wear, we’d already researched his latest overdose and failed rehab stint. The girls were clearly in love with this bloated, puffy ex-movie star weirdo, and it was a bit hard to watch. He must have smoked two packs of Marlboros during his two-hour appointment (we did it after hours), and he sent the girls out to buy some activated charcoal at one point, because he’d taken something and didn’t know if he’d have to go to the hospital or not. I think they use activated charcoal to pump your stomach. He didn’t need it, but I still don’t know what he took.

The tattoo itself was nothing special. Corey had some sort of ugly alien head or something that he wanted me to cover with a bad, tribal panther. He told me just to draw it on, and I think his only real goal was to cover up the alien. I don’t think he was working at the time, and he said something about maybe taking me for sushi when a royalty cheque came in, which prompted some nasty glares from his fan club girls. It was difficult to keep a straight face. He gave me his phone number when we were done, but the session was excruciatingly awkward. Although the panther covered his old tattoo well enough, it was still awful. Corey had plenty of other tattoos, and they appeared equally crap. He finally left with his underage entourage and we never saw him again in person.

A year or so later, he had a reality TV show with Corey Feldman called The Two Coreys, and you could see that wretched tattoo in the opening credits, which was both amusing and appalling for me. I’d go out for drinks with the other artists after work, and one of us would usually jokingly suggest that we give Corey a call. I felt bad when he died. In the end, he was a figure to be pitied, not ridiculed.

Brian Reed

Black Dagger Tattoo

Billings, Montana

USA

I started my apprenticeship in 1997 under a lady named Lynn, who came up under the respected Erno Tattoo Szabady. Lynn simply showed up at an art show I was holding in a local coffee shop and my biggest dream came true when she offered me an apprenticeship. I was living in Santa Cruz, California at the time, and had a college degree in fine art that wasn’t doing anything for me. Tattooing offered me a way to make a living with my art, which was everything I’d ever wanted. I didn’t go to college to bag groceries.

Unfortunately, my art background didn’t apply well to tattoos. Skin isn’t much like paper at all, and the application technique was completely different. I thought I’d be a superstar right away, but it didn’t play out like that. You can be a great artist and still be a lousy tattooist. Learning was tough.

Erno’s tattoo shop was on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, the same one where part of The Lost Boys was filmed. The boardwalk itself was on a kick-ass funky, weird sort of spot in Beach Hill, and was populated with all the freaks and beach bums you might expect. Erno himself was a big deal in the ‘80s, and he was in all the biker magazines around at the time. Those five or six years at the shop were very good mostly, but then Lynn went a little crazy and fired me. After taking a year off, I started at Lovedog Tattoo. Eventually, I bought half the shop and worked there for about ten years until my partner and I stopped seeing things the same way. Shit happens when tattoo cowboys are locked up together for too long. I moved to Montana in 2015, and I’ve never been so landlocked in my life. Although I’m in Montana now, some of my best stories are from California.

One afternoon I was working alone when two, big musclebound dudes came in with this little chick. The girl wanted a tattoo, but the guys were being super weird so I told them to kick bricks. That wasn’t what they wanted to hear, and shit started going south in a hurry. The guys were calling me every name in the book and trying to get me to go outside with them, but they were just about to leave when my partner suddenly came back from lunch. My partner was not the most diplomatic guy around, and quickly made a bad situation even worse. He was only half the size of these guys, but wouldn’t back down, which would have been the smart thing to do. The steroid monkeys actually did leave after a while, but then they came back with a two-handed broadsword. You know, like the one from Conan the Barbarian. We quickly locked the front door, but it was made of glass and the guy shattered it with one poke. I thought this fool was going to chop us to bits. Lucky for us, they fucked off and made a clean getaway with the sword. This was right before Thanksgiving, so we couldn’t get anyone to fix the door for almost two weeks. Clients kept asking about the sheet of plywood over the door, but at least nobody died.

