Nate Pea

starting out i had two bosses. one was from the tail end of the black tshirt crowd and one was pure old school. the more modern bloke was full of advice about 'the tattooers duty' etc.... and refused to tattoo partners names or football badges etc....and the old school dude said in the early shops he worked in in the late 70's if you had a £5 note and wanted a tattoo you were leaving the shop minus a fiver but a tattoo to the good. this actually matches my early experience of tattoo parlours in the early eighties. i know for a fact that the old school dude tattooed a full nazi back piece (something i would never do) and never gave it a second thought (i may do another thread on the story attached to that!). anyway, this brings me to my current dilemma. i have noticed over the past ten year or maybe a bit longer that masonic imagery is exploding all over the industry. all seeing eyes, burning torches and owls sitting on skulls being the most obvious. my objection would be that invariably the bearers have little understanding of the imagery they are asking for. like.....i wouldnt tattoo a nazi swastika on anybody but it would an especially dick move to tattoo one on somebody who had no idea of what the nazi party even stood for or that it existed. most days i think i should probably just hammer that fucker in and move on to the next one and im probably just being a dick but?.........anyway......

hey. my name is Nathaniel Pea and i have my own studio. i took it over from the previous owner in 2011 having served an apprenticship under that owner. All of this is known by and checkable with my local competition who i am on terms with. i have been tattooing for 8 years in total over two apprenticships and 3 1/2 as a proffesional. i would really like to get out in to the industry a bit and see a different side of my job. i have as i said run my own registered studio for 3 years and have all the documentation to prove that, however if more is needed i am also in regular contact with the lady who overlooks the tattooing side of the environmental health office. i am passionate about tattooing. its all i do. i am always willing to learn. i love learning. i produce my own flash, am interesested in machine function and maintain my own machines (although i have never yet sucessfully cut a timer spring!) and really just buzz off of anything to do with any aspect of tattooing. i would like to think my tattooing is ok. i would love the opportunity to work with other people. i have a few photo's on my profile and in the next couple of weeks i will be uploading more. the reason i dont have the unending streams i see and wish i had is that i work in a street level street shop. I do about 50/50 appointments and walk-ins. i tattoo A LOT of script and stars i suppose what i would most like is a job in a studio with like minds. people i can bounce of of and hopefully they can me. but guest spots would do it. if any one can help thanks. my studio number is 01952 253059

fucking love that tattoo - - - Updated - - - thinking about the first modern recorded tattoo's would all be polynesian. those tattoos were supposed to convey power. powerful images are awesome. what could be more poweful than somethings head run through

my old boss Jeff (Winston Gomez) has a full set of flash screen printed on acetate. pretty sure its the same set that appears in the very famous black and white picture of him (Pinky Yun) behind on the wall. i've tried to buy that set off of him three times now. offer him the right money and he'll part with it, just never had enough to sway him. last i heard he was working in Brighton. good luck finding him.....if you do though its the real set. he has Les Skuse' old power pack too. i've seen it, dont know if it really was or not but probably

love Robert Ryans work so much

I always felt that my first boss colin deserved some special recognition but i could never work out how to say it, not being so hot with words, then i was reading Stoney Knows How and got to one of the many lyle tuttle mentions and i thought thats the way to go. i got my first apprenticship in shrewsbury, Englandshire. it didn't last very long, six weeks but in that time i did a few tattoos (!) and got some basic pointers concerning drawing flash. i got the sack because of a stituation with my girlfriend who i had introduced to colin and his wife, then we split up and he decided he liked my girlfriend more than me and i got sacked. still he promised to help me if i still wanted and that i could hire a chair in the shops downtime to do tattoos if i wanted so inevitably did. i remember doing a Gypsy girl head that came out real sweet. its on a lad called andy who is still around. when i say sweet i mean for someone learning. anyway when i had finished my sort of boss said he was in a rush and hurried me out of the studio telling me to collect my machines the next day, which i did. I don't know what stupid thing i did to those machines on the eighth of a mile walk home but they would never produce a tattoo again. still in the end it was good because i bought a pair of A.Ciferri machines and never looked back. I remember me and another lad that was working in his shop getting all exited about the full size blue and pink colour Sailor Jerry flash books when they first come out and how happy we were that we had the blue copy and colin turned round and laughed in a derisive way and said 'I dont even like Sailor Jerrys stuff' and i was like......wow.....like jerry made his own inks, needles, designed his own flash, painted his own flash and truly pushed the format.....this dude must be really unique to make such a bold statement, like....he must be someone really really cool just waiting to be discovered, then he'd really show people what could be done. my next boss who taught me so so much and was and is a legend in the area he tattooed told me how hard it was for colin to get into tattooing. my old boss Winston Gomez told me that colin would hang out at all the conventions buying drinks for all the tattooers and telling them how amazing they were but how one would give him an apprenticeship. in the end he paid someone several thousand pounds for a weeks tuition and opened a studio well away from his home town, so you have to admire that kind of perserverence. i often wonder if thats why he has taught around fiteen or twenty people to tattoo in the last six years or so, as a way of sticking his fingers up at all those old boys that wouldn't take him under their wing. even now he's still thinking about me. i spoke to him just the other week when he told me that his new partners in some shropshire convention thing are opening a shop round the corner from mine, after another partner in the same convention was closed down for tattooing a minor, so that was nice of him to let me know that id have some new friends to talk to. pure gold. thanks best mate. anyway, check his work. one day i hope i can put in a line a cleanly as him, honestly, but his whip shading is amazing. according to doc web in his book thats how the old boys recognised each other work and judged their skill, on the shading. dont know if that true. anyway, amazing guy

