The 10-Year Lie: A Honest Guide to Why Fine Line Tattoos Fade

{and Why I’ll Do Them Anyway}

​Reading Time: 6 Minutes

Category: Education

Author: David Nash

​The "Fresh" vs. "Healed" Deception

​If you spend enough time scrolling through Pinterest or Instagram looking for your next tattoo idea, you’re going to see a lot of "single needle, fine line, micro tattoos." You see these micro-portraits the size of a quarter, or script so fine it looks like it was written with a whisper.

​And the picture you see looks incredible.

​But there is an unfortunate, unpromising reality that the internet filters won’t tell you: You are technically looking at an open wound.

​That photo was taken moments after the needle stopped. Likely right after the very last sterile wipe that tatt will ever see. The skin is tight, the ink is still sitting right at the top, and the artist (if they are savvy) probably blasted it with a polarized light to cut any glare.

​It is, in fact, a digital fantasy. It is not, however, the tattoo you are going to live with.

​The tattoo you live with is the one that settles in six months later. And the tattoo you die with? That’s the one you need to think about.

​You Are Biological Matter: Your Skin is Not a Canvas

​I hear it in the shop every day: "I want something simple, I want this tiny, detailed design because I don't want a big, heavy tattoo."

​I completely understand and even respect the sentiment. But as part of my job, I have to explain the boring science behind it daily.

​Paper is static. Canvas is static. Your skin is a living, breathing organ that is actively trying to attack a foreign invader (me & the ink) I am putting into it. That is its job.

​When I put ink into your body, your immune system sends out these little janitor dudes called macrophages. Their only goal in life is to eat that pigment and carry it away to your lymph nodes. The larger the pigment particles (like the heavy black lines in American Traditional work), the heavier they are for the macrophages to move, so more pigment stays put.

​The tiny, delicate, sometimes diluted particles used for soft shading and "micro" details? The macrophages devour those things like a pitbull on a pork chop.

​Over time, ink spreads. It migrates. It’s the core nature of tattoos. It moves and changes because it is a part of your body now, which is constantly moving and changing. If we pack too much detail into a postage stamp, in ten years, it’s not going to look like a lion or a flower; it’s going to look like a bruise on a banana.

​I Am Not the Tattoo Police

​Don't take this as me raining on your parade. I am not the "Tattoo Police" or some all-knowing tattoo monk. And I definitely am not the keeper of some ancient, mystical gate that you shall not pass.

​I am a guy who trades time (and what essentially amounts to skill) for money to feed my family.

​If you hire a roofer and tell him, "I want the shingles made out of raw pine because I saw it on Pinterest and it looks sick," a good roofer is going to tell you, "Hey bud, just so you know, that’s going to leak in a year."

​But if you look that roofer in the eye and say, "I understand the risks, I have the budget, and this is exactly the aesthetic I want right now," then that roofer has a choice. He can pack up his truck and leave, or he can say, "Yes sir," and install that roof with the cleanest, straightest lines you’ve ever seen.

​I show up to work to provide a service that I love.

​I will absolutely execute these fine-line, delicate tattoos for you. I will apply every ounce of my decade-plus years of technical experience to make sure that needle depth is perfect and that line is as crispy as a freshly starched shirt. I’ll even take a photo of it, post it on my Instagram, and hopefully get a few hundred likes... which, ironically & in all honesty, propagates the very trend I’m warning you about.

​I’m not above the system and I am not smart enough to judge it. This is, in all reality, a service industry. My love language just happens to be Acts of Service.

​So if your heart is set on a design, and it’s not a life-changing bad decision, or something that I know full well another artist could perform better or with more passion, I’m going to do the job you hired me to do. And I’m going to do it with a sense of pride.

​But it's also important to respect the client enough to tell everyone the truth about the materials we’re working with. I’ll build the wall you asked for. I just want you to know which bricks are going to crumble first.

​So What's the Alternative?

​I gotta get an eagle tattoo the size of a hubcap?

