i've officially been tattooing for twenty years.
in a row.
two decades.
look at all that dark hair!!!!!!
everything i am,
everything i've done,
everybody i've met,
everywhere i've been,
for the last twenty years all traces back to this career.
...and i fell into it and just couldn't ever climb out.
so this is what it is, and what i do, and what's happening.
two decades, thousands and thousands of tattoos, gallons of ink,
tons of needles and tubes....
all of it.
and let's never forget the big loves and bigger losses
and the long lengths to which interactive participation have taken me;
from the very worst albie rock show runaway trainwreck moments
to the very best enduring close connections to genuine people.
it's all due to tattooing.
the job i love to hate, and hate that i love so F*ing much.
i've overlapped with so many many other artists over the years,
and fortunately/unfortunately
i haven't spoken to almost all of them in a very long time.
mostly because i took my old motto to heart too often.
yup.
breaking hearts and burning bridges
is exactly what i did for a solid decade straight.
and that didn't work too well, honestly.
this new approach- doing tattoos all day every day,
at AMPERSAND TATTOO in the environment that suits me best
has changed everything about the way i tattoo.
even when it's bad, it's still pretty F*ing good...
and it's a damned sight better looking, smelling, and feeling
than the places and spaces i occupied and spanned time with prior.
how wild is that?
only in the last few years have i felt at home in what i do.
-
guys,
i had three apprentices after a fashion.
i'm at a 33% success rate, although they've all gone on to do great things.
i had four separate careers in the same sense.
that's about a 25% win ratio.
i went from the tiptop to the bottom to the middle of nowhere
and now i'm up here just doing all the things i do best every single day.
there's just so much history wrapped up in the past two decades.
there's my babies who're big and my big baby who is small,
there were two divorces, and there's one real redheaded love that outshines both.
there've been big moves and big houses and small worlds and triumphs
and tragedies and death all over the place-
from the tiny deaths of love and money to the big gaps left by blood and family-
guys,
maybe i'm not making a big enough deal out of this:
TWENTY MOTHER-F*KING YEARS.
that's a practically a life sentence.
if it was a real job, i could retire.
although, if i'd wanted or been suited to a real job,
i wouldn't have ever started down this reckless road of makery and mockery.
-
y'know,
i thought about firestorming all the folks who made my life terrible through tattooing-
a long list of who can get bent and get lost, who did me dirty or -
and as quickly as the thought came, it left....
nobody is a F*ing A*-hole for no reason,
and i'll bet the reason was me most of the time.
ha.
i literally have only true stories to tell about tattooing,
and all of them end with all of us leaving without the title.
and there's a kind of wild animal poetry to that.
i'm sayin'- if it has to end, let it end brutally.
at least that's worthy of another story to weave into the fabric of tattooing.
maybe thanking those bastards and dirty b!tches by name is never going to happen,
but if i'm gonna outright flame anybody,
it's gotta be my own damned self.
sure, it wasn't all me all the time,
but i'll bet it was always partially me most of the time.
no lies: being albie rock is a hard style.
i said those things, i did those things.....i can live with that.
so thanks, tattooing, for EVERYthing.
and i cannot stress strongly enough that i mean that literally;
never quiet, never soft.....
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