morality in tattooing is a kind of weird subject no? the first shop i walked into at 15 would have tattooed a swastika on my forehead if i had the money and and asked for it. that shop was the real deal. the tattooer (cookie out of Hitchen uk) was known to be the best for many a long mile. as for the stuff i buy? i don't buy shite. if you only ever buy the very best that you can afford then the chances are your buying from a one man show who produces stuff as an offshoot of producing stuff for themselves. also they won't have a barrage of slick legal types to tell you why you cant get a refund when stuff goes wrong, but too be honest you can't really get into morality with one person. for all i know they may get off strangling dwarves with a python, but if they're happy to supply me some genuine tat zappers then why should i care. my morality kicks in this way. personally ima avoid virtually any company that puts super flash mega adverts in non trade magazines. these people quite often look like they fell out of love with tattooing and in love with money and celebrity but there is also one other moral issue that continually burns my brain and that is the f?cking shite i hear talked by tattooers about other tattooers. ther is one very well known one 6 miles away from me. he had to buy his apprenticship cause no one liked him, he cant draw so good but i wont try and take his skill away from him, he can tattoo good, apart from on me apparently. the fact that no one liked him and no one would take them under their wing seems to have made him bitter. never heard him say anything good about a tattooer within 50 miles of him. he doesn't think about other tattooers feeding babies, or paying rent. i have to fire a metaphorical shot across his bows about twice a year just to keep him in check. the thing is he has no love for tattooing, just the money and friends it brings him (the kiss arse kind).

i smile and tell them they're really cool and thank them. i tell them that without them i wouldn't look different. it throws them off. then i try to draw them into a longer conversation which offers an opportunity to expose the fact that they are almost certainly dunces

no shadow on the blood drips coming off the jaw to the right of the screen. no shadow on the fresh but shadow on the healed

it's definitely true that we have a history of tattoo'ed eccentrics, but their not so much the everyday collectors. my old boss knew Ron Ackers for awhile before he died and he's fond of quoting him saying 'tattooing is a working class past-time' by which he meant both doing and getting. when i was a kid in the 70's it was kind of an unwritten rule that people with either one or two on either fore arm were acceptable because it was assumed that they were gotten while serving in the armed forces, but any body with much more than that was instantly assumed to be a gypsy, thief or thug. to be honest not so much has changed, the amount you have and placement still seem to have a large bearing on how you are percieved, i have throat, neck and hands done and while that is still way beyond the pale a lad i know who has some really outstanding geometric stuff on his face draws more attention still. like....he's way too cool to notice i think! by the way, my girlfriends grandfather was indeed a gypsy, but he settled down when he met his wife and worked in the local mine for the rest of his life. he used to get tattooed by a travelling tattooer who would come for a week once or twice a year and work out of the barbers. it's hard to pin down exactly what he had, just a lot and a ballerina on the top of one hand that my girlfriend remembers because she liked it so much. - - - Updated - - - oh, my old boss was Winston Gomez. not sure how he's remembered in the industry because i only have his version of events. he's semi retired at the moment but he was heavily involved in the industry around north wales and chester.

Slightly off topic but I recently read some stuff out of Herbert Hoffmans biography and he mentioned that when he first moved to Berlin and started his passion for tattooing that he would 'sometimes notice people without tattoo's, but they were like air ( to him)' hopefully I didn't hack that up too much, but it was a beautiful quote and it will stay with me forever. Needless to say my girl has tattoos and did before I ever knew her. Her grandad had some pretty cool tattoos and had both hands done during the 30's, which in the UK at least was more or less social suicide. I've taken the attitude that people without tattoos are cool because they make tattooed people stand out.