The Early Years

I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. When I was 17 I left Illinois and traveled around the country for a while. I left home because I had a pretty negative childhood; I was in trouble a lot, taking a lot of drugs, in and out of juvenile hall. I had decided that getting a high school education was a pointless idea. I thought that I had ruined my life by being a screw-up and taking drugs and engaging in vandalism. So, I took off and drove around to different states, and eventually ended up in San Francisco after a year of traveling.

I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. While I was there, I went back to school and got my high school diploma. Then I got my bachelor of fine arts from a private art school in Oakland. I studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts. My parents were very hippy-like, and took me to a lot of art galleries as a child. I was influenced by the Cubists and the Surrealists. As I got older, I got interested in these movements and everything that lay underneath it. I decided one day that. I wanted to learn something somewhere. That’s why I went to art school. I went with the false impression that art school would make you an artist, but I learned it just teaches you to harness the artist inside of you.

Becoming a Working Artist

When I graduated from college, I found myself unable to get a job as an artist, so instead I worked a variety of office jobs. Working in an office was fairly easy, but unfulfilling. I had a hard time holding a job because I was so unfulfilled; the smallest provocation would cause me to quit. I was an artist and I wanted to make a living at that, and I had also been getting tattoos since I was 16. I decided to meld my desire to get tattooed and my desire to be an artist.

Tattooing is an apprenticeship-based industry, much like carpentry. It’s pretty traditional in that sense. There’s no reputable school to go to. It’s an art form that’s handed down verbally from generation to generation. I had to find somebody with whom to do an apprenticeship, so I started researching. I had no idea what to look for, I just knew from getting tattoos that it took more technical knowledge than I possessed. I knew that I was a good artist, and that if I just found somebody to teach me that I would be able to become a talented tattoo artist in a short period of time.

Finding a Mentor

Tattoo apprenticeship is as unique as tattoo artists themselves. I’ve never met two tattoos artists who have had the same experience. I figured that I needed to find somebody, an older tattoo artist, maybe in his 50s or 60s, so I picked up the Yellow Pages and I looked for tattoo shops. I found one that looked like a pretty good place. I went to the shop website and I noticed that the owner was really into bicycles. I’m an avid bicyclist, so I figured if anybody was going to help me, it was this guy. I gathered my portfolio, went to his shop and asked him to teach me. And he said no, of course.

What I didn’t know at the time was that tattoo shops get people coming in at least once a week asking to learn to tattoo. What I’ve come to understand over the years is that it’s a lot of work to teach someone to tattoo. Most people are unwilling to pass on the knowledge unless they believe that you’re really going to use it. They don’t want to waste their time.

Realistically, a tattoo artist has the ability to teach perhaps three people properly in their lifetime. When I say properly, I mean really honoring their obligation to fulfill the apprenticeship. Most people that try to learn to tattoo never finish their apprenticeship, which makes tattoo artists unwilling to teach people that they don’t know very well. I’m really lucky that I ended up where I did. The first person I asked to train me, it turned out, was very famous; he was one of the few tattoo artists in the country with high name recognition among other tattoo artists. His name is C.W. Eldridge.

He told me no, but he didn’t close the door at that point. He said, “Your work looks nice, but there’s no tattoo designs in here.” In tattooing you need to be able to draw eagles and anchors and hearts and flowers. Because that’s what people get tattooed on them. He told me to go out and buy a tattoo magazine, and look at some tattoos, and draw some tattoo designs based on the pictures in the magazines.

Learning the Trade

I went home, I did what he asked and I came back. I believe he was quite shocked that I actually walked in the door with these designs. He said, “Well, those are okay,” and he told me what I did wrong. Then he told me to go home and do more. This lasted for about six months. It was a weekly occurrence; me going back to see him and showing him my work.

We eventually became friends, and he said that he would be willing to assist me in getting my tattoo equipment. Professional tattoo equipment is only sold to professional tattoo artists, so you buy your first equipment through the person who is teaching you. They vouch for you with the suppliers. He told me that he would be willing to show me something about tattooing, but that I wasn’t going to be working in his tattoo shop. He would teach me what I needed to know, to apply for tattooing jobs. He was going to act as a reference, but I had to find the job myself.

You have to be very self-motivated to be a tattoo artist. The only things that C.W. gave me were the tattoo equipment, the basics of the tattoo application process, and references. Because I am self-motivated, those basics were all I needed to become a tattoo artist.

Becoming a Successful Tattoo Artist

To be a tattoo artist you need to be a people person. That’s the number one thing, because you’re working on people. Their experience with you will shape their happiness with the tattoo more than the quality of the tattoo. I’ve had customers come to the shop with tattoos from other artists that I thought were amazing pieces of work, but they were very unhappy with their tattoos because they were very unhappy with their experience. Often they point out “mistakes” that I would not consider mistakes but rather typical issues that result from working on a living being that moves.

