Bobby Came Back

Bobby had his naked ass on a mattress on the floor of the Golden State Tattoo Expo with hundreds of people walking past him, and apparently a tattoo machine is all it takes to make that perfectly acceptable.

No booth surrounded him, not even a curtain blocked the aisle, and no tattoo bed provided even the slightest appearance this had been planned with privacy in mind. Did I mention he was getting worked on right when you walked in?!

Plastic covered the platform he was on, a mattress sat on top of it and Bobby was stretched across the whole arrangement with his shorts pulled far enough out of the way for his artist to work, leaving considerably more of Bobby available to the general public than most people offer strangers during an introduction.

Nobody seemed particularly bothered by it, including Bobby. Talking to a half-naked man lying on a mattress in public apparently didn't bother me either, so I stopped and introduced myself, and within a few minutes Bobby was just Bobby. He was cool as shit, easy to bullshit with and completely comfortable with the arrangement around him, without any tough guy performance attached to the hours he was putting in or any interest in making sure people understood how much work he could take. We talked, I grabbed a couple of pictures, and the show pulled me somewhere else.

Another pass through the same area the following day brought the cinderblock wall back into view, followed by the mattress, the artist and fucking Bobby stretched across it again.

That changed the picture for me. The first day could have been anything. Bobby had made an appointment, committed to the work and ended up on a mattress in front of the show entrance, which makes for a funny photograph and probably would have been enough to earn a place in my camera. Coming back the next day was different. He already knew what the work felt like, knew exactly how exposed the setup was and had spent enough hours there to remove any mystery about what another day would involve, yet the mattress had Bobby on it again and the same artist was back at work.

No speech came with it and none was needed. Sunday remains blank on my end since I wasn't there, so Bobby may have returned for a third day or may have spent it somewhere reconsidering his relationship with mattresses. I have no fucking idea, and making up the missing piece would give the story a cleaner ending at the expense of making it less true. Two days are what I saw, and two days gave me plenty.

Remove the tattoo machine from the photograph and the entire scene goes sideways. A half-naked man lying on a mattress on the floor of a public building with strangers passing a few feet away is generally the beginning of a very different conversation yet put an artist beside him with a machine in hand and the mattress becomes acceptable furniture, the plastic covered platform becomes a workspace and the exposed ass barely earns a second look.

Tattooing gets away with some weird shit. The photograph gets better the less there is around Bobby to help it. No beautiful shop is supplying atmosphere, or expensive furniture is making the experience feel exclusive and no carefully designed space is telling anybody how important the work is supposed to be. An artist has his equipment, Bobby has a mattress and everybody else has an aisle running right past them, leaving almost nothing between the two people involved except the work being done.

Coming back the following day says plenty, although I'm probably giving Bobby's return more thought than Bobby ever did. He may have woken up, grabbed his shit and headed back to the convention without attaching any deeper meaning to it whatsoever, which is usually how the best material ends up in these articles anyway.

The portfolio had already done whatever it was going to do for him; the photographs were old news and the follower count attached to the artist's name couldn't help much once Bobby was back on that mattress. He already knew how the guy worked, what several hours beside him felt like, and whether he wanted to do the whole fucking thing again. He did.

Yeah, I'm saying shit that's obvious, but not everybody picks up on it, so you'll have to keep fucking reading until I get these thoughts out of my head……… A tattoo starts in a weird place when you really pull the process apart. A person can discover an artist through a photograph taken months earlier, stare at a little screen, go through a portfolio, send some messages, blah blah blah, and decide this is the human being who gets to alter a piece of their body that they'll still be carrying around long after the phone used to find the artist has been replaced three times.

Pretty fucking obvious again, except the tattoo industry spends an enormous amount of energy measuring everything surrounding that decision and considerably less explaining the human part sitting right in the middle of it.

Bobby made that part difficult for me to ignore. There he was on day two, back on the mattress, putting more skin in front of the same hands. Whatever happened during the first session apparently didn't send him running in the opposite direction, and I don't need to know what they talked about, or whether they became friends. Maybe Bobby just thought the artist tattooed really fucking well. I like not knowing, the return is enough.

Inker has a job somewhere in front of all that, and this is where I'm going to beat our own drum a little harder than I normally do since being shy about what we're building would be fucking stupid. We can put artists on a map, present collector's portfolios to look through and make contacting the right person easier, but that's just static no brainer CEO wearing a fucking Patagonia vest at a Ted Talk bullshit.

Getting collectors interested in the people behind those profiles is where this gets interesting and is the secret sauce. We're out in the field and not just showing up at tattoo shows, handing out swag. We're going into shops, YOUR shops, meeting YOU guys, interviewing YOU, writing about YOU, filming YOU and putting media behind YOU whose work deserves more attention.

An artist doesn't get a bill from us afterward for the privilege of having his story told either. There isn't an exposure package hiding behind the interview or some bullshit upgrade required before collectors are allowed to find him. Inker is free, and the point of building an acquisition engine around all of this is to bring potential customers toward artists rather than charge artists for the possibility that a customer might wander past their profile. Put that beside Bobby for a second and the whole thing makes more sense.

Inker might help the next Bobby find the artist a few miles away whose work is exactly what he has been looking for but has never seen. Inker is building the road, making it easier for the right people to get onto it, introducing artists to collectors and vice versa who may never have found each other on their own and got the fuck out of the intersection once they meet. Whatever happens afterward can't be manufactured by a platform anyway, and trying to claim credit for it would miss the entire point. Bobby didn't come back to Golden State the next day for Inker, an algorithm, a follower count or anybody's marketing department. He came back for the artist.

The mattress just happened to be there. And I keep wanting to leave the mattress alone, but the fucking thing refuses to stay furniture. It's on a platform over concrete with almost nothing around it, yet every piece of machinery this industry uses to create attention has disappeared by the time Bobby is lying on it. No impressive shop, a giant social following visible from the floor, no ad campaign, or polished profile and noooooo little blue check hovering over the artist's head. Just the collector, the artist, the work and a mattress that looks like it was kidnapped from somebody's spare bedroom or from a federal minimal security camp. Just sayin!

Hundreds of people could see everything except the part that actually mattered. That's probably why I still like the picture. My last photograph of Bobby has him stretched across the same mattress with the artist beside him, cinderblock behind them, strangers passing a few feet away and his shorts doing the absolute minimum required to remain legally involved. Golden State had incredible artists, elaborate booths, giant banners and plenty of people with names much bigger than Bobby's.

I came home thinking I had photographed a half-naked dude getting tattooed on the floor that I could probably peddle his pic at some Bear publication, but apparently, I photographed the entire fucking reason Inker exists.

Bobby, if you read this, please contact us. I'd love to interview you properly, hear your side of this and finally find out whether your ass made a third appearance on Sunday. More than that, thank you for being cool enough to let me interrupt your session, bullshit with you for a bit and take the photograph in the first place. And if you did come back Sunday, I need to know whether that fucking mattress at least bought you dinner.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker