The Long Game

I spent most of my teenage years running from cops and chasing a chemically altered state.

By sophomore year, I’d broken my high school’s suspension record. And, for some reason, the administration decided the best place for me during junior year study hall was the art room. I suspect they just wanted me confined to a space where the floors were easy to bleach and most of the sharp objects were accounted for.

At the time I was obsessed with highly rendered pen and ink drawings. I used the thinnest Mircon pens I could find, letting my inner control freak micromanage every turn of every single line. The drawings were technically impressive if you measure artistic merit by pure sweat equity and eyesight damage. But they had all the gesture and raw energy of Nicaraguan hostage negotiations

My art teacher saw that I was suffocating my work inside this tight, safe little cage. One morning, she walked over, snatched my beloved Microns out of my hand, rolled up my drawing, and jammed it into the cubby.

Then she went completely ape shit. She ripped a massive, jagged sheet of parchment off the giant wall roller and slammed it down in front of me. Next to it, she dropped a bowl of black ink and a couple of raw potato pieces she hacked up with a knife.

”Make something with that,” she said.

It completely broke my brain. My entire bag of artistic tricks had been emptied out faster than a Foot Locker during a rolling blackout.

But I dove in and started dipping and ripping with those slices. And you know what? It was the coolest thing I made all year. Without my tiny, perfect lining pens, I couldn’t hide behind cross-hatched illusions of hyper detailed deception. I had to rely on pure, raw silhouette.

That day I began to understand the core doctrine of making art. Taking an impossibly complicated world and filtering it down to its simplest form. Something with a cadence that resonates loudly.

I think about those raw potatoes every time I go to design a traditional tattoo.

Traditional tattoos are engineered exactly like those potato stamps. They aren’t minimalist because the old school sailors and carnies lacked skill, they are minimalist because those guys understood the brutal reality of human flesh.

Every tattoo changes over time. It isn’t because the artist fucked up. And it isn’t because the client didn’t buy the fancy aftercare with arnica oil cold pressed by Tibetan monks fasting in the Himalayas. They change because skin is a living, bleeding, shedding organ that spends twenty four hours a day trying to shield our inner workings from the outside world. The body treats a tattoo like a foreign invader, slowly digesting the pigment for the rest of your life. Contrast softens. Edges blur. Father Time always wins. And that old man always insists on being the last one holding the machine.

The question isn’t whether your tattoo will age. The question is whether it was designed to survive the meat grinder of time.

When you buy a car, the sleek exterior styling catches your eye at first, sure. But when it comes to actually parting with your hard earned cash from the trampoline factory, you’re thinking more about the drive train. Will the transmission take all that city abuse?  You want a machine that performs at a high level for years to come. Not something that blows a head gasket at just over 60,000 miles, even though its been dealer maintained its entire, short, four year life.

Looking at you Ocean Honda, North Hollywood.

Good design anticipates use. Tattooing must anticipate time.

Traditional tattooing wasn’t built on fleeting Instagram trends or aesthetic pseudo science masquerading as style. It was built on decades of scar tissue and observation. Early tattooers watched their work heal. They tracked down clients twenty years later in smoke filled brothels and adjusted their style based on the wreckage. They saw that fine lines melted into static noise, so they made their outlines bolder. They realized ink spreads, so they left intentional breathing room and simplified shapes. Those heavy black lines weren’t just a style choice. They were structural engineering designed to hold the fortress together.

Every tiny detail you put into a tattoo is a legal contract you are signing with the client’s future body. 

Can your ego actually keep that  promise?

If you tattoo eyelashes thinner than a sewing needle, are they still going to look like eyelashes in a decade or three? Or will they merge into a blurry black eye that makes that pinup look like she burned the corned beef on Saint Patricks Day?

If you pack an entire portrait into a two inch circle, what happens when those edges inevitably soften? You aren’t giving them a masterpiece, you’re giving them a time bomb that will eventually explode into a before picture from a burn treatment center.

That’s not hate. 

That’s physics.

People assume complexity equals mastery. In reality, the opposite is true. That’s why we like pop music. We don’t want to hear an orchestra divebombing in odd time signatures all over the place. We want four on the floor. We want a fat hook and a hard nod. Anyone can add another wrinkle, another highlight, or more tiny texture. Even if the structure is sound to begin with, most of that toil is in vain. The real magic is in removing unnecessary information while keeping the image instantly recognizable. Traditional tattooing asks a beautiful and scary question. 

What is the fewest number of marks required to say the absolute most?

The ultimate test of a tattoo is the across the room view. Stand twenty feet away in a place with no overhead lighting. Can you still tell what it is? Now look thirty years into the future, past the sun damage, the shattering hangovers, the putting on weight during a pandemic toilet paper apocalypse lockdown because ordering DoorDash was one of the few joys in life at the time. Can you still read it? 

That’s the design metric that matters most.

Tattooing is a rare species of art. Oil paintings and marble statues get to spend their lives nestled stoically behind velvet ropes and climate controlled glass cases. Tattoos never get a vacation from reality. They go to construction sites. They get sunburned at water parks. They get oiled up and cracked with whips and chains. They are right there with you as you wrinkle, go gray, and eventually break down. Everything the wearer suffers through becomes a part of the medium.

A great tattoo doesn’t fight that reality. It welcomes it.

Think of a tattoo as having a strict visual budget. Every line, every micro shadow, every white highlight spends a little of that budget. If you blow the entire budget on day one trying to look clever on TikTok, there’s going to be nothing left in the bank come tax season.

Great tattoo design isn’t about adding information. It’s about spending your visual equity wisely.

Because at the end of the day, time finishes every tattoo. You just have to make sure you give it the right blueprint.

I guess we call that universal design. It’s more than a blueprint for art. It’s also a blueprint for life.

The world will never stop selling the lie that more is better. More noise, more side hustles, more micro managed details to distract us from the fact that we don’t have a solid foundation. Our anxiety makes us act like stoned teenagers with a bag full of Microns, frantically adding lines to a drawing because we’re terrified of what happens if we step back and realize that there’s no substance underneath. We overcomplicate our relationships, our careers, and our thoughts, thinking the extra noise equals depth.

But it never does. It just creates a shit show that won’t survive the ride.

Sometimes life requires you to confiscate your own Microns. It forces you to look at the giant blank page in front of you, grab a piece of raw potato, find the silhouette, and ask yourself what actually matters when the edges get a little blurry. 

If you strip away the trickery, and drop the unnecessary details, you can focus on the main things that will actually withstand the wear and tear of existing. Just like the ink in your skin, you only have a limited budget of energy and time. Don’t spend it all trying to look fancy on one day. Save some of that juice for the road ahead. 

That last sentence sounds mildly suggestive but I’m ending like that anyway. 

Professional artist. Amateur writer.