crusty like me, how’d ya come by it?” He told
me he built it and after the stories of where it all
came from we started talking tattoos. He had an
arm full of old traditional work, like what I do, so I
invited him to the shop for some ink.
Before long, we met up at the shop and while
we were tattooing, we started talking. He said he
had never been tattooed by any “big names” in
town, he was more into simple tattoos that had
meaning to him, a place or a time to remember.
I told him, “It’s not always the names that make
the difference, we don’t know where we might be
today without the influence of countless relative
unknowns, whether that influence is obvious
or not. Think of the Butterfly Effect. We may not
know what some little known tattooer may have
done for us even if they weren’t a Da Vinci of
tattoo art, but they DID affect us.” We talked, we
laughed, and we did a couple tattoos. One was
an old flash pattern, the other was something
I drew. Our conversation about the old being
replaced by the new and how we were holding
on to the past brought up some pretty good
stuff. Things like with each new generation, the
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