As the new season of Ink Master brings in mentors and apprentices, judges Oliver Peck and Chris Nuñez talk candidly about that dynamic in the tattoo world.
One of the most visual representations of tattooing both to our community and to the world at large is television. The most famous tattooers on the planet, whether or not they are technically and artistically the best, are those who are on TV shows. A great swath of tattooing on television has focused as much on drama as it has on clean lines and placement, but Spike TV’s Ink Master has forever taken up the cause to promote great tattoo art. “The positive side of what I am trying to do on television is wean out the people who shouldn’t be tattooing in the first place and teach the viewers that there is quality in good tattooers,” says Ink Master judge Chris Nuñez. “The face of tattooing has been who is on television. Twenty years ago the elite were great, their tattoos had soul, and now through television and social media there are so many tattoos out there that are hollow.”
The great part of growth in tattooing’s popularity is the acceptance of tattoos in society and the money in artists’ pockets, but now that tattoos belong to the populace, the hierarchy has been upset. The old guard can no longer control who is deemed topflight, and while that decision is now more democratic, we don’t want your spinster aunt or much of Facebook (Filip Leu isn’t even on there) to have a say. With the system that brought tattooing from an outlaw activity to perhaps the biggest artistic movement of our lifetime pushed aside, scratchers and kids with art degrees— but no training—have been allowed in. The apprenticing system has been decimated and with that the soul is quickly evaporating from the craft.
“Internet, television and media all hurt the craft really bad in the tradition of how you get involved and, really, the dues you have to pay to be there,” Nuñez says. “You can see somebody’s time in the business looking at a tattoo.”
This new season of Ink Master plays off relationships but not in a sensational way. The show invited mentors and apprentices to compete for $100,000, a feature in this magazine and the title of Ink Master.
“They come in as a team—the mentor and apprentice,” Oliver Peck says halfway through filming, “and those who have the strongest bond, who both respect each other, have been staying strong in the competition and will go further. The casual groups fall off quick. The stronger tattooers had better apprenticeships because they took it seriously. It speaks volumes to the relationship between the master and apprentice.”
Nuñez got his apprenticeship in 1990 from Lou Sciberras. Nuñez was a graffiti writer, walked into art school, walked out of art school and into Tattoos by Lou in his hometown of Miami. “I met Lou, I showed him some of my sketches and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come back tomorrow, kid?’ Ami [James] started a week after me and Emerson [Forth] also was that same week, so three of us who are still tattooing today all started our apprenticeships at the exact same time. Lou loved Emerson and Ami and I was just there to pickup—just really be the bitch of the shop.”
But Nuñez wouldn’t have changed that for the world. “It was great, it was the best experience ever because I earned my apprenticeship, it wasn’t given to me. There wasn’t a single thing handed to me,” he says.
The beauty of apprenticeships in tattooing and not most other training is that mentors teach their apprentices everything, to the point that if the apprentice works hard and pays attention they will be equipped to replace the mentor. How many other professions would give away all secrets to young strivers?
“My apprenticeship was running the shop from the top to the bottom,” Nuñez says. “Before I even got to do a tattoo I spent months making needles, building click chords from a nickel and a paper clip, cleaning tubes, making stencils, taking payments and selling tattoos.” And of the actual “bitch work:” “There was getting coffee, washing cars and picking up dates—all for Lou, none for myself. But at the end of every night I got to be the 18-year-old kid who got to go to the coolest spots in the city and hang out with every club owner and hot models. That was the life.”
The mustachioed judge had a different track in Texas. “I started out in my last years of high school and I just wanted tattoos so I figured out how to hand-poke tattoos and then made a ghetto hairdryer-rotary machine,” Peck says. “I got a bunch of my drug addict friends to give me money so I could buy some tattoo equipment, and to repay them I tattooed them all. I tattooed hundreds of people and I had never seen a tattoo magazine or been to a shop—I didn’t know that it was a career possibility.”
He, too, walked in and then right out of art school but eventually landed at a piercing shop that was just starting to do tattoos. He was their first tattooer and admits that both he and they were clueless. Then Richard Stell came to town and, after being bothered by Peck for a spell, offered to show him how to really tattoo.
“He told me to start over,” Peck recounts. “Every habit I had was bad. It was harder starting over than starting from scratch. When I first started tattooing I thought that I was reinventing the wheel, like, I didn’t use any black for outlines. Richard, he told me, ‘Your bullshit isn’t going to work. We did that shit when I was a kid too.’”
By being around Stell, Peck was afforded the ability to see other older legends and their tattoos, but more importantly, the tattoos on them. For a young Peck, whose first tattoos hadn’t aged a decade, to see how tattoos sat after 20 years made an impact on his approach to tattooing.
“With apprenticeships going away, no one is fucking hitting kids on the back of the head,” Peck says. “Trial by fire is not the way to learn tattooing. So many tattooers now do things to their tattoos, like pack white into it and make it look shiny, for the portfolio. I tell everybody who works for me if you put an unhealed photo in your book you are misrepresenting the tattoo that they are going to live with. If you put a bunch of glossy, wet, unhealed photos in your portfolio you are a fucking liar. You are selling me something that I am going to have for a week, not 20 years.”
In no way is this season of Ink Master meant to serve as a crash course in tattooing, this is no Tattoo School, but rather a reminder to the community that there was a soul to tattooing and that with the right training the art will stand the test of time. “The lesson this season is that only the people who did real apprenticeships, and I’m talking apprentices and mentors, will be the last people to be in the competition,” Nuñez says. “All those who did half-assed shit go half-assed out quick.”
