The Strange Things Tattooers Become Experts In

First thing I thought of as I put my money clip in the plastic bowl and walked through the metal detector was, “I’m breaking one of my rules today, what the fuck.”

See, I try my best to avoid certain places. Hospitals, grocery stores, Silverlake. This particular day I found myself in a court room. Gross.

I was testifying in a divorce case where a buddy of mine was fighting for partial custody of his kid. I took the day off, put on a suit and paid $20 to park. In fucking Van Nuys.

Not the kind of afternoon I typically daydream about. That usually involves a waitress from Applebees, a Dodge Caravan with expired tags, and a good, old fashioned game of “Escaped Convict Meets Warden’s Wife.”

I had met with his attorney, and she went over everything she was going to ask me. I was nervous getting on the stand, but it went surprisingly well once we started. We went over this, I’m good, I thought. This isn’t so bad.

Maybe I’m a little naive or I don’t watch enough network TV but I totally forgot how the legal process plays out in court. How the ex-wifes attorney was going to have a go at me. I was not ready for that.

She was mean. Really mean. I wanted to crawl under the bench and hide. It was awful. 

How did I end up there? Well, it’s a long story. Really long, depending on who you ask.

Rewind to a year earlier when I was sweating over a kneecap outline while my client was spilling every detail of his messy divorce. Secret bank accounts. Cheating. Fake dating profiles. Mistaking the symptoms of gonorrhea for a rare type of UTI. Who was going to get custody of a celiac, three-legged French bulldog named Jim J. Bullock. 

This might seem like a lot. But honestly, it’s just another Tuesday in the Tattoo Shop.

If being baked in study hall, drawing demon skulls in my dog eared Biology spiral hadn’t prepared me for my tattoo career, being higher than the ozone and listening to Scott Byers talk about how the meteor was a mistake and that the dinosaurs were supposed to go on to invent language, agriculture and lesson based parenting sure did.

When most people think about tattooers, they imagine drawing, painting and putting ink into their skin. Maybe trading a motorcycle to cover a gambling debt or beating up crackheads pissing on the roll up gate.

Those things are all certainly part of the job.

What most people don’t know is that we also become accidental, unlicensed experts in things that have nothing to do with art. 

We spend an afternoon crying with someone who is struggling through a memorial tattoo.

We hold our vomit when the couple on their honeymoon want tiny sparkles that match up when they hold hands.

We hear about how celebrity clones are really reptilian overlords who control the drone bird population that did 9/11 so we could invade Iraq and use Saddam Hussein’s extraterrestrial stargate portal to time travel and stop Kris Allen from winning American Idol.

Divorce, addiction, family drama, dating disasters, workplace politics, grief, recovery, alien sodomy, attempted as well as successful, and the occasional Elvis sighting in a tater cellar in Wyoming. We hear it all.

Somewhere between the fourth stencil try and and telling the artist in the next station that they clogged the toilet so you can steal their Saniderm, a weird shift happens. The client settles in the chair, adrenaline spikes, and they start telling you things they haven’t told their friends, family, or sometimes even themselves.

Some people get in a chair and they think they’re in therapy.

I totally understand.

Most modern interactions are incredibly short. Ordering coffee. Self-checkout. Sending reels on Instagram. Most conversations happen through screens.

But a tattoo can last for hours. That’s an unusually long time to be focused entirely on another human. It’s kind of sad how rare it actually is.

People often assume clients return because of price, style or convenience. All of those things matter. But trust matters more. People always come back to places where they feel seen and understood. The tattoo is part of the experience. The relationship is what brings them back.

For all the jokes about tattooers becoming part-time therapists, I don’t think most clients are actually looking for therapy. I think they’re looking for something that’s much harder to find.

An uninterrupted conversation. With someone who doesn’t give a fuck just enough to be real.

And maybe a reminder that the most meaningful interactions don’t happen through a screen.

The tattoo gets them in the chair. The trust is what keeps them coming back.

Looking back, that’s probably why I ended up sitting in a courtroom in Van Nuys answering loaded questions about somebody else’s failed marriage.

The attorney wasn’t asking about tattoos. She wasn’t asking about linework, color theory, or whether I thought a portrait of Kanye West in drag would fit better on the forearm or the calf. She was asking whether I knew this person. Whether I had seen how they treated people. Whether they showed up when things got hard. 

Somewhere along the way, after enough hours in the chair, enough conversations, enough stories, you stop being a stranger.

And that’s one of the stranger things in tattooing.

People come in looking for artwork, but what they end up remembering years later is the conversation. The off color joke. The morally grey advice. The emergency snack run. The day they needed somebody to listen and somehow found themselves talking to a guy who draws skulls for a living.

Most of us aren’t trained therapists. We’re certainly not qualified to solve anybody’s problems.

But for a few hours, we can give somebody something that has become surprisingly difficult to come by these days.

Our full attention.

Turns out that matters a lot more than I ever realized.