​Well... to be honest, "Bold Will Hold" is time-tested, not just a style choice. There is a reason you still see 70-year-old tattooed vets with anchors on their forearms that you can still read from across the room.

​It’s not just style; it’s structural engineering.

​American Traditional tattooing—the stuff with the bold black outlines and the solid color saturation—is built to survive the war against your immune system.

​The Black Outline: This is the bones of the tattoo. It holds the design together. Even if the color fades in 40 years, the image is still readable.

​Negative Space: This is the "breathing room." We need skin breaks (or areas with no ink) so that when the ink spreads (which it inevitably will), it doesn't turn the whole tattoo into a blobby mess.

​Contrast: True Black & your skin tone. It cuts through the visual noise.

​If a design relies on a line thinner than a hair to make sense, then its perfection is on a countdown clock. If a design relies on bold structure and a knowledgeable approach, it’s an investment.

​How to Get What You Want (With No Regerts)

​You don't have to get a panther or a dagger if that’s not your vibe. I get it. Not everyone wants to look like a sailor from 1945. But we can apply the principles of longevity to any style.

​Size Matters: If you want detail, we need to go bigger. We need to give those lines room to spread without touching.

​Simplify: We strip away the unnecessary noise. We focus on the core image. Not every tiny tattoo needs to be a testament to how small they make needles.

​Trust the Artist: A relatively small tattoo applied with delicate shading and precise line work can read as delicate or effeminate as much as it can strong and prevalent. It's a matter of when and where you use the tools at your artist's disposal.

​If I tell you a design is going to turn into a "blob," I'm not trying to crush your dreams. I'm trying to save you a laser removal session in 2030.

​Now, if an artist comes back from the drawing room and shows you something that's completely out of pocket from what you want, it is within your rights to find a compromise with the artist and the design, or find another artist that you think would be more applicable to your style.

​The Conclusion

​I’m here to provide a service. Whether you want a piece of American Traditional history that will outlive us both, or a delicate fine-line accessory for the here and now, I’m going to give you the best version of that tattoo possible.

​I just want to make sure you know what you’re buying.

​If you’re ready to talk logistics, come see me. I’m at Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas (Wednesday–Friday) or Heart in Hand in Waxahachie (Saturday–Sunday).

​We can talk design, we can talk budget, and we can figure out how to put something on you that you can be proud of.

​TL;DR

​Micro Tattoos Fade: Your immune system eats fine ink particles.

​The "Fresh" Photo is a Lie: Don't trust Instagram as a reference for healing.

​I Will Still Do It: If you understand the risks, I will execute the tattoo with precision and pride.

​Bold Will Hold: Structure and negative space are the keys to longevity.

Purple Dragon: Small-Town Tattoo Iceberg 🧊

Part I — The Surface Layer

As a kid, there weren't allot of activities going on in downtown America in the nineties. But I can remember walking past the graffiti on this one wall. The door would open with a ding and let the buzz of a tattoo machine drift into the street, mixing with the smell of cigarettes like a pie cooling on a cartoon windowsill. That was the first time I realized tattoo shops had their own kind of mysterious gravity. They would pull you in, even if you weren’t old enough to follow the allure.

This story is the first layer of a larger iceberg theory. The surface you can see is just the beginning. If you didn’t know…..the idea behind an iceberg is that most of it hides just under the water. The surface is what everybody talks about, but the real weight of it…. the rumors, the silent truths, the cold case files live underneath. That’s where most of my knowledge rests, the underbelly.

Every small-town tattoo shop leaves a wake behind it. There are stories that float between truth and rumor… fading memories that only make sense if you were riding the wave of the times. Before tattooing got chewed up by reality TV and spit out through Instagram trends, Tattoo Shops were their own little worlds. They didn’t “represent an industry” or care about “going viral.” They carved an industry out of virgin territories.

One of those mythical brick buildings was The Purple Dragon Tattoo in Waxahachie, Texas.

