Question 19: Ok Boomer
Discover more from ISO: My Body
Question 19: Ok Boomer
Mentorship in tattooing
In your opinion, what qualifies someone to become a mentor? Do the labels “elder” and “veteran” mean different things in the context of tattooing to you?
[Image: a grown cat next to a tiny kitten. They both reach for a high-up countertop. The adult cat holds a tattoo machine.]
Congrats, you’ve asked a tattooing question with almost no defined answer!
I was talking to someone who has no tattoos over the weekend about the culture and found myself trying to describe the fact that there is practically no single universally defined way of doing anything in tattooing. Every “rule” or tradition set down at some point in tattooing’s history has been broken or challenged. Some are eventually abandoned and some are proven to stand the test of time, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any one thing that every tattooer does the same way. As such, there’s no official length of time in tattooing that makes you an “elder” or qualified to be a mentor who takes on an apprentice.
It's worth noting that “veteran” as a term originated to describe someone of military service, and much of its colloquial use still leans on the implication of having survived challenging times or shifts in a field. This isn’t irrelevant in tattooing, given that people are still smashing out shop windows over tattoo beef or making apprentices drink from dirty rinse cups, but it wouldn’t be my word of choice. There’s already enough rhetoric out there about being in the tattoo trenches, and I’d rather do less to think of myself as a combatant behind enemy lines.
The conventional wisdom that I’ve heard repeated during my time tattooing is that you shouldn’t take on an apprentice until you’ve been tattooing for at least ten years. That rule seems to have gone totally out the window. I’ve seen people with barely any years under their belt “teach” someone to tattoo, and I sometimes wonder, what exactly is it their mentee is learning?
What I tend to believe is that you shouldn’t formally become a mentor without considering what it is you have to offer a protege. Historically, people would take on an apprentice when they owned a shop and needed additional laborers to help sustain their workload and create some passive income. Having an apprentice was a way to ensure your knowledge and legacy lived on, and to hand down what you’d built. The deal was often that the apprentice would agree (either formally or informally) to continue working for the person who taught them, thus guaranteeing a return on the investment of teaching and giving them a pre-existing clientele and space to work—a symbiotic relationship of sorts.
Most would agree that tattooing today is oversaturated with artists. There’s been an explosion in the number of shops and tattooers in any given area; I’ve stopped trying to keep up with who’s new in my city. Teaching someone to tattoo can be a double-edged sword; on the one hand, you’re helping shape the generation to come, and on the other hand, you’re creating your own competition. I think very carefully about who I would want to hand down my skills to and what I might be able to offer them. I do think I have a well-rounded combination of technical knowledge and experience navigating client care to share, a community and clients to connect an apprentice with, and a home studio to give them.
However, the desire to mentor doesn’t always mean someone is well-suited to the task. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t have the time or energy to deliver a focused apprenticeship at this point in my life, though I’m starting to warm to the idea. Plenty of people who technically had apprenticeships dispute the idea that it taught them anything at all; it’s not uncommon to have a mentor in name only and be left to figure it all out on your own. Some people have a wealth of things to offer but just aren’t great teachers—maybe they don’t know how to give constructive criticism, or they don’t know how to articulate or demonstrate what it is they’re trying to teach in a digestible way.
There’s a wide spectrum of mentoring between officially taking on an apprentice and just, say, giving advice. The latter happens all the time in tattooing and is one of the knowledge economies I most love participating in. Tattoo approaches are so highly individualized that there’s info to be exchanged between people of any experience or style. There are people I’ve helped get started or offered some guidance to in their tattoo journeys that I wouldn’t describe as a mentee, necessarily, just friends with whom I was happy to share what I knew. So much of what I know today is an amalgamation of people I’ve worked alongside, things I’ve observed from afar, trial and error, rumors, step-by-step tutorials, and hands-on demonstrations.
“Elder” is most popularly understood as someone of greater age: a grandparent, an older friend or mentor. However, indigenous definitions of “elder” describe someone who has knowledge, wisdom, and skill regardless of age. An elder can be younger than us, which beautifully disrupts colonial notions of knowledge and skill as correlating only to the amount of time we’ve been on this earth. Queer and trans lives disrupt this idea, too, and have been staging necessary interventions into notions of a linear life trajectory. What if someone is younger than me, but has been on HRT longer? What if someone came out later in life?
Many people come to tattooing later in life, something I greatly admire. It’s intimidating and exciting to learn something new when we’re told we should be committing to a single trajectory by x or y age. There are also plenty of mentors who are no longer with us on the physical plane, who we continue to learn from even after they’ve passed, remembering their teachings, measuring our actions against what they advised, and absorbing their spiritual guidance.
I often lament having missed the opportunity for a singular mentor relationship in my own tattooing. There are so many questions I’ve wished I had that person to turn to in asking, so many things I think I could have learned sooner or better if I had had that guiding light. But I am grateful to have sought and learned to recognize learning opportunities in unconventional people and places. Newer generations of tattooers have coined the phrase “community taught,” which is a beautiful way to honor the way our knowledge accumulation actually takes place.
Last week I did a portfolio review for an aspiring tattooer. We looked at their drawings together, talking about what makes a tattooable image and what will stand the test of time. I pulled out my old portfolios and shared some of what I’ve learned over the years, and we looked at some of my past drawings and mused on what could have made them stronger. They noticed things I hadn’t, and I learned things from our time together. I was surprised at how excited to share I was and encountered the feeling when you hear yourself talking and realize “damn, I guess I do know a lot about this stuff.”
Will I formally become a mentor anytime soon? Maybe not. Am I an elder? Probably, reluctantly, all of a sudden.
My book, Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work is available via Afterlife Press.
A reminder that I offer one-on-one portfolio reviews and consulting about your practice.
🌸 I’m at an art residency for the month! If you’d like to support my living and studio costs while I’m here, you can Venmo @tamara-santibanez, CashApp $TamaraSantibanez or PayPal santibaneztattoo@gmail.com.
🌸 Mutual Aid: Yocheved and Miss Wanda urgently need funds to repair her family’s home in Gainesville, and to keep several disabled natal and chosen family members in crisis afloat. Most of their family members are disabled, and due to abysmal healthcare in Florida, are unable to seek proper care. They have to rebuild their off-the-grid home for what is now the third time due to repeated displacement. Donate here.