I’m often asked if I was always an artist, if I knew I wanted to tattoo, the answer is no. I didn’t think I could tattoo until a tiny seed was planted and shortly after was forced into an environment of fertility. One that would foster which ever path or outlook I tended. I could use it to build something good and of the White, or let blackness fester. Luckily I choose the White.

In 1996 I was working in a small factory in Eastlake, OH, had been out of “The Suck” for a year, was trying to attend community college, because that’s what you do, raising two little ones, married to my high school sweetheart, and happily malcontent. I had spent the majority of the last 4 years deployed as a USMC Infantryman and had already missed too many days of my young one’s lives. So I was happy being home and seeing them regularly , I was l malcontent because I really missed being a Marine. I was finding the day to day daily grind of civilian life was much heavier then my time as a Marine.

One thing I did have, other than smiling littles climbing on me, was the fact I had started my tattoo journey. I was getting my left arm sleeved by Mike Helms. This is in an era before tattoos were as a abundant as today, especially large pieces like sleeves. You pretty much only saw rock stars, bikers, or tattooers decked out with entire limbs embellished with art.. To make it even more unique for the time, Mike designed my sleeve in full, the first session consisted of him freehand drawing then tattooing the entire base outline from wrist to shoulder. Every couple of weeks I would go sit and he would chip away at making it look like the vision he had in his head. It seemed like my arm was in a constant state of varying degrees of healing. Constantly peeling and transforming. Constantly changing.

Around this time I picked up sketching regularly. I didn’t call it drawing, because I wasn’t an artist. My brother was the artist of the family, always painting, drawing, and making art. I hadn’t taken an art class since 6th or 7th grade, but as I mentioned I was attempting community college. I had time in my schedule to take a class, Art 101 was the only thing that looked interesting so I decided to give it a try. Now I was a doodler for sure. Stick me in a classroom with someone lecturing and my note pages and notebooks were filled with random images of who knows what. But again, an artist, no way. Sketching regularly was progress from doodler as I saw it. So I started sketching often, like whenever you pull out your smartphone today because the world got too quiet and still and you felt an unknown need to DO something other than just sit there and your phone is right there so why not why not get distracted, those times of the day, those are the times I would pulled out my sketch pad and work at making more than doodles. I found that I had an aptitude for it, and it helped me mental feel like I was doing more than just rolling along in a daily grind.

It was one of those times of sitting and sketching in a break room in a factory in Eastlake, OH that the seed was pushed into the soil. I was eating and sketching, I wish I could remember what I was working on. Was it a random image I wanted out of my head? An assignment from Art 101? Was I trying to recreate something I had seen? I don’t know what it was but I was paying attention to nothing other than what I was doing when I heard “What, you gonna be come one of those tattooers now?”

The nickname Greaselake wasn’t used because Eastlake, OH was a sunny vacation spot on the lake. The name Greaselake was used because it was exactly what you can imagine a post industrial boom town of the Great Lakes that is on the backside of growth to be. And the people I worked with are exactly what one can imagine. A mixed lot of older ‘wish the Unions still had pull’, younger ‘I’m here to make bar money’, and everyone in between. It wasn’t a group of hard-asses, but they weren’t cheerleaders either. My coworkers and most people I knew at that time were just trying to make ends meet with a little leftover for the pool hall, bowling alley, or bar. And anyone that talked anything bigger or different was met with a mixture of disbelief, disdain, and/or apathy.

So when I heard “What, you gonna be come one of those tattooers now?” I didn’t take it as an encouraging question. I took it as an accusation, as prod, a dig to make fun of me for thinking I could do or be anything other than a Greaselake Factory Worker. Now whether it was meant that way or not I’ll never know. But the fact that I took it that way is important. It’s important because at that time of my life, and if I’m being honest I’m still subject to it, if someone told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do something I was immediately interested in it. That didn’t mean I ran off to be a rebel and did everything I was told not to do, but it most defiantly would make me start question the “why” of why I shouldn’t do it.

My coworker’s question most definitely planted the seed of becoming a tattooer, tattooist, tattoo artist. But I didn’t know it yet, however I did realize without question that the path I was on was not the one I was meant to walk. It was going to take a couple more choices, a heartbreak, and some hard lessons to lead me down the meandering path to where I began.