Tucked into an old repurposed gas station in the area around 212 W Jefferson Street, it sat somewhere between the old historic courthouse and Oma’s Jiffy Burger. It drew in bikers, Townies, misfits, Preachers, and the occasional teenager chasing a little rebellion. The name of the shop was a deep dish with several beefy layers of meaning. Maybe it was a nod to 70s biker-fantasy artwork. Maybe it echoed old Sailor Jerry flash with serpents and dragons. Or maybe it just sounded powerful when it was echoed in a bar by some small town lot lizard to the local leather daddy.

In small towns, tattoo shops were never just tatt shops. They were rumor mills churning out hot goss. It’s no different than the inside and outside of a beauty salon, gossip leaked both ways. Every story had its own seven-layer recipe. Every town in America had that one shop that made people question the artist’s past, the town’s morals, and the stereotypes of the time. Tales spread about shop owners with dangerous secrets, cursed designs, or “infection scares.” The capital T Truth usually mattered less than the myth it left behind.

That’s what keeps me coming back to this iceberg. Over the years, I’ve sifted through what people said, what actually happened, and what became part of my own tattoo folklore.

I’m going to try to trace that elbow-web of half-truths tangled around the halls of the Purple Dragon.

This isn’t a moral audit of the owner or a fact-checking mission for the townies. It’s more like a dive into the atmosphere — the urban legends and the tones that still linger from that era of Texas & tattoo culture. I’ll move through it layer by layer: the nostalgia, the hidden rumors, and the deep, often uncomfortable stuff under it all….. like guacamole and black beans.

I’m not here to pretty up the past or make it safe for the internet. Consider this your warning. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, no hard feelings, I totally get it; so little time….so many tattoo blogs yada yada thanks for reading this far. But if you’re still here, BITCHIN. I’ve been sitting on these notes for a minute, and if I don’t put them out here right now, I probably never will.

The storie has to start somewhere with the purple dragon. Let's start here

Part Two: The Epidermis

The Name- The Purple Dragon

Disclaimer: I use a lot of colorful language and some derogatory terms. That’s okay, because I like the way I talk, and I like you too. Try to be chill.

Before we can break the skin on this bad boy, we’re going to have to scratch the surface around the sensitive tip of this iceberg.

So, like any story, it starts with a title. Or more precisely, what it meant, what it stood for, and what it would come to mean.

I’ve heard the old Purple Dragon story about a hundred or so times from the yellowed, tobacco-stained lips of every salty, old-school tattooer who took pride in his roots and valued the art of storytelling in a way that’s been lost to fast-paced media.

I’m pretty sure most of you (especially if you’re here) have heard it by now.

Maybe you can recall, though, that there was a time when you had to buddy up to a guy for a few years (even trade goods or jobs) before a guy felt like opening up about this old story he’d heard, memorized, and embellished.

But for the sake of continuity, I’ll lay it out as history denotes.... not from research or verifiable sources, but from the same way I first heard it:

consumed, then regurgitated, and finally chewed like cud in the back of my mind until it comes to pass that it fertilizes the thoughts of future degenerates.

---

Soooooo…

Sometime in the 60s, in Honolulu’s Chinatown, Sailor Jerry (Norm Collins) had already decided he despised the idea of people sharing tattoo information with the uninitiated.

Through a local interview, Jerry overheard another tatter by the name of Lou Norman mentioning that purple ink didn’t exist.

As you probably know (though something not universally understood by clients of the time) the pigment used to make purple ink was toxic.

In a pretty gnarly way, too.

So Jerry, being Jerry, took that as a personal challenge to make someone publicly look incompetent.

The man was an innovator in a way that has affected every following tattoo generation.

He mixed his own pigment, tattooed a bold purple dragon on some guinea pig’s arm, and then sent the kid straight down the street into his rival’s lair to ask for a “huge purple dragon tattoo, with no budget.”

Lou apparently really chastised the kid in front of a lobby full of sailors.