The thing about that shop was that it was between two bars on the beach, so there was always some crazy shit happening. Santa Cruz was a heroin town, and we were finding drug paraphernalia and empty booze bottles in the alley behind the shop every morning. We were the rowdy neighbours to San Jose, which was just over the hill. They had money and we didn’t, so there was some animosity between us. It didn’t matter though. Beach Hill was a fun place to tattoo and something was always going on.

For example, two customers came in together, and they both wanted Gary Coleman tattoos on their asses. Gary was a child star from a TV show called Diff’rent Strokes in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I still have no idea why these white guys wanted him on their butts. Stefan Johnsson, who went on to become very big in the world of tattooing, was working for me at the time, and he did both these guys. One of them got an actual portrait of Gary on his butt, and the other guy got his full name, but misspelled, with an inverted arrow to indicate where the missing e should have been. Neither of them would explain why they wanted these tattoos, which made us even more curious. It was impossible to understand why anyone would ask for an intentional spelling mistake. Maybe they lost a bet? Who fucking knows? It was a bit odd to say the least, but it was their skin.

A group of guys came in, and one of them got the infinity symbol with the word cunt right in the middle. He wouldn’t explain that either, and it was none of our business. My guy wanted a picture of his golden retriever looking back over its shoulder with menstrual blood dripping from between her legs. The bloody dog vagina against the orange fur was very striking, and I can still see that tattoo when I close my eyes. One of the guys got an upside-down cross, but that was very pedestrian compared to the stuff his friends got.

One sweaty guy came into the shop and wanted me to tattoo the word suicidal across his forehead. He was this gangster dude and wanted it spelled out in olde English lettering. I managed to talk him out of it, but he was dead set on getting it done right away. I don’t know what happened to him, although I doubt he’s still alive. I never get people like that in Billings.

I’ll always remember the Castroville gangbangers who wanted small artichokes behind their ears. California is divided into specific growing regions, and they were from the artichoke capital of the world. When someone wisecracked that artichokes didn’t seem very tough, one of them asked if they’d ever been punched with one. Artichokes have a very spiky exterior, and you can tell it would hurt like hell to get one in the face. The highest ranking guy got his first, and everyone else came after him according to rank, down to the last homeboy beer fetcher, or whatever. A week later, the ‘bangers showed up with their biggest homies—the guys that were so high ranking that they rarely went outside for fear of being killed or arrested. The cool thing about them was that they had to sit very quietly and not show any sign of pain. Even a wince would have been a terrible loss of face. I wish all my clients were like that.

The timing was great because they got tattooed just before the state fair. When the other cliques saw the artichoke tattoos, they all wanted tattoos of the specific vegetable in their growing region. We were doing tattoos of tomatoes and strawberries and every damn fruit and vegetable you can imagine. The valley is called The Salad Bowl, and all the ‘bangers wanted to represent. That was fine with us, and we were busier than hell. The little tattoos didn’t challenge us artistically, but we made good money.

Those ‘bangers were also smarter than they looked. They knew that the cops identified them by their tattoos, so they all got the same tattoos. Twenty of them all had artichokes, and a lot of other stuff, too. It was actually a cop who hipped me to that little trick. A cop looking at them wouldn’t be able to figure out who they were by their tattoos. The police were studying the photographs in my portfolio, but even that didn’t help them much.

One of my clients scares me, and he’s actually a friend. I was tattooing his palm once (probably something like Gimme My Money) and I could tell he wasn’t liking it much. From the corner of my eye, I could see him cocking his fist to punch me in the head. His fist kept going back farther and farther, and I knew there was a terminal spot he would reach where his fist couldn’t go back anymore and would have to shoot forward. It was very difficult to work on this guy and still be ready to duck when he let that ham-sized fist go. We’re tight friends and have known each other a long time, and I know he didn’t want to punch me, but it seemed for sure like it was going to happen anyway. I was trying to tattoo his crazy, leather-like work hands and waiting for the fist to crash into my head. That wasn’t the longest tattoo I’ve done in my life—not by a long shot—but it sure seemed like it. And no, he never actually did hit me.

