Inky McInk

For years Dirty Dave’s great ambition was to be a tattoo artist. He wanted to open his own studio where he could ink bikers, stupid teenagers and fashion followers who would get their ‘tramp stamp’ or bellybutton or ankle tattooed with a symbol that meant nothing at all to them but once it was in Chinese or Japanese it was all right.

He even had long term plans to open up a prison visit service where, like a mobile library, he would roll up once a month and tatt up the gang-bangers and other miscreants.

The problem was that the only thing Dave could draw was a duck. To be fair to him there aren’t many people who can draw a male Muscovy duck as well as he could but he accepted the fact, in the end, that demand for that particular tattoo would be limited.

Customer – “I want two snakes wrapped around a sword with a naked chick as its handle with a mountain in the background and the name ‘Hilda’ in some kind of gothic script”

Dave – “How about we do a nice duck?”

It wouldn’t have worked and thankfully he never took it any further than ducking-up Stinking Pete’s left shoulder with a mallard that looked like Gene Hackman from the Unforgiven saying “Duck of death?”

But what a trauma to have your chosen career ruled out because of sheer lack of talent at what it is you want to do. It’s kind of a specialist area, in fairness. You get a tattoo wrong and you’re going to wind up with a very angry customer.

So how do wannabe tattoo artists practice? Do they have hunchbacked assistants who go out and steal fresh corpses for them to practice on or do they use orphans, or what? No matter how good you are artistically surely you need to get used to the process, make a few mistakes here and there, like everyone does in every  job. Practice makes perfect and all that but nobody needs the top of the sword to look like a septic knob or have a half-arsed version of your football team’s crest permanently etched into your skin.

I don’t have any tattoos myself. I did think about getting one but I always figured I’d manage to get an epileptic dyslexic who’d pitch a fit half-way through so I’d end up with something that was spelt wrong and then crossed out.

Similar posts

  • No Related Post
This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 8:36 amand is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

39 Responses to “Inky McInk”

Leave a Reply

You can add images to your comment by clicking here.