When Lou called bullshit and said, “There’s no such thing as purple ink,” the sailor rolled up his sleeve; and there it was, as purple and swollen as the devil’s dick.

The guy tells ol’ Lou that Jerry had no problem doing one already, and Lou allegedly dropped from the shock.

My guess is, he probably thought this dipshit had signed his own death warrant.

I’d imagine Lou thought this guy was ruining his arm with a carcinogenic substance that would rot him alive.

Jerry was never one to waste a punchline, especially at the expense of an adversary.

So, allegedly, he sent Lou a bouquet of purple orchids with no note.

But that’s just an old story... and my hometown couldn’t be farther from Honolulu.

---

I like to think that old fable is the origin of the shop’s name from my quiet & secluded neck of the woods.

But to be honest, I’ve never actually interviewed the owner aaand that’s not really where my interests lie.

The truth is... once upon a time, people weren’t dying to share esoteric knowledge, legends, or secrets.

Unfortunately, that kind of secrecy creates a sub-culture of outsiders looking in, making assumptions about things they can’t perceive or don’t understand.

It’s human nature to fill in the gaps.

You see a shadow and imagine you saw a person.

A face appears in abstract wood grain.

Maybe you see shapes in a cloud as it passes.

Our minds do the same thing with missing information, they can't help but fill in the gaps.

Like most kids growing up in rural Texas at the turn of the millennium, I didn’t know who Sailor Jerry was/ or anything about this story.

What I did know was that the shop in my town had a weird, mysterious name & it was a random-seeming title that everyone seemed to know.

Even weirder, everyone knew someone who had gone there, and each of them had their own version of the story behind the name.

That air of mystique will always lead to a need to “be in the know.”

As one would expect, this will create a powder keg of misinformation.

I often wonder if the absence of a shared narrative creates a vacuum of information that is inevitably filled with rumors until it is as sufficient as fact.

You have to be seeing examples of this every day by now.

The current fast-moving news cycle drops a headline, and the first story to print becomes solidified into the zeitgeist — regardless of truth.

---

One of the strangest parallels to that misinformation phenomenon was a leftover idea from the era that honestly doesn’t make much sense at face value:

purple = gay.

It sounds silly to a person with a fully formed adult brain, but in the late nineties, underground gay culture was still a rumble under the floorboards of middle-American homes.

Mirroring the satanic panic before it, it sparked fear and fascination in the misinformed.

Years before a strange televangelist claimed he’d received a vision that the purple Teletubby was gay, kids in schools were already whispering about coded symbols gay people used (what ear you pierced, what side you wore a wallet on, if you sucked dudes)… who could keep track of all the rules.

But the main thing that caught on in Waxahachie was purple.

One of the worst fights I saw at the time was in elementary school.

It started because a kid called another kid a “purple shirt.”

The fucked-up thing is, his mom had just put him in a purple polo.

But in that moment, “purple shirt” was a low-brow stand-in for “gay.”

Honestly, looking back, the whole thing seems pretty gay.

Yet in that climate (with the AIDS epidemic still misunderstood and misrepresented on every news outlet) being called gay was a serious slur.

Regardless of how you perceived that statement… it is what it is.

---

Through my early teen years, everyone just knew that The Purple Dragon had to be tied to gay culture.

And of course, all those self-proclaimed experts also just knew that all gay people probably had AIDS.

Then, sometime around middle school, a local “free-thinking genius” connected the dots between esoteric symbolism and a grainy photo making the rounds on the early internet.

Boom! 💥 “The Purple Dragon” must be a euphemism for a man’s penis.

In fact, they said, the guy who owned the shop probably had a big purple dragon tattooed on his cock.

Pretty soon, everyone just KNEW that was true.

Over the years, that rumor was no longer spinning... it was gaining traction.

As gay counterculture became more visible in the mainstream, people who thought they were being progressive started parroting baseless stories if it made them sound compassionate or “open-minded.”

---

To this day, I still get messages from people asking if the owner really had AIDS, or if the shop was some kind of underground gay bar.

