TATTOO MACHINE AND A CEMETERY
One story that I always liked to tell was the one about the tattoo machine and the cemetery. I won’t mention the tattoo artist by name but I will say he was forged from the old school tattoo community. This artist used to make getting a tattoo a different kind of experience in a time when people didn’t know much about the industry and blindly walked into a tattoo shop without any knowledge about how it would be. He used to love to play on that by being the character that he was taught to be. He was bold, loud, and comical which was what most expected a tattoo artist to be. When he would finish a first timer’s tattoo, he would say to his client '“You are now officially white trash”.
He also liked to say things out loud instead of quietly in his mind. If you were lucky, his old school coil machines would run perfect through the duration of the tattoo. But if not, he would curse his machine and profess that it was running like crap right in front of his client while in the middle of the tattoo which brings me to the story.
One day he had it with the tattoo machine he was using because all day it was acting up on him so by his third tattoo of the day and right in the middle of doing the tattoo, he stood up and walked over to the front door. Everyone in the shop was curious what was going to happen next! Under the night sky he flung open the door with his foot and threw the whole tattoo machine into the cemetery across the street. He came back in, said “f*ck that machine, let’s do this sh!t”.
I’m sure the client was a bit nervous at that point but everyone else got a kick out of his antics. The other artists were amazed that he went to the length of throwing it into the cemetery when it was a $500 tattoo machine that just needed a little tune up job.
What happened to that tattoo machine you ask? He came to his senses the next day and sent his apprentice out to find it. Yes, the apprentice did find it after about 2 hours of walking around the cemetery grounds and earned himself a Cheeseburger and another day of learning.
Tattoo artists were a different breed in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was like a sideshow within a sideshow and I’m a better tattoo artist for having experienced those golden years of tattooing even as crazy as it was most of the time.
Oh and I should mention the tattoo that the client received turned out great. Half of me thinks it was all just a stunt to be funny and it was!
Written by Shred