EDITOR'S COMMENT—September 2002
I just got back from the 7th Annual Motor City Tattoo Expo in ice -cold Detroit. You can read about it and eyeball the pretty local gals, but there's one subject I didn't talk about in my coverage, and that's the seminar I gave on Friday night. The promoter, Tramp Welker, allowed me to lead a free Skin & Ink discussion group for people who want get into the magazine, shoot better photographs for the Readers' Gallery and, generally, bitch and moan about various articles we have featured over the last few months.
I like hosting these informal get-togethers. It's a great way to spend a little quality time with Skin & Ink readers and share a few pointers on using a camera and getting free publicity. But the part I like best is when people tell me, face to face, what they like and what they don't.
In Detroit, it was all about how they missed Danny Fowler's outrageous column on the technical aspects of tattoo machines. I, for one, thought Danny's column was hilarious. Using almost incomprehensible technical jargon to explain items as simple as turning an adjustment screw to the right to tighten it and the left to loosen it, Tattoo Science challenged readers from Lausanne to Las Vegas. In fact, Tattoo Science was the favorite column of the patriarch of European tattooing himself, Felix Leu. I, for one, never understood a word Danny was saying.
Others at the seminar praised the dramatic change Skin & Ink has undergone since the old days, five years ago, before we added key ingredients, like words, for example, to the bimonthly mix.
One thing, however, stuck in my craw. There was criticism of the articles we feature on tribal and ethnic tattooing. One person told me, "When I saw the May cover [featuring the Samoan, Uati Mika, with his amazing full-body pe'a by Petelo Sulu'ape, I almost didn't buy the issue."
I appreciate the honesty, but I also take it as the dumbing of the current tattoo world in the year 2002. I especially groaned at the comment, "Once you've seen one tribal design, you've seen them all." The fact is, once you've seen one design, you haven't even scratched the surface. Educating the eye to discern one tribal tattoo from another is kind of the point of featuring articles about Polynesia, Asia, Alaska, Eastern Europe and other native cultures in Skin & Ink. In fact, I remember, just the other day, hearing Tramp tell me on the phone that he was upset the Hawaiian tattoo master Keone Nunes was not going to attend his event. "Man, his tattoos blow me away," Tramp told me. "I was thinking of getting some of my old ink removed and getting some of that stuff." It seems, after opening a copy of the May 2000 issue I sent him, Tramp got a chance to check out Keone's leg-length, hand-tapped tattoos firsthand. And, believe me, someone with Tramp's experience knows incredible work when he sees it.
For me, I've been lucky enough to hang with indigenous artists. And to hear these ethnic tattooists talk about the hand-poked designs and techniques is like a different language, a language so full of meaning and symbolism that much of American-style tattooing seems ephemeral and capricious by comparison.
Hey, I love tattooing, from Sailor Jerry to Paul Booth, from Horiyoshi to Deano Cook, but if I forget to include the more esoteric, less publicized areas of tattooing, I'd be depriving my readers of, if not the heart, certainly the soul of the art.