I have always been facinated by tattoos and most anything generally associated with counter culture. When I was in grade school through high school I would use Sharpie markers to draw fake tattoos on my friends. I wished I could have started this back then.

Here I am years later, learning the craft that has been evolving over thousands of years. It hasn't been as easy as I hoped because I'm not learning the traditional way as an apprentice. I don't have the time, nor do I have the money to pay a professional tattoo artist the several thousand dollars usually paid for the knowledge of this ancient skill. So this has, for the most part, left me on my own to scrounge and dig for bits and pieces of information along with tips and tricks to help me become as good with a tattoo machine as I am with other mediums.

I have gotten some advice from tattoo artists, but for the most part I have spent many hours hunting down whatever I could find in books and on the internet. The rest has been actual hands on trial and error.

Luckily, for my guinea pigs (earliest victims), I felt comfortable with a tattoo gun from the start. I actually went to skin alot sooner than I had planned, as I tattooed my first little bit on someone about 30 hours after getting my Skull machine. I don't count it as my first tattoo because it was both insignificant and more or less to get my friend "Big" Steve to shut up. The needle was out way too far, and the power was up way too high, but Steve held out knowing how long I had the gun and that I had used it on grapefriut a whole 2 times. I guess it wasn't as bad as it seemed, because he was there with bells on to be my first and second planned tattoos.