Episode 17. Blood and Lightning: On Becoming A Tattooer, by Dustin Kiskaddon (Author interview)

So you've, you've, you were teaching in a community college during this time in the tattoo shop, but now you're not.

Yeah.

I was lecturing at UC Davis teaching at Berkeley city college.

I was tattooing like 20 hours a week at that point.

and writing the dissertation.

And so I was working all the time.

Tattooing involves a great deal of hustle, what we might call hustle, self-promotion, self-guided initiative, and a lot of downtime unless you're somehow full of work.

So the life of the tattooer, as I experienced it, was wrapped up in other things I was doing on the side.

And I found other tattooers who were also doing similar things, not teaching in colleges, but doing design for their merchandise, or running some other gig over here, or trying to make ends meet in this kind of complicated juggle of multiple income streams.

Now, I interviewed some tattooers who were very, very successful, people who make more than $1,000 a day and are booked up for a year.

And this is in part because my project took place in the San Francisco Bay Area where a lot of the sort of most prominent tattooing happens.

It's less the case anymore because it's kind of happening in every major city, but San Francisco in particular was kind of a hub of tattoo innovation, especially throughout the 80s.

And so...

In my life, balancing tattooing with teaching became a problem and a problem I needed to solve.

So one of the reasons that I jumped ship from academia, it is related to that desire to not work all the time, especially now that I have a toddler who's amazing and I want to spend time with him.

So one of the questions I get from people who read the book or interact with my project is, is whether or not I'm still tattooing or will in the future.

And the answer is no, in part because tattooing requires a kind of, well, if you will, chops.

You've got to stay up on your game to do it well.

And as you know, the stakes are high.

So in tattooing, the marks you make are permanent, and they're on someone's body, and they're accomplished in an experiential moment with someone else.

all in exchange for money.

And so the idea of doing it as a kind of side project isn't a good idea.

Maybe it's a good idea for some people, right? For some people that just want to tattoo their friends and they're not super concerned about the look of it.

And maybe they're not even getting paid.

Awesome.