Review: Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and my life in Ink by Jeff Johnson
Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and my Life in Ink
by Jeff Johnson
Product Description
A behind-the-scenes tour of the fabled tattoo industry on the arm of a swashbuckling insider and natural-born storyteller.
In the eighteen years he’s been a tattoo artist, Jeff Johnson has worked on everyone from nervous young coeds who turn green at the sight of his needle (chudders) to cocky would-be artists with fancy design degrees and weak constitutions (night hogs). As the proprietor of the legendary Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, he’s inked gangbangers, age-defying moms, and sociopaths; he’s defused brawls, tended delicate egos, learned to spot and avoid bunnies, and made it his mission to perpetrate ingenious and awful practical jokes on his fellow Trojans. He’s a true swamp panther: He knows all the tricks of the trade and, more important, he knows how to keep his legendary shop in Portland, Oregon, from becoming the scene of a nightly bloodbath.
In Tattoo Machine, Johnson lifts the curtain on an art form that has undergone rebirth and illuminates a world where art, drama, and commerce come together in highly entertaining theater. A tattoo shop is no longer a den of social outcasts and degenerates-it’s a workshop where committed and schooled artists who paint on living canvases develop close bonds and bitter rivalries, where tattoo legends and innovators are equally revered, and where the potential for disaster lurks in every corner.
Discussing everything from his days as an apprentice to some of the greatest inkers in the trade to the incredibly vivid nightly spectacular over which he presides, Jeff Johnson has written a sometimes riotous, sometimes harrowing, and always riveting memoir about what it means to be on the front lines of a global art revolution.
I've always been curious about tattoos and the culture behind it; I've never personally wanted to get one for myself (needles, ugh!) but the work I've seen on some of my friends has been stunning. Jeff Johnson's "warts-n-all" memoir was quite informative, funny, and at times disturbing. He tells his stories quickly, at times viciously. It was always incredibly entertaining.
He talks about the shop he runs and shares many of his experiences with customers and co-workers. It's not told in any particular order. One can imagine this book as a sequence of appointments; each time you drop into the tattoo parlor to add the next section of your skin art Johnson tells you a couple of chapters. One day he might be thinking about how the chemicals used in tattooing is affecting his brain, while another day he cheerfully reminisces about drawing Spiderman as a kid. He might rant about the quality of tattoo ‘schools’ that are cropping up around the country or think wistfully of the “good ol’ days” that is too young to experience. The story that has really stuck with me was Johnson’s encounter with ‘The Collector,’ a seriously freaky man that Johnson believes (and now I believe, as well) must be a serial killer. It sounds straight out of an urban legend, and it makes me wonder if it’s a ‘tall tale.’ But then that little voice at the back of my head says “But what if it’s not?”
Johnson isn’t overly self-promoting in his book, which I also appreciated. He readily admits that he isn’t the best tattoo artist, or the worst, just a middle-run average artist. When I finished reading, I started looking around on-line for more information about his shop and the tattoo website he runs, because the information wasn’t included in my advance copy. I don’t know if it was printed in the final version of the book.
Totally a great read for me, and I don’t know the first thing about tattoos!
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