Adversity Is An Audit

I spent last Sunday afternoon tattooing with the Chiefs-Raiders game playing through SiriusXM on my iPad.

Not because nostalgia for AM radio was running thick like syrup, but because somehow one of the biggest games of the weekend wasn’t being shown in Los Angeles.

By the time the weekend rolled around, the NFL seemed to realize what it had on its hands. The Chiefs were suddenly one of the stories of the season. The game was a divisional battle with national attention.

There was just one problem.

Out here, on the West Coast, we still couldn’t watch it.

The television decisions had already been made.

There was something funny about listening to that game while tattooing, because the Chiefs have spent this season doing something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

They got audited.

Not by the IRS.

By adversity.

Last season was a grenade whistle.

After years of championships, playoff runs and the kind of sustained success that makes winning start to feel inevitable, Kansas City went 6–11.

And losing does something winning can’t. Something way more important.

It tells you the truth.

When you’re winning, almost everything looks like it’s working.

The draft strategy works. The coaching works. The veterans still have it. The young guys are developing. The front office is brilliant. The culture is strong.

Even fucking up a little can start looking like part of the plan.

Winning is like deodorant. Losing is like lining a kneecap in a heatwave.

The interesting thing about Kansas City wasn’t that they had a bad season. Every organization eventually has one.

It was what they did with it.

They didn’t burn the building down.

They didn’t decide everything that had produced years of success was suddenly obsolete. They didn’t chase every shiny object available in free agency or completely reinvent themselves because one season went sideways.

They looked at what the bad season had exposed.

They drafted.

They developed.

They addressed weaknesses.

They kept the parts of the organization that still worked.

They used the information.

Because the Chiefs didn’t need to learn how to win.

They needed to figure out why they had stopped winning.

There’s a difference.

And lately, tattooing is going through an audit of its own.

Tattooing is slow right now. That’s hardly breaking news if you work in the industry.

Talk to tattooers in almost any major market and you’ll hear some version of the same conversation. Books aren’t filling like they used to. Walk-in traffic is inconsistent. Clients are watching their money. Artists who used to book months ahead suddenly have calendars emptier than an Oktoberfest on 8th Street in Miami.

There are plenty of reasons for that, but I’m not really interested in pretending I can reduce an entire economy to a tattoo blog.

What interests me is real talk around the what now.

Because for a long time, tattooing had some real momentum behind it. The winds were kind, your Grace.

The culture exploded. Social media gave tattooers direct access to millions of potential clients. Styles proliferated. Tattoos became normal in professions and social circles where they once weren’t. Instagram turned into a giant worldwide tattoo convention that never closed.

Business was good. And everybody looks smart in a bull market.

A booked calendar looks like a good business model. A waiting list looks like customer loyalty. A big following looks like demand. Demand looks like quality. And eventually all of those things start getting confused for one another.

They aren’t the same thing.

Attention isn’t demand. Demand isn’t loyalty. Loyalty isn’t craftsmanship. And a full calendar doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at running a business. Sometimes it just means there were more people looking for tattoos than there were available appointments. You don’t really know which one it was until the phone stops ringing.

That’s the audit.

Slow season starts asking uncomfortable questions.

How many of your clients come back?

How many send their friends?

How many people following you actually want to get tattooed by you?

Can you create work people want without depending on the algorithm to put it in front of them?

Can you draw flash?

Can you sell an idea?

Do you answer your messages?

Is your website useful?

Do people know where to find you?

Did you build anything during the busy years besides a follower count?

Did you save money?

Did you build relationships?

Did you become better at tattooing?

And here’s one people don’t talk about enough:

Are you somebody people want to spend four hours sitting next to again?

None of those questions matter quite as much when you’re overwhelmed with inquiries. They matter a lot when you’re not. That’s why I don’t think slow seasons are all bad for tattooing. They suck, sure. But pain and usefulness aren’t mutually exclusive.

Adversity shines a light on things prosperity can hide. Like, the algorithm is not your booking agent.

Social media has become an amazing distribution channel for tattooers.

It also made us soft.

We’ve come to a point where being a successful tattooer and looking like a successful tattooer are easy to confuse.

You can build a whole audience around beautifully filtered work, a carefully cultivated persona, funny videos, controversy, lifestyle content or whatever dumb shit keeps calloused thumbs from scrolling past you.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. Watching people eat chips in their car is a guilty pleasure that ranks right up there with singing Olivia Rodrigo  songs into a hair brush.

Marketing is part of business.

But marketing and business aren’t the same thing.

Clout and clientele are definitely not the same thing.

Ten thousand people willing to watch your dead horse satire Reel are rarely ten thousand people willing to hand you $500 for a grim reaper on a skateboard.

That’s a distinction a booming market can hide way better than most people realize.

A slow one can’t do it at all.

When the tide goes out, follower counts don’t pay car insurance or child support or your bookie.

Clients do.

And the tattooers who spent the good years quietly building relationships with actual collectors may discover that they were building something much more durable than it seemed at the time.

This is where I come back to the Chiefs, or really just sports in general. Since TBS likes to remind us how many Octobers there are.

The lesson of adversity isn’t that everything you were doing was a shovel abortion in a dark basement.

That’s panic.

An audit tells you what is working too.

Maybe your clients are still coming back but you’re not great at finding new ones.

Maybe your work is dope but nobody ever sees it.

Maybe your Instagram following slowed down but referrals haven’t.

Maybe your pricing needs revision.

Maybe you’ve spent years chasing a style that eyes on The Gram love, but the people who actually get tattooed don’t particularly care for.

Maybe you need to stop talking about how the aliens built the pyramids and how Disney created Frozen as a distraction from the Earth being swallowed by a black hole to hide the secret Nazi base in Antartica where they control the 5G chip that was in the Covid vaccine.

Or maybe you’re doing almost everything right and the economy is just fisting everyone straight in the tender turd cutter for a while.

That’s useful information. And absolutely valid.

The point isn’t to panic every time your router plays Rammstein or the calendar gets light.

The point is to look at it and ask yourself.

What is this telling me?

What still works?

What doesn’t?

What have I been blaming on circumstances that I actually have the agency to fix?

That’s the difference between adversity and an audit.

One happens to you. The other is something you can use to build.

There’s another side to all of this that doesn’t get talked about enough.

If you’re a collector, this is the best time of year to get tattooed.

That artist you’ve been following for a while?

They might have an opening. And there’s a pretty good chance they would work with your budget.

Artists are drawing flash.

They’re trying new ideas.

They’re putting together promotions.

They’re hungry for interesting projects.

And they may have more time to spend talking through yours.

None of that means good tattooing suddenly became cheap. Nor should it. It means access has changed.

Tattooers aren’t fans of low tide. But low tide is a great time to buy a boat. And eventually the tide comes back.

The question for those of us on this side of the machine is what condition we’ll be in when it does.

A bad season doesn’t erase what you built during the good ones.

But it will tell you how much of it was real.

The Chiefs found out.

Now we get to.