Hi everyone! Let me introduce myself...

[JaySpike89]

Hello and greetings to everyone here at The Last Sparrow Tattoo Forum! Allow me to introduce myself - my name is Jay, and I live in England all the way over here in the UK. We have a pretty okay tattooing scene here but nowhere near as big as the USA. I guess that even though I did do an 'apprenticeship' - I say that with the Dr Evil 'Laser' gesture because that time is a horror story all of its own... but anyway, I don't class myself as a tattooist because I never managed to get a job in another shop after that (this was almost 3 maybe 4 years ago). So I guess now, I'm just a guy who's very respectful to the industry. I'm a huge fan of the traditional art of guys like Sailor Jerry, Ed Hardy, Mike Malone and I love the artwork of Horiyoshi III, too. So I guess if I were to specialise in a type of art, it'd probably be traditional and Japanese. I also play guitar in a rock band and I love doing that - been playing since I was about 13 or 14 years old, so roughly around 10 years in music. So enough about me!

Why am I here? Well...one day I'm on youtube giggling a train wrecks of people trying to teach tattooing via the internet and I happen to stumble across an interview on a channel called LastSparrowTattoo. I watched this video from start to finish and it was about an hour and a half long - this video opened my eyes and seriously changed my entire outlook on tattooing. So I watched a few more - I would first and foremost like to thank the following people for making me realise just how special this whole thing really is - people like Scott Sylvia, Jeff Cribb, Oliver Peck, Juan Puente, Dan Dringenberg and Freddy Corbin. Hearing all these old stories about how they got started (especially Jeff Cribb - because my story is very similar to his) - really made me sit up and think. I want to learn as much as I can, as often as I can. I would love to connect with you guys and share thoughts and stories and maybe learn something from it.

On closing, Scott Sylvia, thank you for founding this website and generating an awesome online community. I would love to meet you one day and get tattooed by you - seriously, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

I hope to speak to many of you guys here soon! :)

[SStu]

Cool, and welcome!!

[JaySpike89]

Thanks SStu! :)