You have to be a people person but you also have to be a salesman. You have to be able to draw whatever people want. People are inherently conservative with their tattoos. They ask for the same things over and over and over. Tattooing is also a very impulsive business. People decide “this is the day I’m going to get a tattoo,” and they come in to get it. So you have to be able to draw for them on the spot, and the drawing has to be flawless before they’ll let you tattoo it on them. It’s kind of like being a performer. You can’t go out on stage and perform a song that is half-finished, because no one wants to hear it.

Tattoo artists have traditionally been more technicians than artists, using the equipment to recreate a design that’s displayed on the wall, over and over. When someone comes in and says “I want this heart here on the wall that says Mom,” rather than tattooing that exact design for them, I will draw something that’s unique and custom. I might only make small changes, but I will draw it in my own style. That way, if they went to another tattoo shop it would be hard for them to find the same thing.

The first thing that C.W., my mentor, told me was that tattooing was the easy part, and customer service was the really difficult part.

A Changing Industry

To make a tattoo, you use needles that are soldered to a bar that are pushed in and out of the skin by an electro-magnet. It’s the same technology that you find in older doorbells. The magnet goes on and goes into the skin and goes off and is removed form the skin. It happens about 300 times a second. The technical aspect of tattooing is largely unchanged.

The things have changed in the industry are that the pigments are no longer toxic…and the cleanliness aspect. The inks are made of non-toxic pigment, the same type of pigment used for candy, like M&Ms. It’s the same type of pigment in children’s toys. Because it goes into peoples’ mouths, the company makes sure that the pigments are not toxic.

Up until the mid-1980s, tattoo artists were a lot less clean than they are today. They didn’t use latex gloves, and they would often re-use needles on people. Beginning in the 1980s, single-service needles became a common practice. HIV/AIDS was the impetus for that. There’s also a competitive aspect; the cleaner your shop appears, the more money you can make.

The art has changed dramatically, too. The tattoo industry is moving more and more to this use of original drawings. Many shops no longer have designs on the wall, but instead will draw what a customer asks for. One reason for this is that you have people, like me, coming into the industry with an art background, which forces the level of the artwork higher and higher. Tattoo artists have to change their level of work or they face becoming irrelevant, which means being unable to make enough money to survive.

A Changing Clientele?

A common misconception about tattoos is that the people who get them are all bikers. Maybe that’s because they have the most visible tattoos, but as a tattoo artist you know that everybody comes to get tattooed. When I say everybody, I mean everybody from the super-rich to the super-poor and everybody in between. It’s not that there has been a change in the clientele it’s just that people have become more public with their tattoos as the public has become more tolerant of them.

Ten years ago a housewife would have gotten a tattoo that was hidden and very small. Now, that same housewife is willing to get something more public because it’s become socially acceptable. This is largely because of tattoos being on television and in the popular culture.

It also has to do with geographic location. In a place like Cincinnati, a real working-class type town, you’re going to see more working-class people and more bikers getting tattooed. In a place like Los Angeles, you’ll have all kinds of people getting tattooed because it’s more acceptable to show more skin.

The Politics of Tattooing

When I got my first tattoo, in 1985, they were definitely identified with the rebellious youth culture. Now tattoos have almost become a way to be a part of the crowd. We see tattoos on television, and we want to be like people on television. It’s almost become a rite of passage to get a tattoo.

Tattoo artists tend to be fiercely independent people. You could never have a tattoo artists’ union because you could never get five tattoo artists to agree on anything. There’s an old joke in tattooing that goes “How many tattoo artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” The answer is “Five. One to do it, and the other four to tell him how to do it better.” Tattoo artists are big supporters of labor unions, even though they might not necessarily want to be in a union.

Here in the United States, I would say that 98% of tattoo artists are very proud Americans and very patriotic. I was told once, “You may not like war, but you’ll learn to love it,” meaning that you might be disgusted by the concept of war, but war also brings you a lot of business. Lots of customers are getting a tattoo before they go off to war. As a tattoo artist you are applying their war paint. So, you have interesting dichotomies. Tattoo artists are fiercely independent and highly patriotic. Some are liberal, though there’s a lot of conservative tattoo artists as well.

The Future

I love what I do, and I will probably do it until I can no longer physically do it. I like tattooing because it allows me to be an artist. It allows me the freedom to work wherever I want in the world, literally.

In Los Angeles, customers usually pay a $100 minimum and $150 per hour. Your pay is based on time, similar to being a car mechanic. Tattooing allows me to support myself in a comfortable fashion.

Find out more about Jason Sweet and his work at www.freaksandgeekstattoo.com.