Its actually quite shocking how easily available this stuff is to kids, the amount of underage kids that come into the studio with terrible tattoos they have done themselves is rising. I’d say we get one or two every week at least here in London. These are 15-16 year olds who managed to get this stuff off eBay and scar up their body’s and their friends.

Its easy to blame this increase on Miami/la/London ink shows on TV, however tattoos are on the increase in popular culture. Movie and pop stars, fashion models and TV presenters are now sporting an array of tattoos for impressionable kids to see.

Its not just the fact that they are doing bad work they may regret that bothers me, but the fact that they are not properly sterilizing their equipment, this risks spreading blood borne diseases such as hepatitis c, hiv, and tetanus.

This has been a problem for a long time, “scratchers” working from home are nothing new. Its not just in the UK either, they have them in pretty much every country, in Australia they call the “backyarders”. I think the most alarming thing of all is not that it is still going on but the age of these kids now getting hold of equipment.

All this stuff was available when I started out in the industry, yeah I was tempted to buy an eBay machine so I could practice on fake skin, but I decided to do things the right way and apprentice at a studio, where I would learn things the correct way and not pick up bad habits.

Now my view on this is having lots of tattoos does not make you a good artist, I have seen some shocking work on people coming into the shop from other studios and the customer says “well they had lots of tattoos and looked the part” well all I can say to this is what I always say to people going to a new studio, check portfolios people!

I can see where they are coming from I wouldn’t trust a dentist with no teeth!

To me a tattooist with no tattoos is disrespectful on a few different levels, firstly having tattoos helps you understand what your customer is going through, you know how it feels and you can sympathise with them, also if you are taking from an industry and making money from it you should give back to the industry, go seek out artists you like an get work by them, you will learn a hell of a lot from watching and talking to them!  This is more of a lifestyle then a job.

So you don’t need to have loads of tattoos to be a good tattoo artist, if you work hard you will be successful and put out good tattoos. But if your life and blood is tattooing and you love it so much why don’t you have any tattoos?



Hopefully this post will be informative and useful to you, I think it is important for all artists to share knowledge and how they approach things as every artist works in a different way, by working and talking with other artists we can all improve and learn.

In the past few weeks I have been painting a lot, I have just moved from tube watercolours to ecoline watercolour ink, which is a great medium to paint in, very smooth to blend and the colours are really bright!

I have been using 300gsm cotton paper with the inks and have found the results to be the best I have ever produced.

I normally line all my watercolour paintings with fine liner or brush pens, you definitely need waterproof ink so they don’t bleed when you add colour, I use faber-castell pens, they are waterproof Indian ink.

I use my own saliva to first wet the area I am working, you can buy pre made fluids for this, you don’t want to use water as saliva and fluid is a lot thicker and will make the ink and watercolour spread slower so you have far more control over it.

Similar to tattooing I always work dark to light, when painting. I normally do the whole painting in black and grey first then go over with colour, working dark colours through to light colours last.  So for example, blues and purples first yellow last.

Once I have finished I used coffee to stain the background, I use a light coffee wash over the whole background, then I use a second darker one over some areas, freeze dried coffee it perfect.

This is not THE way to paint in watercolour, many artists will do it very diffentley, but this is the way I do it, this is not the only way but it works for me!

craigy

been quite a creative week for me this week, and here is the result!

I just watched ‘stoney knows how’ a short documentary about old school tattoo master Stoney st Clair, filmed just before he passed away in 1980. Stoney was an incredible man and i suggest you go check it out, its available to stream free (and legally) from folkstreams.net and there are some short clips on the youtube which you can check out.

I was very inspired after watching it and decided to do a set of very very traditional flash, 6 pages of old school roses inspired by stoney st clair and of course sailor jerry, very thick outlines and only 3 colours, with an ink brush pen and watercolour.

If you are an artists and want to trade/swap a set contact me!

Lots of my friends seem to be buying houses, getting married, having kids an settling down and quite frankly this scares the crap out of me, when you settle down into a routine and get comfortable you get lazy, your art and mind stop growing and you become apathetic, jaded and dull.

Tattooing is an art in which you are a lifelong apprentice, there is always something to learn and share with other artists, things to try experience and develope and travelling keeps you fresh. New places, studios and artists keep you as keen and eager as when you were an apprentice with fire in your belly and goodness in your heart.

In the two years i have worked at Ouch i have grown as an artist and person considerably, i have shared good and bad times with the team there and become a better person for it, so it is with great sadness and lot of thought that i have decided to leave, thankfully with the support and blessing of the ouch team.

I never leave any chapter of my life with a closed door, and i would like to thank andrew, tim, miguel, paulo, darek, chris, alex, natalia and kelly for being such a great group of individuals.

