Every Television in This Picture Lost

Every television in this picture lost years ago, beaten by thinner screens and a world that decided a television should hang on a wall instead of requiring two men, a furniture dolly and an argument about whether the doorway was wide enough, yet there they were at a tattoo convention stacked on top of each other with rabbit ears pointed toward the ceiling, different pictures bleeding through curved glass, one giant wooden console sitting at the bottom as a base like it had been dragged out of a living room where nobody was allowed to touch the thermostat.

I took the picture because the whole scene looked weird, but good weird. Ok, ready to go down my rabbit hole? Soooooo, there are tattoo artists who would probably understand my “out there interpretation” of my observation and what I connected from these heavy ass Tv’s.

I’m talking about the older artist who wants very little to do with the digital circus that has attached itself to tattooing, the guy who can draw all day, tattoo all night and still regard Instagram as an unnecessary administrative burden created by people who should probably get a hobby. He doesn’t want to shoot reels between appointments or learn whatever new booking platform showed up this month, and if you hand him a QR code there is a decent chance he will stare at it long enough to make you question whether you handed him the right thing.

He’s survived this long without any of it, his clients know where to find him, and from his chair the entire technology conversation can look like a solution desperately trying to locate a problem. Not sure if that makes sense right now, but give it a min, lol. Sorry…Squirrel! The problem, challenge, whatever the fuck you want to call it, is that the world around him doesn’t give two shits about how long he’s survived.

A potential client searching for an artist at eleven thirty at night is not going to know that the guy a few miles away who has thirty years of experience, can freehand half the design directly on the body and can spot a bad placement before the client has finished explaining the idea if none of that exists anywhere the client is looking.

His refusal to participate doesn’t preserve anything sacred; it can leave very good work hidden behind a door fewer people know how to open. The old way didn’t become wrong, but the route people used to go there changed.

Comparison is the word that seems appropriate here and that makes it more interesting, because the old artist can be stubborn enough to hurt himself and still understand parts of the job that newer tools can’t hand to anybody.

He knows the client who says yeah yeah tat me up way too quickly, and that’s the client who needs another conversation before anybody picks up a machine.

When a design actually looks impressive on a glowing screen, he’s going to tell you that tat over time will look like shit on an elbow.

None of that arrives with the software, and none of it becomes obsolete because the software improved. The mistake is believing the old method created that knowledge.

The paper appointment book didn’t teach him judgment, the shitty pencils he’s been using for years didn’t create his taste, and answering a shop phone didn’t make him better at understanding people; those were “knowledge imprinted micro moments” compounded over years of experience, built from healed tattoos, bad calls, good calls, clients who changed their minds, mistakes expensive enough that he only needed to make them once, and nights spent wondering whether he had chosen the right career at all and what the fuck he was supposed to do tomorrow if the answer was no.

Protecting that fundamental core as the world changes around him is very different from protecting every old habit attached to it, especially when the newest tool always presents itself promising faster, easier and more efficient, three words that make any creative person suspicious.

The TVs in the picture already went through their version of this. A thinner, sharper screen showed up and the old one got pushed into a garage, or onto a curb if anybody was brave enough to lift it and take it, even though it still did what it had always done. The world just stopped wanting it that way.

The older tattoo artist can end up with the same fate, but he doesn’t have to. He can lose the paper, book without losing any of what took years to build, let people book online, use better tools, and make it easier for clients to find him without touching the part of his brain that knows a design is wrong before he can fully explain why. That part took years, the rest was just what happened to be sitting around him at the time.

The TVs in the picture already proved the other side of it. Nobody cares what channel they can still pull in, how bad the resolution is or whether the one on the bottom weighs more than a refrigerator; they lost the job they were built for and still managed to keep enough personality to matter for something else, which is a much better outcome than hanging on to the old job until people start looking at you like a curiosity from another time.

Quick trip down memory lane and humor me here. Back in my bar hopping drinking days I was on a business trip in Minneapolis and ended up in a dive bar where, after you walked through this corridor near the entrance, there were three musicians off to the left, two men and a woman who I’d put somewhere around their mid sixties. They didn’t look particularly healthy, the woman was sitting down and suffering from lymphedema, and she was the singer; one guy played an accordion and the other had a washboard hanging from his neck that he scraped with a spoon.

From what I understood that night, they had been popular roughly forty years earlier, back when the sound they played still had an audience that came looking for it, but music changed, tastes changed and the people coming through that bar had changed right along with them.

What got to me was what they had been reduced to. They weren’t being presented like three musicians with decades behind them, they were closer to an attraction near the entrance, this weird little piece of the past people could stare at on the way to the bar, and the whole thing had the feel of being about one step removed from charging five bucks to poke the washboard player with a stick. They had survived, but survival had turned them into novelty. Don’t be that band!

Enter Inker!!! The whole point is to take the shit that keeps artists from being artists and move it somewhere else, letting the platform handle discovery, booking, the repetitive questions, and all the other stuff that keeps eating time without putting any ink in skin. The artist doesn’t need to build a second career as a content creator or stare at analytics trying to understand why a video of him making coffee got more attention than the tattoo he spent twelve hours on; the software needs to get better at carrying the artist without sanding off everything that made him worth finding in the first place.

That older artist already has the part nobody can download for him, the years, the mistakes, and the instinct that tells him a design is wrong before he can fully explain what’s bothering him, and Inker doesn’t need to interfere with any of that.

It needs to shorten the distance between that artist and the people who would appreciate him, which means making him easier to find without asking him to trade thirty years of earned instinct for whatever the internet decided was important this week.

Those TVs got another life after the world stopped needing them for the job they were built to do, and the band in Minneapolis didn’t get the same break, ending up near the entrance as something people looked at more like a curiosity than a group of musicians with decades behind them.

I’d rather see the old tattoo artist give up the parts of the past that aren’t helping him, keep the parts that took years to earn and let Inker handle enough of the newer shit that nobody ever has to decide whether the next logical step is putting him near the front door with an accordion player, a washboard and a five-dollar stick.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker