Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

174 Epilogue 2008
sponsored by people in the tattoo world. Production companies
and media conglomerates currently organize most conventions.
For example, Clear Channel Communications, Inc., provided the
funding for Tattoo the Earth, a convention tour that visited
twenty-two cities over the course of two years (2002–2003), featured
forty-two artists, and was covered in twenty-seven local and
national media outlets. These conventions draw audiences by
providing free booths to a handful of well-known tattoo artists
and fill the rest of the booths with second-tier artists willing to
pay for their booths so they can gain exposure. They are most frequently
held in major-arena venues such as San Francisco’s Cow
Palace and the Oakland Coliseum that offer what the artists often
see as less than ideal working conditions.
Thus, as with magazines, over the past decade conventions
have become less and less popular among those at the artistic
vanguard of the tattoo world. Nonetheless, the nexus of power
that connects the magazines and conventions makes them difficult
to ignore or reject for those artists seeking to develop or
maintain a client base. As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, word of
mouth has always been the best way to generate satisfying business
for artists and clients alike. But serious collectors and their
friends only have a finite amount of skin. Even well-known artists
must promote themselves with advertising and by actively participating
in even the less desirable outlets in the tattoo world.
Tattoo Artists’ Training
If one thing about the tattoo world has changed—sociologically
speaking—since Customizing the Body first came out, it would be
the system of apprenticeship. In the late 1980s the only viable
means of entering the tattoo trade was through apprenticeship
with an established artist. During the apprenticeship, the novice
learned how to build and tune machines, make needles, mix pigments,
draw and color flash, and where to find the supplies
necessary for all these elements of the occupation. The apprenticeship
also provided training in the ethics of the trade. Initiates
learned about the importance of respecting other people’s custom
work, not to “poach” other artists’ clients, not to open shops in
the same neighborhood as established artists, and so on. To the
disappointment of many of the more established and long-term
members of the tattoo world, apprenticeships have, since the