Ask a career tattoo artist, someone twenty or thirty years deep, and you won't hear them talk about "the industry." You'll hear them talk about it, the way you'd talk about a person. Something with moods. Something that has fed their family, tested their patience, humbled them, and kept them coming back to the iron for decades. For a lot of us, tattooing behaves like a living, breathing entity, one we serve rather than one we simply practice.

My friend Eddie Deutsch, who has been tattooing a very long time, has taken to writing what he calls love letters to it. I understand exactly why. Tattooing has supported me through my life. It's given me a trade, a community, a way of thinking with my hands. You don't treat something like that as a commodity. You treat it the way you'd treat a person you owe your life to: with devotion, with discipline, and with the understanding that you are, in some sense, in service to it.

Tattooing gives you a future. It also gives you a past, stories, memories, travels, and a kind of magic that's beyond the comprehension of most people until they've walked through the threshold themselves. That threshold is real. You don't understand it from the outside looking in. You understand it once you've lived inside it for years, once the craft has shaped your relationships, your income, your travels, and the way you see the world.

Not every tattooer sees it this way. This is an attempt to explain, to the ones who don't yet, why so many of us do, and why it matters for the future of tattoo culture.

Photo credit: Brayco.

The Community That Understands the Threshold

I'm not alone in thinking about tattooing this way, and that's part of what makes it feel like something bigger than any one of us. I talk to my friend Mike Pike about this weekly. My wife Courtney understands tattooing in this same way too. She's walked through the threshold with me as a supporting wife, close enough to the craft to feel its pull even though she's not the one holding the machine.

I can speak on this with tattoo artists old and new, from anywhere in the world, at any hour. My good friend Brett Stewart, who has the largest tattoo museum in the world, is a real deal, obsessed tattoo man, and we talk about exactly this. I was lucky enough to have had the chance to speak with Lyle Tuttle about this same idea before he passed. I still speak regularly with my friend Lance McLane, Doug the Thug, and Baby Ray, conversations that used to run for hours on this exact subject. I've spent hours and hours with Tom and Mick Beasley talking about it too.

I talk daily with my best friend about this, and he has known this same magic for thirty plus years. There are others who came into tattooing around me who carry it just as deeply. My lifelong friend Shane Tyner has become such a loyal servant to the craft. So has Austin Gervais. Honestly, the names could go on and on. All of the customers of Feldman Tool Co. understand this love of the craft too, in their own way, whether they're behind the machine or wearing the work.

But let's shine a light on the founding fathers and mothers of tattooing, the trailblazers who carried this same devotion long before any of us showed up. One I talk to quite often, Good Time Charlie, is a very loyal servant of the craft himself. And then there are so many who came before us: Sailor Jerry, Charlie Wagner, Samuel O'Reilly, Percy Waters, Amund Dietzel, Bert Grimm, Paul Rogers, Cap Coleman, Don Ed Hardy, Maud Wagner, Betty Broadbent, Mildred Hull, Owen Jensen, Milton Zeis, and Lyle Tuttle. Every one of them served the same entity we're talking about here, decades before it had a name.

The names are countless, really. Far more than any one blog post could hold. But that's the point. They are the magic. They are tattoo.

From old to new, this love of the entity of tattooing runs deep, and it's rich with stories and magic. That's not something you can manufacture or fake your way into. It's earned, one conversation, one relationship, one year at a time.

My daughter Frieda will grow up immersed in this love, the love of tattooing. She won't have to go looking for the threshold the way I did. She'll grow up already standing inside it, surrounded by the stories, the people, and the devotion that built this trade long before she was born.

The Servant, Not the Gatekeeper

Talk to enough people outside the trade, and even some newer folks inside it, and you'll hear the word gatekeeping thrown around like an accusation. Old school tattoo artists holding tight to secrets. Machine builders who won't explain their setups. Shops that won't sell equipment to just anyone off the street. From the outside, it reads as ego, maybe even a kind of old guard masculinity that doesn't sit well with a generation raised on information on demand.

I'd ask people to look at it differently.

When something has given you a future, for you and your family, you don't hand it out carelessly. You protect it. You guard it with the same loyalty a soldier has for the flag, or the discipline a servant has for the house they've given their life to. That's not ego. That's stewardship. The unwritten rules of tattooing, the vetting, the "you have to earn it" mentality that still shapes tattoo apprenticeship traditions today, weren't built to keep people out for the sake of exclusion. They were built to keep the craft alive, intact, respected, and safe, and to make sure the people carrying it forward actually understood what they were carrying.

None of this means withholding knowledge forever. It means wanting the next generation to build a real relationship with the craft, the same slow, humbling relationship the old timers built, instead of skipping straight to shortcuts.

Why the Vetting Existed

Anyone who got into this game in the early to mid nineties, like I did, remembers it clearly: you needed to know somebody to even get an offer to buy proper tattoo equipment. The old supply houses vetted you. They wanted to know you were a professional before they'd sell to you.

Call that gatekeeping if you want. I call it backline credibility testing, informal certification, and frankly a safety mechanism. Tattooing punctures skin for a living. Bloodborne pathogen protocol, sterile technique, basic competence with a machine, these aren't small things, and the vetting process was the industry's way of making sure the people holding needles actually understood the stakes before they were turned loose.

E-commerce flattened all of that into "does your card go through." And the demand for that flattening didn't come from nowhere; a lot of it came from scratchers and unvetted operators who wanted that obstacle gone. Private equity is a broad term, and I don't mean to paint the whole concept with one brush. When I bring it up, I'm mostly pointing in the direction of the business units of the Body Art Alliance specifically, because I saw it firsthand. I watched profits get put over the support of the craft, over and over. At a certain point, business is business. But at what cost? As that kind of ownership has moved into the tattoo trade, buying up supply houses and machine and pigment brands, the floodgates have opened further still. Letting anyone order isn't innovation. It's oversaturation, and oversaturation is how something special gets diluted into something disposable.

