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HS: It’s funny, too, that even with the ubiquity of tattooing these days (in movies and on TV), it’s still a mystery to most people.
BJ: That’s why there are so many stories like, red hurts more. Or, the outline hurts more. The fear of the unknown. Until you get tattooed you don’t know. Why would you say red hurts more? Ink doesn’t hurt. But, I think over the years, perhaps a certain tattooist had a shitty red ink and had a hard time getting it in. So, he had to go over and over with it. Then, hell the red would really hurt.
HS: Certainly, different people handle the needle differently. Most of my tattoos have felt different.
BJ: Absolutely, it’s 180 degrees change from person to person. Like you, you were sitting there laying like, “I’m getting my ribs tattooed, it ain’t a thing.”
HS: Well, that isn’t entirely true.
BJ: You may have been screaming on the inside, but on the outside it was cool. You weren’t moving. It made it easy to get it done in reasonable amount of time. Versus you fighting, and then it would have sucked. Especially for me, people come in already nervous and I’m a big guy. They really start to think it is going to hurt. People might think if you were doing it, the tattoo wouldn’t hurt because you are smaller.
HS: When, in reality, it would be awful.
BJ: Yeah, it would be a ton worse. It really does depend on who’s doing the tattoo. This guy Erik Rieth in San Francisco did my chest and it was by far the worst pain of all my tattoos. He’s 5’ 2”, but doesn’t play around.
HS: You hear about the old school New York way, with the boldest colors and lines. Even reading the descriptions, that isn’t a tattoo I want to get.
BJ: The machines back then are obviously the same as now really, but perhaps they would have just been run so hard. Not to mention, the guys use the same needles for weeks. Then they have the lifestyle with sailors in port, or sailor pay day, something going on in the city, and it’s like an assembly line. Three or four guys involved in banging out different portions of the tattoo. Just down the line. One guy does lines, one does color. They bang out like 10 tattoos in an hour.
HS: I can’t imagine the little kids going, “Hey, I’m going to be in the circus.” That must have been the worst. Just having a full suit banged out super quick.
BJ: Looking at those tattoos in pictures, those lines are like a quarter inch think. Man, did that hurt. That is one pass hitting you hard and fast. Jesus, I bet it was brutal. The guys have no gloves, using a bucket with just a splash of Lysol.
HS: That’s what Lyle told me, they used a bucket of water for weeks. Sure, he’s the guy that helped change standards, but that’s because he knew the practice.
BJ: I got my first tattoo at 14 or 15. I don’t remember the guy wearing gloves and that was in the mid-80s. My friend and I went, and we just got our names on our legs. Thinking about it the machine never stopped running. He stopped mine, rinsed the needle, and tattooed my friend. Got my name, Vaseline, bandage, done. Next guy sits down. What you want? Name. Cool. No stencil or anything, just done.
HS: And, in the early era, they didn’t really need to ask what people wanted, the visual vocabulary was pretty staid.
BJ: Selection was limited. There weren’t 1000 designs. There were 15 pages of hand drawn flash. That’s what you got. You want that? Nah, I don’t know how, you can have this. Perhaps it wasn’t even an option to get custom. There wasn’t a great variety of color. Reading the old Sailor Jerry letters between him and guys in Japan or on the mainland, you read someone saying, “Yeah, this guy gave me some blue and it’s amazing,” or, “I got this purple you gotta try.” I’ve been tattooing 10 years, and even the progression now from when I started is crazy. Some tattooists are like fine artists now. I don’t want to say they’ve changed the game or reinvented the wheel, but at the end of the day the bold stuff is going to hold up. All the feathery stuff and fine line looks great, but in 10 years it might look like shit. It might not be there. Now, with stuff from 1998 to 1999, we’re beginning to see how that ages.
HS: I’ve certainly seen how the fine line can get dissipated over time.
BJ: All that fine line stuff is cool and looks awesome, but it doesn’t last. Like Anil does the postage stamp thing, and it looks amazing, but you’ve got to photograph it right away. You need to take into consideration the skin. The elasticity of the skin, when you are 80 your skin is not the same as when you are 20. Those lines that are like a millimeter, in 10 years they might be 5 mm thick. You have to take into consideration that over time that will happen. That is why your tattoo is fucking awesome. It’s big, it takes up a ton of space, and it’s bold. No matter what, in 20 years, you’ll go, “Holy shit, that is an awesome ship.” You know what it is right away. I remember Ed Hardy saying, “If you can tell from across the room what it is, that’s a tattoo.” Shit, eagle and a panther, dope, from across the room you can tell.
HS: Actually, that was Clayton Patterson’s response—“That’s a tattoo.”
BJ: To yours? That’s awesome. That’s cool. It’s always good to hear stuff like that from people who are in the industry or know about tattooing. When another tattooist wants you to tattoo them. They know good and bad, so it’s always cool when a tattooist or someone really into tattooing wants you to work on them. Although you’re not a tattooist, you know good and bad, because you’ve studied it.
HS: And, I have shitty ones too.
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