After I posted about it on my story yesterday, someone messaged me saying:

> “I can remember when I was a teenager, they always said the owner of Purple Dragon had AIDS, and if you got tattooed there, you’d get AIDS too.”

That message was pretty much copy-and-paste identical to dozens of others I’ve received since talking about this topic.

In all honesty, though, the truth that lies deeper is much crazier.

It’s a microcosm of public scrutiny and mob culture that has been applied on a macro scale to the rest of the world through the internet.

I never got to go inside the Purple Dragon Tattoo before it closed its doors.

But from where I sit, these rumors and stories probably killed the shop.

Sure, it kept its loyal regulars, but their ability to reach new clients was strangled by word-of-mouth and reputation.

Fear and regurgitation p

erched over the old building like a vulture’s nest.

Once we break through the surface, maybe you’ll see this iceberg a little deeper.

Part Three: Subdermal Anchors

Disclaimer #2

In the spirit of transparency, I want you (the readers) to know that after posting the last blog, I started to feel some type of way. Soooo … in an effort to seek out every version of the truth, I reached out to the owner of The Purple Dragon to ask a few questions and maybe clarify a couple of the finer details.

He replied and said he’d be happy to answer my questions. However, while I wait on his reply, I’m realizing that no matter what he says, it will inevitably change how I see this story as I write it. That realization gives me a sense of urgency to bring you the next part before any of my views or opinions shift—and I believe they will, just by the mere fact of knowing more than I did yesterday.

Part 3 isn’t what I’d call finished, but I’m happy to share it in its current state.

.__.

It’s 1978, and you’re sunbathing on a beach in Goa, India, along what was known as the hippie trail. It’s the height of the most free-thinking, live-and-let-live era in modern memory. Suddenly, you spot an eleven-year-old boy with the biggest tattoo you’ve ever seen, handing out flyers for his family’s business.

“What in the world?” you think to yourself.

Even in that time of love and peace, seeing that had to shake some people’s reality to the core. And I’m sure none of them imagined that a skinny kid from their tales abroad would grow up to become one of the most renowned tattoo artists of my lifetime..... and someone who personally inspired me to be more than just a tattoo man.

Filip Leu ( a few years before his ascent into tattoo legacy) was simply a child born into a bohemian family living on the outskirts of modern society. A boy who received his first tattoo from his father around age eleven and, by some accounts, performed his first tattoo by thirteen.

.---.

Throughout most of pre-modern history, families like the Leus were the cultural norm. Believe it or not, for thousands of years the archetype of a family was simple: a father who specialized in a trade that served his community. He would hone that craft to support his family and protect his bloodline.

Ideally, a mother helped where she could and kept the children at bay until they were old enough to learn their father’s trade. That system offered a double-edged sword: free labor, sure … but also a way to pass down ancient knowledge, principles, and belief through long hours spent side by side. The hope was always to hand that lineage off to the next generation.

Through the lens of modernity, we call that patriarchy/ or outdated. In today’s world, it’s easy for someone to claim outrage, or to wedge themselves between a parent and child over a perceived harm.

---

So now we hear stories like, “Oh, I got tattooed at that place in the ’80s when I was a teenager.” Someone mentions an old shop and another chimes in, “Yeah, I got tattooed there when I was a minor; they didn’t give a fuck.”

But what slips from memory is the reality of fluctuating ideals. The truth is, there was no standard, no regulation, no oversight for tattooing in Texas until 1993. I don’t know if there was one single incident that made the government decide to shove its nose into the business … but once that genie’s out of the bottle, it doesn’t go back in.

Generations of Texas tattoo families who had long taught their kids to tattoo resisted the new invasive oversight. Suddenly, people who’d been trying to peek their noses into the business of tattooing were all the way in. These outsiders (once not privy to its secrets) were now the ones demanding access and oversight. Inspectors were just strangers with badges that were walking into sacred spaces they’d never earned the right to enter. What had once been a closed circle for the initiated was now an open book, being re-written whilst read for the first time.