I look forward to the next chapter in my life, as myself and my partner india have both been granted working visa for australia.  It is quite literally the other side of the world from london and i look forward to learning and sharing as much as i can with new artists there.

So if you fancy getting tattooed by me before i leave hit me up on here or by facebook! heres to the future!!

So far this year i worked two conventions and one bike show, the tattoo i did at bournemouth on the sunday got through to the handful of finalists for best of day, which was a huge compliment considering the caliber of artists working the show.

I very much enjoyed attending reading convention, there were a lot of younger artists working which was great to see, i also got to meet Ian of reading who is probably the most normal and down to earth tattoo artists i have ever met, considering the mans reputation an the fact that he has been working in the industry for around 30 years. I have met many less experienced artists with much larger egos and terrible attitudes, who could learn a thing or too from Ian.

so get out to your local show, support other artists and studios, get tattooed buy or trade flash or a sketchbook and support the industry, talk to other artists learn and share knowledge with them and who knows what kind of art will be produced in 5 years from now!

Missing the point; Stereotyping the tattooist.

Finlo Rohrer’s’ article So why do ‘normal’ people get tattoos? Published by the BBC in 2007[1], identifies a change in attitude towards tattooing through recent decades. Rohrer says tattoos were “[…] once the mark of the outcast, of the rocker and the rebel […] (yet) it’s now just an everyday thing.” Since the articles publication, tattooing can it seems, be seen more frequently on mainstream television, on programs such as La Ink, Miami Ink, and London Ink, as well as on the body’s’ of well know celebrities in the media.

This interview will aim to portray the change in attitude towards tattooing through the eyes of a tattooist, once an agent of dissent, now the ‘en vogue’ artist.

I am Sitting here with Craigy Lee at Ouch Tattoos’ flagship branch on Ealing high street, in the sterile glass walled enclosure at the back of the Hippie Heaven ‘head’ store; it’s easy to imagine yourself as an attraction for customers of the shop, peering in to the tiled space where the artists work.

Craigy, who sports a wealth of his own tattoos, enthusiastically shows me his latest Tattoo machine, acquired the previous weekend from a tattoo convention. Miquel, his colleague, and mentor is tattooing as we begin the interview, over the background hum of his tattoo gun.

Elliott: So who do you work with here at the shop?

Craigy: At the moment I’m working with Miguel from Chile, Paolo from Portugal, and then obviously the shop staff as well.

And, where do you think you fit into the rankings?

At the bottom probably, (laughs) because of my age and experience. Well, Paolo has been tattooing for eight years, and Miguel for like twelve years, and they’re both in their thirties, where as I’ve been tattooing for two years and I’m in my twenties. That’s how the ranking goes.

What got you interested in tattooing?

Everything else in my life failed. I went to art school as a way of bumming out for three years, never thinking of tattooing as a career. Then, while there I started a band, I started playing music, and then I started driving bands, and after doing that for a couple of years I drove a band, and one of them was a tattoo artist and we got on really well. So being that he was from Florida, I went out for a holiday to stay with him, I went to his tattoo shop and once back in England, I thought that it was something that I could do, and actually be quite good at, and make a career out of. As i was heading towards twenty-five, I was like: ‘Right’ it’s time to get a career going.

Lots of musicians are tattooed; do you think you were attracted to tattooing because of your interest in bands?

Yeah I think so, like, most bands nowadays are quite heavily tattooed and it’s quite in with the whole punk rock thing. I had a lot of tattoos anyway before I even thought about doing it as a career, just because, I don’t know; Colourful people like colourful things on their bodies.

And what was your first experience of tattooing?

My parents and my uncle all have tattoos, and they all ride motorbikes, so when I was younger we used to go to bike shows, and everybody there would have big colourful tattoos; that was kind of it. Getting my first tattoo was actually at a bike show, so, it wasn’t really that frowned upon, my parents paid for it for my eighteenth birthday, I remember it being pretty painful though.

What do your friends and family think about you getting into tattooing?

My friends loved it because they could get free tattoos, and my parents loved it because I was finally doing something that I was making money at, and not living at their house for free. But, my Nan made me promise not to get any on my hands or neck.

Why do you think she wouldn’t want you getting tattoos on your hands and neck?

I think having your hands and neck tattooed is a bit of a downer when you want to go travelling because people look at you weirdly in customs, and people can be quick to judge you. People still have the mentality that tattoos are for ‘bad people’. They’ll judge you because your hands are tattooed and think you’re a criminal or something.

What do you think about the inference that tattoos are just for criminals, and bikers?

