Voyage Austin | Press
Voyage Austin
Local Stores from Austin in 2021
Excerpt from Article
From my time at Fragment Tattoo in Austin, with Jordan Mitchell and Darryl Hanna
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Many of the obstacles that I faced early on in my career were due to the “trial and error” nature of learning how to tattoo. A majority of artists do not want to teach and often times the industry seems to pride itself on the secrecy of the craft. There are now some fantastic internet tutorials that explain tattooing, but these are very recent tools and many artists look down on this level of accessibility. Sometimes mentors are a saving grace to the students who they take on, but sometimes mentors will abuse their influence or withhold knowledge. I owe my introduction into the industry to my apprenticeship, but it was not thorough in terms of teaching me most of what I know today. Instead, I watched other tattoo artists very closely. Once I was more established as an artist and if I struggled with certain mechanics and how to implement a technique, I very humbly asked for more in-depth help from colleagues. I feel indebted to the friends who took the time to help me improve. Even still, there is a connection between the machine and hand that is unique to every artist and you can only truly understand what works best or you by tattooing with ink on skin. Unfortunately, the permanency of tattooing leaves little room for error and making a mistake that can never be erased is a burden that tattoo artists have lived with. I described some of the tattoos on my legs as “scribbles” and some of them are quite literally that. Rather than make mistakes on clients, I often opted for attempting a technique on myself regardless of whether I wanted it on my skin or not.