---

But nestled beside the Skeltons’ motorcycle run *which I believe was owned by Bill and Carol Skelton** and tucked away from the crowded urban grind, this wave of modern tattooing was moving forward. Into the chapters of this open book.

There used to be a time when walking into a tattoo shop wasn’t for everybody. The prudish, the weak-willed, the indecisive — those people stayed out. The tattooed eleven-year-old handed your hippie aunt a flyer, and she tosses it away in disgust. The mystique itself was enough to keep them from crossing the threshold into what promised to be the most permanent investment of their short lives.

Then came the decades of 24-hour media, dragging everything out of the ether. After punk rock exploded, it established a broad counterculture that bled into art scenes everywhere. Suddenly the sight of a tattoo on MTV wasn’t foreign anymore. The forbidden fruit had been televised, and as always, that made it even sweeter.

The doors opened wider, and new business is always welcome when you’re young and hungry. But with those new customers came their reservations and their preconceived notions about this “bad” thing they were doing … and about the kind of place where they were doing it.

People look back on those shops now and judge them through the frosted-glass, IKEA-and-fern-riddled lens of the modern med-spa-style tattoo parlor. They lie in sterile rooms getting AI-generated designs from some quiet kid with an art degree, and it becomes easier to judge their own past.... And in turn forgetting how much soul, noise, and human mess once came with the craft.

We minimize our part in our era of rebellion. How quickly we forget getting fake IDs, begging an aunt to play mom... just to get tattooed or pierced when we knew we weren’t old enough. Old enough to know better, too young to care as they say.

Now you look around the quiet, white-walled studio, the hum of the machine replaced by silence, and it’s easy to forget why tattoos ever felt dangerous. Easier still to judge the cluttered, chaotic shops of the past instead of honoring them as part of the culture’s DNA.

---

Imagine for a moment you’re that young, adventurous kid, sitting for your first tattoo. You’re nervous, adrenaline buzzing through your veins.... and suddenly in the middle of it, the smell of green soap mixes with cheap aftershave and palpable discomfort. In walks the newly formed arm of the health department to inspect the shop. They mention a couple of minor violations, but it all sounds like Greek to you.

Later, you’re drinking with a buddy, telling the story of how the place you got tattooed got “raided,” and suddenly that snowball of rumor is rolling downhill.

It wasn’t uncommon then (or now) for competition {especially among so few shops} to breed wild talk. One artist, a town or two over, might say, “Don’t go there, man, I heard he uses dirty needles.”

This was a leftover habit from the old scab merchants who used to set up roadside tents. Lesser craftsmen would tattoo wherever they could get away with it, staying just far enough from the next guy a town over to avoid a fight. They’d hoard whatever new business they could and tarnish anyone else’s name in the process.

---

The Purple Dragon didn’t have much competition in Waxahachie ~ or in the area at all, for that matter. So who would benefit from its demise?

I should probably disclose this: growing up in this town, I know plenty of people who knew the owner and plenty more who got tattooed there. And I’m 95 percent sure all the rumors surrounding the name were just that .... local urban legend.

Still, you’d hear stories: “I got tattooed there when I was sixteen.” “I got my belly button pierced there.” But those stories leave out details.major details like how someone’s dad was a childhood friend of the owner and gave his blessing, or how they had been pestering mom all summer to feel like part of the same rebellious current as everyone they admired. I still get parents TO THIS DAY who can’t comprehend that, legally, they aren’t allowed to give consent for me to tattoo their child in the state of Texas.

The half-truths feed the more elaborate rumors. And before you know it, bias and speculation shape how you remember everything... all because you NEED to know.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be part of everything. You don’t have to fit into everything. You don’t have to know everything.

And if you absolutely must chase down the story behind that eleven-year-old boy walkin up to you on a beach in India, maybe stop and ask yourself: were you ever meant to find something more, or were you the intended mark the whole time. Are you driving the narrative, or are you a dark tourist, a passenger to the informed?

