Tenka Gomen; Kabuki Kumadori

Rememberin’ back when i knew every tattoo shop in town… Next came the era when I actually knew most of the tattooers… Of course i started tattooing in Amarillo, and spent the bulk of my career tattooing in Ft. Worth, and am now tattooing in Dallas, the big city, the Big D… But then again I remember knowing most of the tattooers in Dallas too. It’s still a tight knit group when I think about it, I reached out to a Ft. Worth guy just this morning, and it was just a couple of weeks ago i called across town to a fellow tattoo artist to catch up on industry standards… Those that are outside the loop are lone wolves, they don’t share in the history of the whole, they don’t have a place in the overall hierarchy of the tattoo caste… Our closed system… It’s members only and you need a lot more than a tattoo to join… Ultimately it is about your level of respect for the mark, the mark of the tattoo… It is about your allegiance to it, to the whole… It is about the black, about the color… It is about the machines, the matacide, the rail… It is about the tradition, it is about the family.