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INKEDblog takes you beneath the skin of today's tattoo culture. Our mission is to celebrate tattooing as a modern art form which incorporates art, fashion, style, and pop culture. While paying homage and respect to the past, we look to present a contemporary take on the present and future of skin art.
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Friday Jun 09, 2006
Every BODY Has a Story: Protective Demons
"After I had been an apprentice for about a year under the direction of Carl Hanes, at International Tattoo Garden in San Francisco, I decided to do these tattoos on myself. These are the first and last, self-done tattoos. Man, did it suck doing them…
This was about ten years ago, and I had met Carl Hanes because we were both street workers for the city. He was tattooing during the time we worked together, and soon after, he started working at the shop.
I knew that I wanted to be a tattoo artist from when I was a kid. I had a couple of getto tats done by friends with India ink, and even then, I knew that I could have done a better job than they did.
I have an art background, and before I started tattooing, I worked as a professional illustrator and published many of my images in various magazines and publications. Carl accepted me as an apprentice, and I have really enjoyed the work ever since. If you want to see my portfolio, check out www.happygoluckyart.com
The mask tattoos were inspired from Japanese Noh theatre masks. I guess Noh theatre could be described as the Japanese version of ancient Greek theatre, sort of operatic and dramatic.
I started work on them, and it was really different from doing a tattoo on someone else. The pain was not the same. I found myself bearing down harder than I normally do. Since I did them ten years ago, I also worked a lot slower then. The masks took four hours each. The pain of the tattoo wasn’t that bad, but I got the worst neck cramps. Just about killed me. I did the work alternating each side in two-hour sessions.
One thing that appealed to me about these masks is that in eastern mythology, demons are not considered evil necessarily. Often they are protectors of something good, warriors defending a peaceful entity or place. Interestingly, they are most always jealous women. I’m not sure what that means about me, but I believe being protected by a jealous woman is a probably a lot of protection…:
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