The First Tattoo

I started playing with art when I was a very young child. One Christmas my Grandmother gave me a book on how-to-draw horses and I was hooked. I'm not even sure if I was five or six at the time. I started drawing and I drew day and night. I worked on comics and characters and I kept drawing. I drew anything in site, my grandfathers pipe, my fathers pack of Marlboro's, mean pictures of my step-sisters, it didn't matter I just drew. Over the years, like most things in life, my taste matured from stick-men to super-hero's to cartoon art to realism, landscape, fantasy and on and on. Somewhere along the road of growing up I found motorcycles and then the biker culture. I did this at a relatively young age - around 13 or 14. This led me and my art down a completely different path and along this path I found Tattoo's.

In the town I lived in there used to be an old artist that went by the name of Swede. I found his shop at 15 and hung out there trying to convince him that I needed a tattoo up until the time I was 18 and joined the service. When I got that first leave and was able to come back home for a week one of the first things I did was go to his shop. I stood in front, staring through the windows, not believing my eyes. The man I had hung out with for so long, the guy who and turned me on to my first ride on a chopper (old triumph 650) and the one artist that I wanted to do my first tattoo - had sold his shop and moved away. I searched the entire time I was on leave. I knew if I kept looking I would find him, unfortunately time ran out and I had to head back to the other side of the country and back to training. No Swede, no tattoo, no luck. Damn Swede you couldn't have waited a few months before you sold your place to that dress shop!

Arriving back at base and still wanting to get my first tattoo I looked forward to my next leave. I'd find a place - there had to be one around, my God I was in a military town after all, don't all service guy's get tattoos? I talked with everyone who I thought might know and then one day sitting around at the park on base, drinking a beer and playing guitar, the son of one of the ranking officers on our Base came and sat down, started showing me some things on the guitar and just generally passing the day away. As we continued to hang out just BS'ing I started talking about wanting to get a tattoo and how my attempts to get one from "The Best Artist in the World", who just happened to have a shop in my little home town (exaggeration is an art form at 18), were all for naught. The artist had moved and now I was stuck. As luck would have it the kid had just gotten a tattoo a couple of months ago and knew of a good place with artist who had been tat'ing people for years........... a place about 200 miles away!

I was a kid, 18 at the time, thought I knew everything like most 18 year boy's I've ever met, I was going, didn't care what the military thought, didn't care about anything, I wanted a tattoo and that was that. I got a group of my buddies together and we planned it all out. We'd ride the bus down to Augusta, spend the weekend, get a tattoo or two and just have a good ole time and be back for duty on Monday morning.

Boy plans - God laughs - the Military frowns.


Technorati Tags: first tattoo military, triumph 650, motorcycles, biker culture first tattoo, motorcycles, biker culture