Some Deliver Lunch. We Deliver Tattoo Culture.

I was outside Mia's Tattoo in Los Angeles when I took this picture. The little red robot was sitting in front of the Thai restaurant waiting for them to load it with an order. I've seen these little guys around Los Angeles before, but parked next to a tattoo shop I was visiting, it looked a little different. Here was a machine waiting for food with cameras for eyes, four dirty wheels, an orange flag sticking out of its head and instructions already waiting somewhere in its program telling it exactly where to go once somebody closed the lid.

Restaurants have this shit figured out; tattooing doesn't.

You can pull out your phone right now and find thousands of tattoo artists before you finish your coffee. That sounds like a simple task of discovery until you try to find the right one.

Search Instagram for a tattoo artist and prepare to get “bamboozled.” You've gone in looking for a black and gray artist within twenty miles of your house, but Instagram has other plans for your evening.

You can count on entertainment that's for sure as you'll get tattoo artist mimicking dancing monkeys, rage bait, an artist pointing at words floating above their head, with three of them as sponsored posts, then a Reel with twelve million views that has absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for, and probably a tattoo artist 2,700 miles away who figured out how to make the algorithm horny, yeah, horny!

So, think about it…… Your actual search is merely a suggestion to trigger what the “Engagement Gods” decide where you're going, and these “Engagement Gods” would much rather keep you entertained than help you find the artist you came looking for.

Jump over to Google and you're not exactly escaping the same bullshit, since the first few spots have Sponsored stamped on them, which is Google's polite little way of telling you these guys paid admission, followed by shops with 4.9 stars, 4.7 stars and some pissed off lady handing out one star since nobody validated her parking, which is apparently useful information when you're trying to decide who should permanently alter your body.

Keep digging and Google may cough up the artist you were actually looking for, provided you can make it past everybody who bought their way in, reviewed their way up or stuffed enough magic words into a website to receive a blessing from whatever other weird digital gods decides who gets seen this week. Hashtags will send you even farther down the rabbit hole, and asking your buddy isn't much safer since everybody has a tattoo guy they swear is fucking amazing, even when you're looking for Japanese and their guy spends most of his day putting tiny butterflies behind people's ears, but you'll still get the inevitable, Bro, trust me, he's sick.

By the time you're finished, you've got fifteen tabs open, six Instagram profiles, screenshots of three artists whose names you forgot to save, don't forget your buddy's guy blowing up your phone, lol, and enough dancing monkeys in your feed to start your own fucking circus, all from trying to do something that should have been pretty straightforward: find a tattoo artist who actually does what you're looking for.

There could be an artist six miles from your house doing exactly what you've been looking for and you may never see their work since they haven't figured out what sacrifice the “Engagement Gods” are demanding this week. Look, of course I'm going to pitch our platform, I write for Inker, but fortunately for me it's an easy fucking pitch since we're dedicated to this industry in a bunch of ways that have nothing to do with throwing up a profile page and bragging that we have tattoo artists on it.

Artist discovery is dumb ass 101, it's a given, seriously, if you build a tattoo platform and people can't find tattoo artists on it, shut the fucking thing down and sell churros on a busy street.

What gets me excited is what happens after that, although a churro sounds fucking perfect right now. Sorry, let me focus… Okay, where was I? Ah, yes, we market artists, write articles about them, photograph them and go looking for the ones whose work deserves more eyes on it, and I couldn't care less whether the “Engagement Gods” have already blessed them with 300,000 followers. Give me the artist putting in the work, banging out badass tattoos in a shop every day and still waiting for that break, since sometimes all that artist needs is a little spark to even this shit out and get their work in front of people who otherwise may never see it. We can be that spark, put the artist and the work in front of our audience, give them a fair shot at being seen, and after that, let the fucking tattoos speak for themselves.

I enjoy the interview side of it even more since I get to peel all that surface shit off, and I don't want the bio they've copied and pasted fifteen times or another version of the same safe interview where everybody pretends the artist was born holding a tattoo machine under a full moon.

Sit across from me and I want the ugly parts, funny shit, bad decisions, what you're proud of, what you're still pissed about, how the fuck tattooing got mixed up in your life and who you are when nobody is asking you to describe your style in three words. Give me enough time with an artist and that polished shit usually doesn't stand a chance, which is what I want, since a collector can start reading about an artist, they had never heard of and finish saying, fuck, I like this motherfucker, I want to get tattooed by them. Try pulling that out of a follower count.

I'm not going to trash other tattoo platforms trying to get you to sign up for ours, since I don't need to play that shit and I'd rather you go look for yourself. What I can tell you is that we show up, and I mean physically show up, at conventions, inside shops and across the table from artists with cameras pointed at them and questions they probably weren't expecting, and we're pretty fucking easy to get ahold of too. We're not waiting around for the “Engagement Gods” to decide which artist deserves attention before we talk to them, and we're not checking the follower count at the door before deciding whether there might be a great story attached to the work.

Some incredibly talented artists need a fair shot, a few more people looking at what they can actually do and a platform willing to put some muscle behind them without asking them to dance for it first, and we're doing exactly that.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker