HOW DID I GET HERE?! (Part One)

I’m here in 2026, thirty years since I embarked on my tattooing journey!
It’s all different now, but I still love what I do. This is an attempt to try and make some sort of sense of it, for you and for myself.
I started out back in 1992, I was 21, treading water at art college, trying to avoid getting a ‘real’ job. ‘What am I going to do with myself?’ No internet, no social media, tattoo was still a marginal occupation. Perfect!

The main media source for tattooing was still print, ie books and magazines. Books were hard to find, usually with pages damaged or missing altogether. Magazines were top shelf, up there with Razzle and Escort, but I didn’t care, they were affordable and wanted as much as I could find, so I bought as many as I could. Then I found this book…

It was a revelation to me, as it presented tattooing as an art form that came from the streets but was, with the help of tattoo legends like Don Ed Hardy, beginning to be seen as a deeply ingrained cultural force that really affected people from all walks of life, from stockbrokers to scaffolders and everything in between, all over the world. This was somewhere were I could make a life for myself by drawing. I could actually do this!
But I knew it was going to be really tough.
Around that time, a friend I knew told me a well known tattooist in Middleton, (which is in between Rochdale and Manchester ) called Louis Molloy was looking for an apprentice. So I called him up on the payphone (no mobile phones then either) and arranged to meet him soon afterwards with my drawings. So off I went.
The studio was above a row of shops, a tiny room with a one man booth at the end, walls covered with laminated flash sheets. There were a couple of people there, one was getting tattooed, so I had to wait for Louis to finish. It seemed like forever. Finally, he called me into the other room and looked at my weird drawings, which were all tortured flesh and eyeballs. Then he sent me away, with instructions to draw horses heads and human hands, to show how I constructed pictures, and come back a week later.
So I went back, and drew some pencil sketches of both things, and hoping he’d not changed his mind, went back a week later.
He seemed to like what I’d done, and agreed to take me on! I was simultaneously elated and terrified!
I’d taken my first step into the rest of my life.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO!

Two tattoo skull designs from the 1990’s

These skulls were my very first attempts at tattoo designs. WhSmith pencil crayons and Rotring pen.
Probably about 1992. Seems like I still do this kind of thing!