Nate Pea

I recently tattooed a bloke in his 80's but he was pretty much sleeved. I added the names of his grandchildren to his hands, both sides between thumb and forefinger I felt it was something of an honour to be adding to this blokes collection and was kind of in awe......like his tattoo's are commonplace now but back when he had them he was making a real statement

i wanted to blaze in on this thread with a bunch of stuff about Leo Zulueta, and Cliff Raven's 'Blackwork' and how my old boss who worked as a flash tattooer in the U.S in the early 80's swore Cliff Raven was doing his Blackwork thing way before Tribal etc......but it was all said on the first page. Hmmmphhh!

my favorite loose quote on this would be from the Chad Koeplinger T.A.M. interview when he says something along the lines of it almost being a duty to be tattooed all over so you have some idea of what the customer is going through. i like to get tattooed regularly because it definitely makes me more patient with my customers when they start squealing. jst before i started getting my backpiece done i remember a bloke came into the shop for a tattoo from my then boss. it was a big lower backpiece and he wriggled like hell. i definitely remember thinking like 'for f!ck sake man grow up and stop moving' didn't occur that my boss never commented. any way next week i started on my back and within 10-15 minutes it was like......OH! needless to say i'm a lot more sympathetic to my customers having work on their back now

did my first tattoo at 12, with a compass and indian ink. me and a friend in class tried to put little crosses on our forearms. the older skinheads all had them, like proper ones though into ska and such. next i tattooed a girls initials when i was 14, later cut out with a beer bottle when drunk, then i got my first professional one at 15 by Cookie, who worked out of Hitchen, Hertfordshire not far at all from Len Wolfe's studio in Luton where my uncle got his first swallow. as far as i know they were the two best tattooers outside of london in about a 50 mile radius. it was kind of known that you had to get to Cookies just right....too early and he may not have had a drink....too late and he may be drunk, anyway he did both mine and my friends that day just fine, but a few months later he did a spelling mistake on my friend my tattoo still looks pretty fresh. it's 25 years old now and quite often i see other work from that period and you can see that Cookie knew his onions!

thanks for the replies chaps, i learnt something awesome from the source section the first day i registered. going to spend some of today hacking through the forums and trying not to be in awe of the righteous heavyweights who seem to frequent this place

Thanks for this. Will be subscribing as soon as I get home!

Hey. My names Nate And I run a street shop in the uk. I took it over from my boss Winston who had it for 15 years before me and who I apprenticed and worked under. I've been stalking the site for awhile and figured I should join so, thanks for having me! N