Samuel J. Robichaud

There is always more there than the tattoo

The Wipe Down is a collection of conversations with tattoo artists from across the industry, getting into their lives beyond what we normally see through their work. The conversations can go anywhere, and that’s the point, since knowing the artist changes the way you look at what they create. There’s always more there than the tattoo.

“I don’t need a psychiatric evaluation for every piece of artwork I create.”

Well, there went about half my questions for Samuel J. Robichaud.

In my defense, take a look at the guy’s work before you judge me too hard. There are extra eyes where extra eyes normally aren’t supposed to be, creatures that look like they came from a place you probably don’t want directions to, dark faces, strange anatomy and enough going on across his portfolio that asking what the fuck is happening inside the head of the guy drawing it seemed perfectly reasonable.

Add depression to the conversation and I thought I had him, except Sam immediately fucked up my theory by telling me that when depression gets bad, he doesn’t draw more, he draws less. Creativity shuts down, concentration becomes harder and the last thing he wants to do is sit there trying to turn any of it into artwork. He would rather get around people, get physical and get his head somewhere else.

People have been trying to figure out what the fuck Sam is drawing for a long time, anyway, going all the way back to second grade when a teacher contacted his parents and wanted to know why their kid couldn’t draw pretty things like flowers.

Both of Sam’s parents are artists themselves and, according to him, “didn’t give a shit” about steering him toward anything prettier, which left Sam free to keep filling his head with early 1990s television, movies, music and art, where Skeletor, Darth Vader, Doctor Doom and Sauron were considerably more interesting than whatever his teacher wanted growing out of a flowerpot.

He still remembers an MTV cartoon involving an alien living inside a man’s head that would violently burst out when the guy got angry, and although Sam couldn’t remember the name, I knew I had seen it too. It took me a minute, but it finally came back to me: The Head.

Now I’m thinking about printing the alien on a DTF shirt and wearing it around just to see who bites. I do that with old ass cartoons every once in a while, stuff like Hong Kong Phooey that immediately separates the people who remember it from everybody staring at your shirt wondering what the fuck they’re looking at.

Sam also told me he had already been featured in an article, laughing that they pretty much published what he gave them and describing the experience as, “It’s like I wrote my own article.”

I read it after we talked and he wasn’t exaggerating. There’s plenty in there about where he went, where he worked and how he got into tattooing. Typical boilerplate interview. Not my style. I dig deeper looking for the interesting shit that shaped an artist’s character, which in Sam’s case had me trying to figure out why an eight-year-old was already getting heat over his choice of subject matter and why the present-day version of that kid still doesn’t want to explain why the monster has three fucking eyes.

He accepts that subconscious stuff can get onto the page without him knowing exactly where it came from but asking him to provide a meaning for every strange thing he draws isn’t going to get very far. Sam wants the work weird, fantastical, emotional and interesting enough for people to look at it and come away with their own interpretation, and a face that looks sad to me can be sitting on the arm of a client who fucking loves looking at it. Neither requires Sam to tell us which one of us got it right.

His tattoo portfolio doesn’t give you much help figuring him out either if all that gothic and dark imagery has you expecting a brooding guy who spent his childhood locked in a bedroom drawing monsters. Sam describes himself as social, says he had a pretty pleasant childhood and also makes colorful, sarcastic illustration work, along with portraits where much of his interest is in studying how light lands on a human face.

Animals, plants, insects and biology are good, but manufactured shit starts losing him, with cars, architecture and furniture sitting well below living things and typography occupying its own special place near the bottom. Sam hates script, has terrible handwriting, says math isn’t exactly a strength and has trouble with long sequences of numbers, and he threw out the possibility himself that some of it could be connected before we left that particular medical breakthrough alone.

I asked him when he last made something without having to give a shit whether anybody else liked it, and we had to go back to his teenage years, when school notebooks were getting filled with ballpoint drawings instead of whatever notes were supposed to be on the pages.

Light blue lined notebook paper, and a ballpoint pen are still his favorite medium, and back there it was plenty of weed, a notebook and whatever he felt like drawing, without a client waiting for it or another person deciding whether the finished work accomplished what they wanted. Sam didn’t like people watching him draw either and thinks he may have been embarrassed about it, and none of those notebooks survived for him to look through today.

Getting paid to make art brought other people into the process, and Sam spent years in commercial illustration dealing with clients, deadlines, plenty of revisions and people deciding what needed to be created and when they needed it. He calls it “art on demand,” and his own creativity doesn’t always cooperate with a schedule, with Sam describing it like a battery that can run down and needs to be charged.

He could produce work professionally and did it for years, but there were days when the order to be creative still arrived whether he had anything creative in him that day or not.

Sam spent roughly seven and a half years at the company that would become his last corporate art job, and he says getting laid off devastated him. The paycheck and the routine disappeared, along with health insurance, and Sam felt discarded and expendable after years in which he says he had received positive reviews and raises.

He had already become tired of corporate art and had started looking seriously at tattooing, but being unhappy with parts of the job didn’t make losing it any easier.

Midjourney entered the picture when Sam says his manager asked him to learn it and Sam responded that technology like this was going to take his job. Roughly two months later, the company laid him off. Sam isn’t claiming he can prove the two were connected and neither am I, but I can understand why the timing still pisses him off. These days he wants nothing to do with AI when creating a tattoo design and says he won’t copy another artist’s tattoo or reproduce one already sitting on another person’s body. Whatever leaves his chair is going to spend a fuckton of a lot more time out in public than he will, so he wants the work to be his.