Honor the Tools, Not Just the Art

Here's where I'll speak from my own hands, not just philosophy: the tools matter. Understanding your tattoo machine, how it runs, why it runs that way, how to tune it, how to fix it, is itself an act of respect for the craft. It always has been. The old timers who shaped tattoo machine history built their own machines, wound their own coils, sharpened and rebuilt their own gear because they had to, and because doing so kept them in relationship with their equipment instead of at arm's length from it.

That same devotion shows up in the smaller, less glamorous work too: making your own needles, cleaning your tubes properly, keeping every piece of equipment in the shop running the way it's supposed to. None of that is glamorous. Nobody posts a photo of a freshly cleaned autoclave. But it's the same discipline as building a machine from scratch, just quieter. Taking care of the unglamorous, everyday upkeep of a shop is its own form of loyalty to the craft, and it's just as much a part of honoring the entity as anything you'd put on Instagram.

Today almost everything is premade, ordered, commoditized. That accessibility isn't automatically bad, but it has quietly severed a lot of artists from the hands-on understanding that used to be assumed knowledge in this trade. A tattoo artist who can diagnose a hiccup in their machine, swap a part, or explain why their setup is dialed the way it is, carries the craft differently than one who can't. If you want to start building that understanding for yourself, take a look at our full coil tattoo machine build kits, built specifically so you learn what every part does by putting it together yourself.

That knowledge doesn't have to be exclusionary. It can be a resource, freely offered to people willing to put in the time to learn it, which is exactly why a project like the True Line Directory, an independent catalog built specifically for the tattoo machine building trade, deserves real recognition. Somebody took the time to organize and preserve that knowledge for the community instead of hoarding it. Special thanks to Rue for building it. That's the guardianship this whole piece is about, in action.

Using your resources, the historical ones, the technical ones, the communal ones, can only make you stronger as a tattoo artist. It's not a shortcut. It's the opposite of one.

A Side Note on the Ride

As a side note, the act of drawing on paper and getting intimate with the tattoo you're about to do is about the best feeling you can get. It's a dress rehearsal. It's a practice swing before a hole in one. It's everything: the smell of green soap and Nag Champa, good music, a good environment, then slinging some tattoos with metal tubes and needles you made a few days prior, and watching the tattoo just come together. That's the ride.

I'd be afraid that ride is something a younger tattooer coming up today might miss out on entirely. Not because they don't care, but because so much of the process has been stripped down to convenience, prepackaged, sped up, disconnected from the hands-on ritual that used to be the whole point. That ritual isn't just nostalgia. It's part of what makes the work feel like devotion instead of production. If that sound, that hum of a properly tuned coil machine, is part of what you miss too, we wrote about exactly that in The Sound That Built the Craft.

Know Your History, Or Repeat It

There's a well known line, often mistakenly credited to Napoleon, that actually belongs to the philosopher George Santayana: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It fits here better than almost anywhere.

The old school tattoo artists, the ones who built this trade before any of us showed up, probably weren't sitting around framing their work in these philosophical terms the way Eddie and I do now. For most of them it was a job, a hard one, learned the hard way, worked for survival as much as art. But that doesn't make them any less the founding fathers of this craft. There's a real juxtaposition worth sitting with: the practical, working class grind of the early tattoo artists, and the almost spiritual reverence guys like Eddie and I have come to hold for what they built. Both things are true, and both deserve to be understood by anyone coming into this trade today, whether through a traditional tattoo apprenticeship or years of self-taught grinding. For more on that lineage, we dug deeper into it in Coil Machines, Steel, and the Lineage of Understanding.

Names That Carry the Lineage

Part of honoring the entity is saying the names of the people who've served it: the tattoo artists, the machine builders, and the ones who supported the craft without ever picking up a machine themselves. This list isn't exhaustive, and it's not meant to be. It's a starting point, and a show of respect.

Foundational tattooers and machine builders:
Samuel O'Reilly, Charlie Wagner, Percy Waters, J.F. Barber, Charlie Barnes, Tom Berg, Earl Brown, Amund Dietzel, C.J. Eddy, Owen Jensen, Charlie Geyser, Bert Grimm, Sailor Verne, Greg Irons, Ralph "Duke" Kaufmann, Brooklyn Blackie, Brooklyn Joe Lieber, Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins, Ben Corday, August "Cap" Coleman, Paul Rogers, Milton Zeis, Robert "Bob" Shaw, Lyle Tuttle, Cliff Raven, Huck Spaulding, Zeke Owen, Bill Jones, Taylor Jerry, and countless others. The full list is simply too long to capture here.

Women who shaped tattoo history:
Maud Wagner, May Vandermark, Esther Evans, Betty Broadbent, Nora Hildebrandt, and Mick Beasley, who founded the Alliance of Professional Tattooists with Dr. Kris Sperry in 1992, with her husband Tom right there alongside her, deeply involved in a way that's more tribal knowledge than official record.

Closing Thread

Everything here, the servant's loyalty, the old vetting systems, the reverence for tools, the refusal to let history get flattened by convenience, points back to the same star. Tattooing isn't just a trade you pick up. It's an entity you serve, and if you serve it well, it gives back tenfold: a livelihood, a lineage, a place in something much older and bigger than any one artist's career.

The next generation doesn't need to be shut out of that. They need to be invited into understanding it, earning it, the way the rest of us did.

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