I got my first tattoo from Cliff Raven at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1974. The occassion was video taped and image processed by Phil Morton, Vidiot extrordinaire. The event can be viewed in this section of my site.
I became changed by this indelible incident, left the Art Institute in pursuit of tattoo equipment. Tattooing was not a highly thought of vocation at that time. But I had become instantly addicted. The search for equipment was not easy, there weren't the commercial outlets there are today, and working in the industry often meant indentured servitude, to slavery.
I became a nomadic tattoist working through Wyoming, Northern Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Oregon, Working and travelling with the railroad, living and tattooing out of an old schoolbus.
I moved my young family to Denver in 1986 to begin to tattoo as my sole living. Worked for Peter Tatz and now for myself for many years.
There were about seven of us tattooing in Denver at that time. Now there may be seven hundred. The dam broke. The industry is flooded, its popularity, beyond what I could have imagined from where I started.
I have watched, or been a part of, trends in designs through time. Watching American's embrace embrace their individual markings, not yet sure what they mean. As of yet, tattooing is predominantly a commercial McDonalds experience.
I have incredible insights into why people get them, and what they then do to inpaint the person, but I still see this form dabbling in image branding, sentiment, and shock value, rather than art. I don't see art as redrawing a worn out image in a hoped for new and different way. I would see tattooing as an art as people understood themselves as art itself. That their surface decoration would expand their mind, and the minds of others, in a spiritual manner. A transcendance beyond a pack identifying insignia, symbol of sexuality, or a stab at grief therapy.
I have been HFHVJHJH and part of vast numbers of healings, rights of passage, rebirths of psyche through the tattoos I have done. Virtually every one, and there have been thousands...
Now, in my next 25 years of tattoing, I would like to take to the level of art. Check in on me as time goes. Let's see if I can do it.
©2005-2012 Tom Cross Gallery Inc.