First off, can you let me know where we can find you now?
I have a shop in Manhattan – Five Points Tattoo – it’s between Soho and Chinatown. I’ve been here for eight years now – before that I was on the East Side.
After Miami Ink, I wanted to lay low for a while. I didn’t enjoy the high-profile stuff. I worked at a small shop in New York after that Invisible Ink callf. As the name would suggest, it was very low-key – it even had black-out windows. I wanted to get away from the tattoo-fan clients.
Is there a particular type of tattoo you enjoy doing most – custom/styles?
It’s usually case-by-case. If I have a good rapport with the person it makes it better no matter what they want. It can be exactly what I like but it’s still irritating if I don’t like the person. But if I do like them it can be something totally different from what I like and it’s still ok.
There weren’t nearly as many people doing tattoos when I started in 1988. Back then I was happy to do any kind of tattoo – we did a lot of the famous cartoon characters back then like Yosemite Sam and the Tasmanian Devil. A lot of Celtic arm bands and women getting roses on their chests to, and biker things. It was really different then.
As the 90’s came around it got more art-oriented. More personal styles came up and I gravitated towards tattoo art. There was more experimental stuff then but I never got into that as much. I liked regular tattoo imagery and making it as good as I could do it.
I’m happy now with how I have done it. I have people coming up to me now who I did tattoos for 20 or 30 years ago who tell me how happy they still are. I think that’s probably rare for a tattoo artist!
How did you learn – where did you get your start?
I had my first apprenticeship in Pittsburgh. I haven’t been back though to the city in years. But there I learned how to do it and how not to do it from them. As I progressed I worked with experienced and better artists than me and that pushed me to level up. I learned what types of art have longevity and how much detail to do – whether I should make the details in a very detail-oriented tattoo more secondary to the image so it looks good from a distance as well, for example.
I worked with some great artists that shared their knowledge with me. I’ve been tattooing for over 35 years now. I actuality finally started teaching people now. Just a couple of people so far. I didn’t realize how much I would learn by teaching. When you teach you verbalize things as you do it, and when you do that it makes you think about it more as you do it.
Were there individual influences and mentors that helped you most?
When I was 15 and 16 I had a lot of older friends and they had tattoos – they got them by Craig Helmich who had a place in McKees Rocks. He did amazing work and had a partner – Nick – who was a phenomenal artist. He’s one of my favorite Pittsburgh artists. So, those were the first tattoo artists I had really seen and they had a big influence on me. I was lucky to have been around artists like that.
What influence if any did Pittsburgh have on you as you grew up there?
I feel like Pittsburgh always had a strong art scene. My entire time there as a kid, I had friends who were very artistic in the visual arts and music. My mom worked at the Carnegie Museum so I was there a lot and she had me take art programs at CMU.
I also played guitar – bass. But I was terrible.
I heard you sold the guitar to pay for your tattoo supplies. True?
I did yes! I sold my guitar and amp – it was a sweet guitar too. But that ship sailed a long time ago and I was terrible! My heart wasn’t really in it – not like with tattooing. I got into more lucrative hobbies!
You mentioned the Miami Ink show earlier. How did you get on the show?
I did through my friend Ami James. We worked together in ’92 and at first we didn’t really like each other. But we’d start seeing each other when we went out to the same spots at night and started hanging out.
In 2004, I was living in L.A. He had a TV show they were shooting a pilot for and he told me they’d fly me to Miami and put us all up in a house for three or four days. It was a group of people I was friends with and we just had to goof off in front of a camera for a weekend. A few months later we got a call telling us the show was picked up. Then I knew the shit was real!
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it. It could have hurt me – I was starting to be successful with my business and I didn’t want to look like a clown on TV. But I knew that if I didn’t do it I’d wonder what “What if?”
What was that experience like for you?
I went with it. At first it was great but then it became drudgery. TV people can be sleazy. They wanted us to do stuff we didn’t want to do to force drama. It got to be ridiculous. By the third year I had pretty much checked out. I started mocking the show while I was on it. So, I think they began to hate me! I’m sure I wasn’t easy to work with at that point. I’d ask how we can make the show good so we could win an Emmy, and they were like “Come on dude, we’re making this for people with a fourth-grade reading level!” It ended just as we started to get paid well – which is how those things usually go. They give you a contract and tell you you have 24 hours to sign it – just enough time to not have enough time for a lawyer to go through it.
Why did you settle in New York?
We went as a family to New York when I was a kid and I remember the excitement I’d have being there. I was attracted to the city and it’s been good to me. I’ve lived in New York now longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I’m a certifiable New Yorker. I was the only person in my family to actually have been born in Pittsburgh. When I was 17 my parent moved to Europe for my dad’s job and I stayed in the US. My parents felt they had prepared me well to live on my own at that point.
Any interesting stories you can share of your work so far?
The best part of the path I chose is the great people I’ve met and the chance to travel around the world to tattoo people. I’ve gone to Asia, South America, Europe to do my work. I’ve been all over.
I got to tattoo some of my childhood heroes like Evil Knievel and Anthony Bourdain. And of course a lot of band guys. It’s given me the opportunity to have an adventurous and fun life. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else though! There are probably 10,000 people in New York now doing tattoos. I think it doubled after Covid – though I think a lot of those people probably quit since then.
Any advice to those trying to get into the tattoo business?
Have a good backup plan! An excellent career to have alongside being a tattoo artist would be a fireman – I’ve tattooed a lot of firemen. They have plenty of downtime to do tattoos. Or a teacher – they can do tattoos after school and in the Summer!
It was a dumb idea really for me to do it. I just got incredibly lucky!