Ink Slave

I'm a 24 year old tattoo artist, originally from California and now living in Tampa Fl. I've been tattooing for about 4 years, the first two of which I had started out of the house. I started out not wanting to tattoo anyone for the fear of the obvious. A friend of mine oredered a really poorly made machine off of e-bay which he decided to do a really poorly done tattoo on himself with. After I saw what he had done I knew I couldn't do any worse and attempted to fix it..... which I wouldn't concider much of a fix by my current standards, but wasn't too bad for one of the first few. After I had done his tattoo, friend after friend lined up for the next. Not long after an ex girlfrends brother had bought a kit from superior(garbage) and started himself..... did some solid work too. His dad ended up making him sell his kit to me in faith that I would do custom art with it rather than the flash his son was doing. So for the first two years I picked up whatever knowledge was available and hunted down what wasn't....ran one machine that I had to tune from a liner to a shader between each tattoo. After those two years I got decent enough to do a piece that had caught the eye of a local shop who picked me up as an artist. I started watching and picking the brain of my main influence Esben Rey. He showed me what I hadn't known and showed me what a good tattoo really consisted of. I worked at Phat Katz for one year, and soon after fallowed Esben to Shiva's where I worked for almost a year. Then I landed a spot in what I concider the ideal shop to work in Tampa...MEAN MACHINE! I've been working for a couple weeks now and love it just as much as I new I would. I'm excited to be working with Tom, Nick, and Greu.....three amazing artists who have a huge amount of knowledge for me to absorb. If anyone out there spent the time to read all this, and is interrested in getting some work done feel free to stop by Mean Machine on south Dale Mabry in Tampa Fl.