That’s like a stereotypical thing, back in the day it was just sailors, or bikers, or criminals or whatever. People still use that stereotype, like in freak shows and burlesque, but nowadays they’re a bit trendier. If you buy stuff like Bizarre magazine, which is supposed to be alternative and a bit freaky, all the models in that have tattoos so I guess that kind of stereotype has stuck to it a little bit. But I think at the same time you’ll find like a lot of businessmen getting tattooed and mums and stuff having tattoos. It is gradually being considered more of an art form.

Do you think the media are helping to break down the stereotypical view of tattoos?

Yeah, because with programs like: Miami Ink, or London Ink, or whatever ink on, it’s opening it up to a bigger audience. And, if you go into Topshop and places, their models have tattoos now. I think it’s become a lot more ‘mainstream’ in the last 5-10 years than it was before.

Here in the shop you have quite a few books of designs; do you do custom designs as well?

I’d say 90% of what we do is custom stuff, like we draw it for people. But we also have a lot of ‘flash’, which is the design books and stuff, though every shop in London is going to have those because we buy them from a supplier. So, what we try and do is use those books as a starting point, to get an idea of what the customer wants, and then we’ll draw something that’s more unique to them. Then I get a bit more of an artistic input, and they’re getting something that’s a bit more individual; which is good for both of us.

Is custom work more enjoyable?

Yeah definitely, I mean there’s nothing wrong with doing something off the walls, but as I said, every shop in London’s got those designs, so you could end up doing the same tattoo three or four times in a year, which I have done. There is this one butterfly, which I guess is on the first page when you type in ‘butterfly tattoo’ on Google; literally five people have brought it in the last year and asked for it. The first time, I did it. Then the second time I asked ‘do you want me to design you something else?’ but she said ‘no!’ So then one of the other artists did it. We couldn’t believe it when someone else bought it in the third time.

Which well known tattoo artists have influenced you?

Like, Joe Capobianco , he’s one of my favorite artists, Tony Ciavarro, he’s another, Cecile Porter, and then, Mike DeVries, who does more photo realism, there are loads of cool artists out there.

What would recommend to anyone looking at getting into the tattoo business?

Don’t buy a kit off Ebay, because that’s the best way to spread diseases and get the industry closed down. Just draw lots, make a portfolio, an A3 sketchbook and then try and get an apprenticeship. It’s pretty hard and a lot people want to do it now because of the TV shows, but if your stuff’s really good, you’ll get there in the end. But, don’t be ‘lame’ and email people, just go into the shops and speak to them, and show them your stuff, and keep going back. If they say they like it, keep going back and keep pestering them until you can get your foot in the door.

And what’s your favourite part about being a tattooist?

My favourite part of my job is making money from it. Because I still feel like I’m cheating somebody, because all I’m doing is drawing at the end of the day. Which is all I’ve always done through school and enjoyed, so, being able to do that now and get paid for it feels like I’m cheating somebody.

Lastly, could you tell us who you are, where you tattoo and where people can find you?

I’m Craigy Lee, you can find me at www.craigylee.com. I’m currently working at Ouch Tattoo, Ealing West London, who have my profile, and examples of my work on their website: www.ouchtattoo.co.uk.

when I worked as a tour manager the London date of any tour I worked on was always the most looked forward too. I went to see the king blues in town last week, and I think it’s the atmosphere and crowd that make London so great for bands, and this mentality in the people that make it so great to work in.

when I started my tattoo career I knew London was the place to be, the art, museums and culture are some of the greatest on the planet. There’s always somewhere to go, and something to do. Sure you can kick back and get comfortable in a small town but getting into that comfort zones stops challenging you. when you stop being challenged you stop improving and if you stop improving you will not get any further. Keep your mind open keep learning and pushing yourself!!

During many times in my life I have made bad decisions, decisions that people warned me against and told me not to do but I did them, and a lot of those times it went wrong and people could say “I told you so” but all those small fuck ups were a chain of events that lead me towards being where I am today, and more importantly becoming a tattoo artist and finding the career I love.

Now I have always believed in karma, doing good things for people and getting it back in return, treating others how you wish to be treated yourself. Maybe this is karma hitting me up, or maybe this was suppose to happen and that was all part of the journey! Food for thought I think!

life art and tattooing are a journey, we are all apprentices and never stop learning! there are times i wish i had listened more, or watched more closely, but when opportunities arise again watch and learn. we may take something away from every artist we work with even the worst ones, and by sharing knowledge the industry will move forward and become better. be humble continue to listen and learn and you will blossom.

And to all those thinking of buying cheap equipment from ebay, don’t waste your money, do it the proper way, if your determined and good enough doors will open for you.