Because sometimes, in the hunt to belong, the toll you pay for inclusion is the price of loosing the mystery itself.

As we wash tattooing clean with the disinfectant of sunlight, we lose the dark underbelly that created it. And t

hen who will be the next Leu family? There are great costs to creating greatness.

Part Four: Flesh & Blood

Every weekend, as I lock up Heart in Hand Tattoo, I glance at the back of the building that once housed The Purple Dragon, and my mind spirals with curiosity.

I still remember the day I heard it had closed its doors for good.

I was working a few miles from where I tattoo now, back when there were no other shops open in Waxahachie.

A client mentioned The Purple Dragon had shut down for good… and for some reason, all the tattooers cheered and made jokes.

I laughed along while tracing Cherry Creek flash, but a strange sadness hit me.

Like when you hear that someone you knew from high school passed away.

I’d never made time to walk in there.

I just assumed it would always be around.

And I thought surely one day I would have a reason to go in.

._.

I was only a piercing apprentice at the time.

If I’m being 💯, tattoo apprenticeships weren’t exactly handed out for anyone interested, regardless of skill or passion.

My plan was to pierce, get my foot in the door, and maybe get paid to hang around long enough to learn something.

It’s not the cleanest path, but piercing carried me through some massive droughts in tattooing.

For a long time I took pride in the craft. Providing clean execution, good trajectory, solid client education, same as any service .

But when the passion faded, I knew it was time to step back.

There’s no point dragging someone through an experience you’re resisting socially, mentally, or internally.

Hell, that’s why I got into this industry. In hopes I would be able to avoid being slowly eroded by the monotony of an endless Sisyphean task.

:-:

Life is about flow and balance, and the piercings that once kept my ship afloat began to slow me down, distracting me from tattooing.

Sometimes four or five piercings would walk in during a single-hour tattoo appointment.

What used to be passion was turning into resentment.

It slowly took more and more bandwidth away from my main operating system.

So as my tattoo career grew legs and started swimming for itself, I quit splitting my efforts and dove into tattooing without a safety net.

‘_’

A lot of tattooers burn out.

This is a service industry & you’re constantly at the service of others.

It wears you down slowly, carving little pieces off you like a river shaping a stone.

And the thing about rivers is: they move.

They shift.

They change course.

Nature finds balance.

Or in the words of Jeff Goldblum, “Nature, uhhhh… finds a way.”

Human nature, however, is to try to tip the scales of balance.

We want control.

We want our rivers to stay exactly as they were yesterday.

..-..

Tattooing, to me, has always been about pushing against the flow and, to some extent, fighting the modern currents of public opinion.

The eternal truth of Mother Nature, however, is: if you try to force balance, you either flood… or you dry up.

Old-timers understood this much better than the clean and pristine yuppies of today.

The titans of their day all had multiple plates spinning — whether they were veterans, sign painters, mechanics, travelers, merchants, or captains.

When the common blue-collar man was a nomad, people would pack up and go wherever the work was.

That mobility kept them alive.

The ones who refused to keep moving eventually quit tattooing or became the cranky tattooers we all hear stories about.

We all know those people who haven’t asked themselves in years whether they’re flowing or drowning.

-_-

It always bums me out when someone leaves tattooing.

No matter the person, or the reason.

It’s like being stuck in the backseat on a long road trip with your dad.

As he’s pointing out the scenery, trying to keep the magic alive, you’ve quietly realized that you’re ready for a different adventure.

I’ve always been the dad in the story.

The one who wants the vacation to last forever.

But that isn’t how nature works.

You don’t get to freeze the flow.

You don’t get to hold people in one place because you love the moment.

Sometimes balance means letting someone drift without assuming they’re abandoning the journey.

They might just be following their own current — carving their very own bifurcation.

,’_’

I love tattooing with everything in me, but you can’t expect everyone to love what you love with the same fire.

There is no amount of money or success that could pull me away from being at the tattoo shop, doing tattoos.