Tattooing looked a lot easier before Sam tried doing it. He had watched an artist who had tattooed him for years and figured a lifetime of drawing and professional illustration would give him most of what he needed: “I can do that, piece of fucking cake.” Fruit, rubber and fake skin gave him places to practice, but actual skin hurt, bled and moved with a vibrating machine running across it, and Sam’s assessment changed pretty fucking fast to, “Holy shit was I wrong.” He jokes now about “hacking up my first two or three clients,” who he says he didn’t charge, but he was also questioning an artistic ability he had trusted for most of his life and wondering whether being able to draw meant shit once a tattoo machine was in his hand.

He still grades himself harder than anybody else needs to. When I gave him a choice between producing something bad or producing something he loved that everybody ignored, Sam picked the bad work without much trouble, especially with a tattoo where the client is going to keep wearing whatever he did years after Sam has moved on to the next piece. Being ignored doesn’t make him happy, but he can live with good work and not getting attention a lot easier than knowing bad work is walking around on another person.

Social media gives him plenty of practice at the ignored part. Sam says the algorithms don’t do much for him, and he doesn’t exactly feed them what they want either, since he doesn’t make Reels or TikToks, doesn’t really know how to make them and hates being on camera.

He describes himself as shy and awkward once a lens gets pointed at him and says his normal expression can be interpreted as looking pissed off, which isn’t particularly useful when tattoo artists are increasingly expected to become little fucking television stations to promote their work. Sam doesn’t give much of a shit whether strangers approve of what he makes anyway.

Some people love his work, some hate it, and he knows he isn’t going to please everybody. What does bother him is watching artists chase approval from complete strangers for what he calls a “minuscule hit of dopamine,” especially when the price of admission now seems to include dancing, being pretty or cranking out enough content every week to keep an algorithm interested. “Your art should never be judged by your dancing skills or how pretty your face is or how much content you produce every week.” The kid who didn’t like people watching him draw now tattoos his artwork onto people who get dressed, leave the shop and carry it around Los Angeles without him.

His girlfriend can sit beside him for hours when he draws and apparently has the whole arrangement figured out, playing video games or doomscrolling without hovering over the page asking why he put something there, what it represents or what part of his brain produced it.

She might look over, tell him it’s awesome and go back to what she was doing, leaving Sam to keep drawing without having to explain whether the creature came from depression, an old movie, something buried in his subconscious or the highly sophisticated artistic principle that three fucking eyes looked better than two.

After talking about all of this, I asked Sam whether there was a version of him inside those drawings that people who know him never get to meet, and he didn’t give me another story about childhood, commercial art, or what might be hiding underneath all those creatures.

“I don’t need a psychiatric evaluation for every piece of artwork I create.”

Probably not, but why in the fuck does everything need an explanation in the first place? Put something unusual on paper and people can like it, hate it or move along, but put that same image on skin and everybody wants the backstory. What does it mean? Why that? Why there?

Sam can put a third eye on a face for no deeper reason than two looked boring, and twenty people looking at it can still come up with twenty different answers. I like that arrangement a lot better. Sam gets to draw whatever the fuck he wants, the person wearing it gets their reason for putting it there, and everybody else can make of it whatever they want.

There’s another problem with all of this shit though. Yup, here comes the pitch...........You have to find Sam first. He can sit in Los Angeles making exactly the kind of work you’ve been looking for, and if Instagram doesn’t put him in front of you, you could live twenty minutes away and never know he exists. Inker gives me a map, lets me search the kind of work I’m actually interested in, shows me who is doing it and gets the fuck out of the way.

I don’t need another app turning tattoo artists into fucking Tinder cards so I can swipe through them, feeding me a list of who’s “trending,” or making an artist dance for the algorithm before I’m allowed to discover his work. Show me the artists, show me where they are, let me see what they do and leave the matchmaking bullshit to dating apps. If that search puts a collector in front of Sam’s work and they decide the three eyed thing belongs on their arm, everybody involved can argue about what the fuck it means later.

Before I drop the mic and head out to my next gig, where I’ll be performing two shows nightly at the Oxnard Holiday Inn, I need to thank Sam for letting me come out and invade his space for a bit. I showed up to talk about tattooing and ended up asking the guy about depression, getting fired, AI, shit he drew in second grade, his girlfriend and whether the creatures coming out of his head require psychiatric evaluation, and Sam rolled with all of it without once pointing toward the door.

I also need to thank him for taking one for the team too!

This guy came into the shop during my visit with enough track marks running up his arms that Sam and I both took inventory pretty fucking fast. He did whatever he came in to do, hung around for a bit and left, and as soon as the door closed Sam headed for the sink. I followed right behind him and started washing my hands like I had personally handled radioactive waste.

Soap, hot water, scrubbing the fingers, and really getting between the fingers. The whole fucking CDC production.

And about halfway through it I stopped. Wait a minute, I never shook that guy’s hand, Sam did.

So, thank you for letting me come out, Sam. Thank you for answering every ridiculous question I threw at you, thank you for letting me dig around in your life for an afternoon, and most importantly, thank you for shaking that fucktard’s hand so I didn’t have to.

I’ll be at the Oxnard Holiday Inn through Thursday. Two drink minimum.

Joe Gekko, Inker