Dustin Jak Schwam

Victoria, British Columbia

Canada

The first tattoo I ever saw was on my Big Jim doll, a toy that came out in the early ‘70s. The Dr Steel figure had a big dragon tattoo on its chest, and I thought that was cool as fuck. That’s where it all started for me. A bit later, I saw Dickie Betts of the Allman Brothers on an album cover, and he had lots of tattoos, which were fuckin’ rad. Fast forward to punk rock and I saw smaller tattoos on guys like Randy Rampage. Then I saw the Godoy twins from California and other tattooed punk rockers. Harley from the Cro-Mags had a big tattoo on his chest when he was just fifteen. I knew that Bill Baker had drawn the Beyond Possession album cover, and was aware that punk rockers were doing real art. I had an idea that I might like to do that too.

My dad owned a glass shop, where they etched glass with sandblasting tools. I started doing that, and it was a lot of fun. The work wasn’t done with computers back then, and you needed a very steady hand. Not long after that, I joined a punk band and started trading etched glass for tattoos. Guys like Jeff White and Zane Hall were telling me that I should start tattooing, so I began practicing on my friends in the Jak’s Skate Team with the old equipment they gave me. The Jak’s were all about free tattoos, and they didn’t give a fuck if they were shitty or not. We got so wasted that I’m amazed that any of those tattoos ever got finished. I also worked on myself, just to get a feel for the machine. After a while, I even started to improve.

Art Godoy, Theo Jak, and Jimbo Thompson really opened Victoria up for tattooing. I got a job at Paradise Tattoo in downtown Victoria and started pounding ink full-time. My mother was an artist and I’d done some drawing as a kid, so the work came fairly easily. My influences ranged from Iron Maiden album covers, to fanzine wunderkind Pushead and Mad Marc Rude, who did the Earth AD cover for the Misfits and more. I strongly believe that skateboarding had a lot to do with the rise of tattoos in the last ten years, and I did what I could to help that along. Not because I wanted tattoos to become trendy and popular, but because I wanted all my friends and fellow skaters to look sharp. Punk rock and skateboarding culture is everything to me, and tattoos have always been a big part of that. Half the skaters in Victoria sport my ink. My fellow Jak’s also make good customers.

I went from being a tattoo customer to being an artist, so I can spot bullshit a mile away. I’ll have someone booked for the whole day, and they will phone half an hour before the appointment to say they got called in to work or some such crap. Thing is, I can tell not only what drug someone is on by the sound of their voice, but I can also tell which neighbourhood they scored it in. Don’t bullshit me with your lame excuses—I’ve already used them, and I was a lot more convincing than you are. I’ll spend your fucking deposit at the bar down the street.

I learned to tattoo in an environment where the other guys were lighting firecrackers and throwing footballs around. The real debauchery would begin after hours, or sometimes a bit earlier. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that sort of shit anymore, but now it seems almost too easy to tattoo. Not that it isn’t a challenge to keep up with the new talent. Some of the guys coming in are better than the guys training them, and the quality of the art seems to be getting better and better every year. The industry might be hipster dominated now, but some of the new guys are fucking incredible. You have to step up your game or be left in the dust, so I do my best every time I pick up a tattoo machine.

Working full time at Paradise, I heard and saw all sorts of crazy shit. Weirdos would drift in off the street, and one fucking guy tried to sell us a motorhome. Flash was a lot more popular back then, so people would pick some piece of shit off the wall and expect it to be finished in thirty minutes. One gangbanger told our guy that his homeboys would fuck him up if the tattoo wasn’t to his liking. The guy kept talking shit, so the artist wiped him down with pure alcohol instead of water every few minutes. The gangbanger couldn’t scream or moan because his image was on the line. He had no choice but to grit his teeth, but that must have fucking hurt. Here’s a tip, kids: Don’t be an asshole.

One customer told his kid to stop crying