I can’t even imagine what it would take for me to walk away, but it does make me wonder if rumors and bullshit are enough to push someone out forever.

If I’m being honest, a lot of the rumor mill back then was not really built on anything substantial . It was built from fear and bad information.

Seemingly out of nowhere , the health department had started putting HIV/AIDS informational posters all over the place. Schools, bathrooms, community boards… even inside tattoo shops if the owners would let them.

It was the early days of public-health messaging, and people were flooding. So if a shop in a small Texas town had a poster like that near the bathroom or break area, folks didn’t see “public education” they saw “reasonable implication.”

And like any life form inside it’s own ecosystem, one poor visual cue turned into a reaction…

that turned into a warning…

that turned into a rumor.

From my experience, that’s probably how it went.

Small towns fill in blanks faster than they read them.

Some of you might say █RΞDΛCTΞD█ got out just in time (right before the explosion of commercialization and corporatization).

Others still say he was forced to close, or that he missed the peak.

But if you give your life to something and get little recognition back (and instead only receive negativity) what keeps you going?

When people who’ve never met you celebrate your downfall, how do you find your bootstraps?

•=•

In recent years I’ve gotten to know a few people who’ve been publicly canceled.

People who I have come to know and respect in spite of some public opinions.

The internet has the power to give anyone with a chip on their shoulder a megaphone.

Regrettably, the loudest voice is usually the least educated.

When thousands of strangers assign intent to your actions, demand apologies, or define your identity for you, it has the power to warp how you see yourself.

I’ve watched people question their entire character because of an Instagram comment section.

Now, hear me out … if you’re actually doing something wrong, accountability matters.

But stepping away from your trajectory because strangers decided you should disappear?

That’s not growth.

That’s exile.

Even the strongest captains will feel the instinct to turn around when the waves start pounding the hull.

:_:

And once the shipwreck happens… after the captain is thrown from the helm… why do the rumors survive like a castaway clinging to life in an ocean of information?

With the internet, a story doesn’t die.

It claws its way back into the light long after you thought it was a goner, like a horror-movie victim.

•_•

But maybe if there is a lesson under all of this… a message behind the burnout, the rumors, or my fading memories of that shop…

It would be that flow only works when you can balance it.

A river carves mountains because pressure and direction are in harmony.

Too much force and it floods; too little and it dries up.

Tattooing isn’t any different.

And for that matter, neither is life.

._.

If you’re going to hold fast through the flow — fighting the current against gossip, public opinion, or whatever the internet warriors and armchair advocates decide you are — well, you’d better make sure the scales on the other side are balanced with something worth remembering.

Something heavier than the bullshit.

Something good enough that when people speak your name years later, they think of what you built… not what tried to sink you.

When Anubis weighs your heart against a feather, it’s not going to be one slight misstep tipping the scales.

..-..

Balance matters just as much as flow.

Maybe more.

Is that an oxymoron?

Anyway.

.°•°.

That’s what sticks with me when I look at the back of the old Purple Dragon building every weekend.

Shops will inevitably close.

People are ephemeral.

Stories twist, erode, and drift downstream.

But the way you anchor yourself — the sum of your good, the permanent marks of your integrity — is what settles in the riverbed long after everything else washes away.

.-.

And maybe █RΞDΛCTΞD█ didn’t lose to the current.

Maybe he just found a new balance.

Or maybe — and bear with me here — it’s the same question every person eventually has to face:

Are you the one driving the car, choosing the direction and calling it a vacation?

Or are you stuck in the backseat, being dragged along, trying to make the best of a world where someone else is at the wheel of your life?

.

Whatever the truth was for that shop and its owner, the river kept moving.

My car keeps moving.

The storyline keeps on moving.

And as usual, the myths refuse to die.

I will keep you guys abreast if I receive a response from █RΞDΛCTΞD█.

Maybe I’ll post my interview questions in the meantime if there is any interest and you guys can help me come up with any follow-up questions I may have missed.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far.

I appreciate and love every one of you.