the TATTOO ZINE.com

TATTOOING IS DANGEROUS BUSINESS!

by DG WILSON April 2008

The customer comes in and looks around. They heard about you and your work, want to meet you and tell you what they want. You draw it up or stencil it and sit them down.

Needles whiz back and forth in a tube of stainless steel. Vibrations from your machine massage your fingers, settle your soul. The customer sits back and trys to relax. There is a sense of excitement, risk and joy mixed with a healthy dose of fear...tattoos can really hurt.

The tattoo artist has a whole bunch of different issues to address besides the fear of a customer. We need to be centered, assured, relaxed and detatched. We cannot respond to your pain or screams, nor blood. We need to be professional even though your ass may stink and you wiggle like a worm on a fish hook. We the artists do this for the love of the art, the ability to earn some sort of living off or our art. As an artist, tattooing is a wonderful and satisfying field.

But it can kill you.

That is right, tattooing is a very dangerous form of art. Not only do you have to deal with customers that may be less than upright citizens...they may even be armed with a gun, but you have to handle their blood. The customers today suffer just as much as we with all kinds of viruses, bacteria, contaminations of all sorts.

Today due to hospitals, prisons even jails there are whole new breeds of bugs that are very resistant to our typical forms of sterilization. Even then we take care to clean our stations but realistically the same dangerous bugs that are wiped off your chair can still be on the light switch, walls, door knobs, books...BASICALLY everything else! Even though we may be very clean in our stations we often neglect all the other surfaces in the shop. Realistically there is no way anyone can sterilize an entire shop between customers so we have to trust God to protect us.

Other people in other jobs, even some Doctors don't handle the blood of other people as regularly as a busy tattoo artist.

So when you, Dear Customer, Patron to the Arts wants a tattoo understand that we deserve every penny we get, and quite a bit more. Simply because we take care of you, your work and choose to work on you even though we may never know if something you carry on your clothes, have in your system or whatever may actually shorten OUR lives.

Tattooing is a wonderful art, one that is very special because it deals with people on an intimate and personal level. You come to us the tattoo artists and want this or that, want it where you want it and even try to negotiate with the prices... please understand that this art is a gift to you, possibly with a heavy price to us.