Time, how she flies.

This last month has been jam-packed with tattooing: working four days at Tattoo Zoo, my home shop in Victoria, and coming over to Vancouver to tattoo for three days at Sacred Heart Downtown.

This seven-day-a-week streak lasted just over a month and has now settled into a comparatively relaxed five-day schedule.

Until the end of February you'll find me at:

Sacred Heart Downtown, 725 Nelson
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 10am – 10pm

Sacred Heart Kits, 3734 West 10th Ave.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 12 – 7pm

Then, at the end of February it's back to lovely Vancouver Island.

Full Circle: Tattooing where I first got Tattooed

Being at the Kits location has been a curious experience: 16 years ago I got my first tattoo there (I even kept the receipt around someplace—I'll post once I track it down again). A circle of sorts has been completed in my life: working at that shop definitely recalls a lot of my initial fascination and love for tattooing and tattoos. All these years later it remains a solid shop staffed with amazingly talented people; a great place to tattoo at, and still a fantastic place to get your first tattoo. Come pay us a visit!

In light of my Mother's upcoming birthday here's a little watercolour of her favourite critter, the Monarch Butterfly. Happy Birthday Mom!

During this evening's LOTR-esque public transit journey from Victoria to Vancouver I savoured a few spare moments (“gift time” I call it) to reflect on the past year.

Let me get all scientific-like and suggest that if you take an individual day as a representative sample of the year, today has been solid evidence that 2009 was outstanding with quite a few personal milestones achieved following a serious increase in my creative output.

This isn't meant to be some big self-congratulatory backpat-athon but, hey, sometimes you have to look back to get perspective and appreciate the good times, right? You could look back on your own 2009 and pick out recurring themes and find patterns that play out day-by-day as they unfold across an entire year. Maybe there's things you can be stoked about, maybe there's even things you want to change?

Some notable themes that defined 2009 for me:

• drawing and painting
• tattooing
• machine tuning
• travel
• friends and family

Interestingly, these annual themes are almost perfectly reflected within the microcosm of today's events: I did a walk-in tattoo, built a primitive tattoo machine, cleaned some tubes, fetched coffee, food, and supplies for the shop, and the cherry on top… took a spontaneous trip to Vancouver to surprise my sweetheart with Champagne to usher in a New Year. May even get some drawing in on the bus over. That's pretty much a one-to-one thematic correspondence from day-to-year, Howzabouthat?

I have a good feeling about 2010. This will be the best one yet.

I really love the atmosphere in historic black & white photos, especially photos where a bit of an old tattoo is visible.

Once you've picked through a handful of historic tattoo photo books (Henk Schiffmacher's "1000 Tattoos" is a good place to start) you realize there are a finite number of vintage photos of tattooed folks that seem to get reproduced across many publications: discovering a previously unseen one is quite rare, so I was pretty stoked to find this charming shot through my pal John who in turn found it at Shorpy.

Based on the fairly defined edges of the line work and the fact the numbers appear to be modeled after a typeface or some damn fine handwriting, this Social Security Number tattoo was likely a professional job done with a machine and not hand-poked.

I think it's a shame more modest working-man tattoo photos go unpublished. While I certainly understand the appeal of heavy coverage or topless women with a teensy tattoo on their thigh I'd love to see more working-class tattoos from back in the day. I suspect there are plenty of unreleased images of suave rakes like this guy, oozing style and class—especially for a migrant farm worker—with only one or two small but nonetheless cool tattoos. Bet you got a lot of bang for your badass buck with a couple forearm tattoos back in 1939: neck tattoos just weren't necessary to convince people you were a serious threat.

Head over to Shorpy if you want to check out the higher-resolution original version of the photo or read more about the lineage interested parties have managed to trace on account of the guy's tattooed Social Security Number. Pretty incredible where a little tattoo can lead you.

For me, cowboy hats are so iconically American, iconically Canadian too, really, considering the significance of our Prairie provinces to Canadian identity. It's been my experience that a good cultural centrepiece usually has a lot of power as a tattoo.

As an eight-year-old I saw my first episode of Bonanza, in German no less, while visiting relatives in Austria (The episode was, appropriately, Doppelgänger).

