Finding My Way Back to Tattooing
A personal account of returning to tattooing, finding traditional flash, and learning to give the process time.
I've been fascinated by tattoos for as long as I can remember. As a kid, whenever I saw someone heavily tattooed, there was something about it that immediately pulled me in. They looked cool, dangerous, different and, probably most importantly at that age, like they were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing.
Tattoos were absolutely not encouraged at home either. There was a pretty strict “no tattoos” attitude, which of course only made them more interesting to me.
In my teens I got into punk and hardcore and started going to shows pretty young, often tagging along with older guys. That brought tattoos right back to the front of my mind. Especially in hardcore, tattoos seemed to be everywhere. Seeing heavily tattooed musicians from American bands looked incredibly hard to me. Some of my older friends already had tattoos too, and I remember constantly asking if I could come along to the tattoo shop.
I finally got my first one when I was around 19, somewhere around 2003: FTW on the inside of my right upper arm. Not exactly subtle. A chest piece followed fairly quickly, and then many more over the years.
The tattooer who worked on me back then also played in a band, so I saw him around regularly. At some point I asked him how someone actually became a tattooer. His answer was basically that I needed to be in the shop every day, make myself present and draw, draw, draw.
The problem was that I had a full-time job as a road construction worker. I couldn't just spend every day hanging around a tattoo shop. He also wasn't particularly interested in explaining anything about machines, needles or setups, so eventually the idea disappeared into the background.
Around 2013 it came back for a while. I started drawing and trying to paint flash without really knowing what I was doing. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult and not much came from it.
I even ordered a cheap coil tattoo machine kit somewhere. When it arrived, I had absolutely no idea how to set the thing up, let alone what I was supposed to do with it. It came with some terrible fake skin, I messed around with it a little, and eventually that attempt died too.
Then life happened. A lot of it.
Divorce, losing my house, relationships falling apart, raising kids, losing work, double back surgery, therapy, addiction and recovery, the whole shebang! There were periods where my mental health got very bad, including a suicidal crisis that eventually brought me into crisis care and therapy. Tattooing became one of those ideas that had once interested me but seemed to belong to another version of my life.
Then, in the spring of 2025, I walked into a new shop and met Joe Crooked.
Even arranging the appointment felt different. We got along easily, and while he was tattooing me we talked about life, some of the things I had been through, and eventually about the fact that I had once tried to learn tattooing myself but had pretty much concluded that it just wasn't meant for me.
Joe's reaction was almost the opposite of what I had experienced years earlier.
He basically said: why not give it another go?
I dug out that same cheap coil machine from years before. Joe came over, helped me set it up, listened to it buzz and basically confirmed that it was a piece of shit to learn on.
Then he did something I didn't expect. He invited me to his house to show me more about machines and needles and gave me one of his old Rotary Works machines. He ordered my first fake skins through the shop and gave them to me. Ink, cartridges, a grip, whenever I needed something to get started, he seemed to have something lying around.
My dad supported me too, especially financially. Getting started isn't cheap, and he helped me out with some of the bigger things I still needed, including an iPad and stencil printer. Between that and everything Joe was giving me, for the first time it felt like people around me were actually helping me make a real attempt at this.
Basically: here you go. Get cracking.
And I did.
At first it was a lot of messing around. Pulling endless lines, asking endless questions. Which needle? What angle? How deep? How do I stretch properly? How do I get into and out of a line? How do I get good saturation? And why the hell is pulling a clean straight line so difficult?
Then came actual designs. Shading. Whip shading. Colour. Stencils that disappeared when I wiped them too soon and refused to come off when I left them too long. Fake skin that seemed determined to hold onto every bit of excess ink no matter how much Vaseline and elbow grease I threw at it.
Eventually I started tattooing a little real skin too, first myself, then people close to me. Some went surprisingly well. Others definitely didn't. Each one taught me something.
Eventually Joe even let me tattoo him. I was nervous as hell, but it went well. Having the person who had been teaching me trust me enough to put a tattoo on him felt like a small green light: OK, keep going.
Somewhere along the way, though, I fell down another rabbit hole: traditional flash.
Hanging around the shop and looking through old flash and books made me want to understand how that stuff was made. Spider Murphy's especially blew my mind. My partner Simone supported me in that part of the journey too. She bought me a set of markers and I started painting.
The first attempts weren't great. Wrong paper, wrong tools, not much idea what I was doing. So again I asked questions.
Joe gave me books, advice and things to study. I studied and repainted old traditional designs and some of Joe's work, experimented with different materials and became obsessed with learning to spit shade.
That meant thousands more lines and fades.
And somewhere in all that repetition I realised how good it was for my head.
The period around finding tattooing again had been one of the hardest of my life. My head could be completely bonkers, but I could sit down with a sheet of paper and suddenly four or five hours had disappeared. For that time I wasn't trying to fix my life or figure everything out. I was trying to make the next line cleaner, the next fade smoother.
I still love it to bits for that reason.
Right now I'm actually painting much more flash than I'm tattooing. Partly because a new machine turned into a six-month saga of its own, but also because I genuinely fell in love with painting flash. The machine situation will get sorted eventually. As Joe keeps telling me: “It'll work out. Everything always works out.”
And somehow, he usually seems to be right.
Without really planning it, I've started building a portfolio.
I only recently started sharing the work on Instagram and discovered this whole community of people who are just as obsessed with flash, trading it, painting it and talking about it. To my surprise, people have even started asking me here and there about getting some of my designs tattooed.
Joe now runs Mojo's Tattoo Parlor together with Morgan. He doesn't take apprentices, so I'm not in a traditional apprenticeship yet, but he still mentors me and answers every question I throw at him.
I'm in no hurry either.
I've given myself years, not months, to become good at tattooing.
There are still practical steps ahead too. I need to get some equipment sorted, have a suitable space to work from and complete my hygiene course, which is planned for later this year. Slowly but surely, those pieces are starting to fall into place as well.
The more I learn, the more I realise how much there is to learn.
Tattooing isn't just making cool doodles on skin. It's hygiene, placement, drawing, equipment, dealing with clients, explaining why something won't work, social media, no-shows, conventions, running a business, and somehow still finding the time to make new flash.
So I have no idea exactly where this is going.
And strangely, that doesn't bother me anymore.
It doesn't even have to turn into some amazing tattoo career. I'm having fun. I've finally found something I genuinely love doing, something I can lose myself in, and right now that is already enough. Whatever it becomes from here is a bonus.
That might be the biggest difference between now and 2013.
Back then I wanted to know how to become a tattooer but didn't really have the support, knowledge or patience to find my way there. Now I have people who believe in me, someone willing to teach me, more patience, less urgency and a completely different mindset.
And I'm still curious.
I still want to make the next sheet better than the last one. I still want to understand why somebody else's lines or shading work so well. I can apparently stand around staring at somebody else's fades for an unreasonable amount of time.
Joe caught me doing exactly that outside his shop recently, staring at some flash by Mr. Levi Netto.
“Are you seriously still standing there staring at those fades?”
Yeah.
I was.
And I probably will be for a while.