(This is a post from late 2014 from my previous blog. Re-edited a bit, with new images added.)

The one thing that holds us back as tattooists is conforming to genres. When work becomes a genre, the life gets sucked out of it and originality and progress ends.

I need to clarify the difference between style and genre, because most people misuse the word “style”. Style is an individual thing. It’s the personal touch inherent in our work, whether we like it or not.

However, when people ask “What style do you do?”, they’re wanting to know what category they can put us in. Do we do traditional (old school), Japanese, tribal, biomech, black work, new school, neotraditional, etc?

I’m going to pick on neotraditional here because honestly I hate that term. It’s so clunky-sounding. It screams having been invented by some random magazine editor struggling to come up with a name for something. However, what I’m trying to get across applies to all genres of tattooing.

The basic goals of design in every tattoo are essentially the same– they should be clean and understandable from a fair variety of distances. They also need to be designed and applied in such a way so that they will remain this way through the client’s lifetime, within reason. This is very important. Within a few basic universal concepts, there are countless ways of accomplishing this.

The thing is, though, we only get one shot with a tattoo. The fear that arises from that fact is near paralyzing. We could do all the prep work and make something different and original, but there’s this fear- that it might fail.

The easy way out here is obvious. We do what’s been done before… because we know it works. That way we can dazzle our clients and peers with our technical skill and great taste. We can make perfectly good tattoos this way; but can this work ever be genuinely incredible? I argue no.

I fell in love with Timothy Hoyer, Grime and Adam Barton’s work early in my career. They each had such fresh, original approaches, bringing in things I had never seen before in tattooing. Soon that led to studying Marcus Pacheco and Dan Higgs, and actually understanding Ed Hardy’s work and impact. As time went on, other pioneers came about- Tim Biedron, Lars Uwe, Thomas Hooper. Each of these people did something NEW.

So many times I’ve experienced it, though- one tattooer makes something genuinely new, then others appropriate it directly, changing it just enough so it’s not copying. Enough people do this/enough time passes, and so a “genre” is born. So it becomes, “I’m not copying Barton/Uwe/whoever, I do neotraditional.”

By buying into a genre, we separate ourselves from the thought processes behind them, WHY things are approached the way they are. Thus, we do a tattoo, our thoughts are in the wrong place, they’re not your own.

I think- “Yeah, I’m going to do this tattoo of a woman. I’m going to use a thick line with fine line details. Then I’m going to put solid black under her lower eyelids and under nose in black because I’ve seen that and it looks awesome, and I’m going to use just black, red, and yellow, and I’m going to frame it out in a diamond shape.”

I should be thinking- “I’m going to do this tattoo of a woman. I’m getting across a look of dark sadness- I want that, my client wants that. What sort of lighting gets that across? What sort of colors get that across? What original way can I approach this? What’s an interesting way to form a good silhouette? How will this piece fit into the entirety of my work? How can it be mine? How can I take this farther?” Then again- “How can I take this farther?”

We love throwing out terms like “tied to tradition” and “standing on the shoulders of giants” to justify what is ultimately fear. We can all be giants. I can be a giant. You can be a giant.

Perhaps taking what’s been established and putting some original spin on it isn’t enough any more.

Can we start from zero? Establish the important things as tattooists- clarity; and being built to last. From there get in the personal work to find an honest, genuine, original way to make our work.

Neo-trad: the moment you name a genre, you suck the life out of it and end originality and progress

I’ve always enjoyed this quote, and I continue to try to learn its meaning better every single day-
“We seek not to imitate the masters, rather we seek what they sought.”

Thank you.