I must be pretty impressionable because along with Bonanza, countless Spaghetti Westerns, and all that Marlboro Man propaganda I've become a total sucker for all the stereotypical cowboy romanticism: the imagery of the open plains, big sky, campfires and baked beans, six shooters, and dusty old boots. And I fully confess to having never even set foot in Saskatchewan or Manitoba, neither have I been to the Midwest/Central US. Arizona counts for something though, right?

The closer I look the more I see a connection between cowboy gear and tattoo imagery. Besides the strength and appeal of many long-standing tattoo designs that probably derive from cowboy lore, guns, stars, and the Pharaoh's Horses, for example, there's an incredible tradition of (surface) embellishment on everyday practical gear. It's a fantastic mix of utility and beauty: the leather-tooled flourishes on saddles, cowboy boots with their stitchwork and leather inlay, engraving on weapons and tools, and much more.

This tradition of ornamentation extends to almost every item in the canon of cowboy paraphernalia so I think plenty of opportunity remains for incorporating these visual elements into tattooing. Let me know if you've got any cool cowboy-related tattoos or ideas for one.

Thanks for reading

A “Thank You” painting

Some stiff competition in tattooland today.

We started with this

Since the original was a Mexican gal I figured I'd take it down the ol' black and grey route turning her into a female Mike Muir of sorts. Speaking of black and grey, during my trip to the 30th Anniversary National Tattoo Convention in North Carolina I had a chance to see the mind-bendingly rad tattoos being done by Jose Lopez. So smooth. He sets that bar real damn high. Intimidated but stoked with Lopez' work in my mind, I went on and gave the black and grey painting a go anyway.

In the end I framed my little skate rock cholita with some lettering to tie it all together while paying homage to one of the greatest skate rock tunes, Suicidal Tendencies' "Possessed to Skate".

Check her out. Lemme know what you think. Her boobs are 100% natural, by the way.

Perhaps in keeping with the whole Movember movement, Bryan busted out a lovely mustachio'd babe of his own.

Did up this little design from some anonymous historic flash during a great painting session at the shop with my ol' pal and coworker Bryan J. Turnbull. Lots of painting going on at the shop these days.

It's fun doing something quick and simple to cap off the end of the day before heading home, recreational-like.

In the process I discovered a watercolor paper to avoid in the future: Montval Canson 140 lbs Cold Pressed. It pills up like an old sweater with even a modest amount of water and spit-shading. When I went to do a final tint wash the diluted pigment floated on the surface as if it was coated with oil. Learn from my mistakes or try it yourself and see how awful it is.

Chemistry class, Grade 11.

After combining a few dribbles of Hydrofluoro-somethingorother with two parts Whatsitium I was admiring the vibrant pink the solution had become. "Can anyone tell me what color the mixture should change to?" asked the teacher. I blurt out my response, "Magneta!" (You read that right: mag · net · uh) Probably thinking he'd misheard, the teacher asked me to repeat myself. I responded a second time shaming myself in full view of my 25 classmates with my dyslexic mangling of the word.
Mr. Chemistry kindly corrected my error, "magenta" you mean? "Yes... uh... Magenta," I stammered. Figuring this was surely the first thread of my sanity unravelling I decided to put in a couple hours of research and hastily find some answers before slipping away into a Poe-esque incoherence. Also there was the matter of my wounded self-esteem. After my visit to the library (this was pre-Wikipedia and prior to the birth of the Web, way back when we did "things" with "stuff"). To my delight and amazement I discovered my dyslexia was a sign, not of premature onset of senility or cognitive disfunction, but of brilliance and creativity. Brilliance! Creativity! My frequent bouts of daydreaming and incessant in-class doodling were nothing to be remedied, they were traits to be encouraged, quality traits sanctioned by science even. Science! Yale operates a Center devoted to the study of dyslexia and creativity.

Sally Shaywitz is co-director at the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, and an expert on dyslexia. She says,

And there you have it. My confidence was now restored and my mood swinging dangerously close to happiness at having discovered the apparent hiccups in my inventive little brain were actually symptoms of artistic aptitude and creative vision. Whew, that was a close one.

The basic black and magenta color palette in the Geek Girl Heart Locket tattoo flash I painted recently brought back the memory of my serendipitous high school gaffe. How's that for a color association? I also can't help but think of a certain namesake burlesque performer when I think magenta.