This episode is the result of my recent excitement about a few tattoos I've put my whole soul into.
I've been looking for my personal tattoo style for so long, and considering that maybe I never need to find a niche, that doing it all was my thing (not unlike Beyoncé), that I was a little
astounded when I realized that doing "weird" detailed color work felt like the work was coming directly from my soul.
I don't have a word for this yet, but I do know the feeling. These are pieces that come without many or even any references from the client. These are pieces that come from great trust between
us. From connection, and mutual holding.
This episode details my thoughts about personal tattoo style, and my ongoing process around this concept. There is more to say, perhaps another time. But I hope you do enjoy this one.
And please! Leave a rating and review. I would love that so hard.
episode transcript:
Micah Riot:
Hello, my darlings, Micah Riot here, coming to you with an early April episode of Ink Medicine Podcast. Today I wanted to talk about my personal style in tattoo work and how it has evolved over the years and how I'm finally coming to understand my personal style as emerging Really 15 years later. I've been tattooing for 15 years and it is really now that I'm starting to feel like, and it is really now that I'm starting to feel like I'm coming out with tattoos that really feel like me, like they're coming really from my whole soul. But before we go there, I wanted to read the latest review I received in early March from somebody who put their name as EB Mud, and the review is love this intimate dot, dot, dot, I'm assuming podcast. And the review itself is. It's so inspiring. I love this review. It's short, to the point. It's perfect. Thank you, eb Mud, and please leave me a review. I'll read it on the air. I love reviews. I love ratings. We're at 43 ratings on Apple Podcasts and got five stars right here, five out of five. So please keep this beautiful rating going and write me a review. I would really love it. This is truly like my love child, my love letter to my community and the people that I get tattoo and beginning tattoo artists and whoever else is interested People who are not into tattoos at all might find this inspiring and interesting.
Micah Riot:
This is really, you know, a labor of love. I do it every week because I love it. I get absolutely nothing for it. You know it costs me money to put this out in the air and, you know, sometimes money doesn't matter. Like, you make things because you want to make things. You do a project because it makes you happy, because it brings joy to your life. You know, it's also good for me as a practitioner, because sometimes people come upon the podcast who would like to be worked on by me and they listen and then they feel like they know me more and they can trust me more, and that is awesome. These are all the reasons I have the podcast, but I would really just, if you know, if you enjoy it, please write me a review. I would really just appreciate that so much. And now let's talk about personal style. I would say that I've been looking for my specific niche for a very long time.
Micah Riot:
When I started tattooing about 15 years ago, I worked in a walk-in shop and what that means is that it was a shop known for quick availability. It was black and blue tattoo in San Francisco. It had gotten a lot of best of the Bay, like that was a I don't know if you you know, if you know, if you are in the Bay, if you lived in the Bay, there was the best of the Bay, like awards, right, like the best pizza place, the best theater to go to see movies, whatever. So they have also best of the bay tattoo, right. So black and blue had gotten it because it was very popular, very well known. People would kind of like look up the best tattoo shop in San Francisco that come upon black and blue, they'd call.
Micah Riot:
We had a lot of artists, a lot of stations, somebody was usually available, and so you were expected to do everything. You were expected to do walk-ins, and so a lot of it was. People will be like I want these little florals, I want a name, I want a star, I want, you know, fairly small, simple things, and so I did all that and you know, all of it was custom, but they were all. It was small, like that. We didn't do a lot of flash. We took the flash off the walls early on in my being there at the shop and it was all simple work, but it was all custom work, so you had to be able to draw a little bit at least, use references etc.
Micah Riot:
And I don't have an art school education. I came to tattooing from a degree in women's studies, so that's a little different, I would say, and I drew my whole childhood, but I don't think I was particularly good at it. And when I was coming into tattooing I was really insecure about my art skills because I didn't feel like I had any formal art skills. I had some imagination, but I felt like it was just so hard for me to draw specific things. You know, if somebody wanted a face, a body, an animal, I really I struggled, it took me a long time and I didn't feel like I was good at it. Clients were happy, so it's kind of what's important, but I was very insecure. And as I came with the tattooing, one of the people that I saw being very successful at it was Idexa Idexa Stern.
Micah Riot:
She still owns Black and Blue and you can look up her work and her work has always looked different. She works in more of an abstract style. She did a lot of kind of like flat geometric shapes or played with, like color and line and texture, and her work almost looks like some of it, like it's. It's different, um. Some of it looks like children's drawings in like a very clean, beautiful, precise way, but very simplistic, and some of it is kind of like geometric shapes built upon one itself, um themselves, like she has this one piece that's so beautiful. It's wings in the back of someone's calves. It's years and years old and it's the wings are built out of these sort of like squares and they're different shades of gray and black and they're very graphic and very striking and I love that gradation from black to white, like the grays in there. They're absolutely gorgeous, these wings. It's a beautiful piece. But the point of that was that I saw her doing interesting different work.
Micah Riot:
She did not take on things that people wanted. She, you know, wanted ideas and kind of like seeds from where people wanted to go, but how they were going to get there and the end result was very much up to her. She designed her own work and she didn't copy what people brought her. She didn't want references and it was cool. It was inspiring to see that, because I didn't know 15 years ago that tattooing could be artful in that way. And when I started to work a black and blue at the front counter and like look at everybody's work you know a lot of people did things that looked like hard to draw right, like again things I'm talking about, or maybe some traditional work or lettering, but she was doing this abstract stuff that I was very intrigued by. That I thought looked really cool and one of my first big pieces was done by her.
Micah Riot:
It's those shapes, it's like that type of style. I think back in the day some of it was called also tribal we don't call it that anymore, but you kind of get the visual. It's kind of like they're shapes. They're like flat shapes made up of color, flat color, usually not a lot of shading. That was my first inspiration around style and very soon after I started tattooing up popped up Tatrix and if you listened to my episode with Morgan of Tatrix, who created Morgan, who created Tatrix, then you know a bit more about it.
Micah Riot:
But essentially it was a blog and it contained showcased the work of artists from all over the world that was interesting and unique and innovative and different and stuff you wouldn't see a lot and I was obsessed with it. I would look at it daily, I would like wait for it to be updated and I would just pour over the pages, the digital pages. I would scroll through the pages and obsess about every piece and just be like, oh my God, this texture and the shape and like how this person combined like the realistic sort of like 3d effects with like very flat areas and I just thought it was so cool, like larger scale or unusual it all looked. It looked different, right. So, being on the West Coast here, a lot of the work that was happening around here was trad, so like thicker black lines, bolder shading, bright color florals, banners, things like that. So I was super excited to discover Tatrix and I was like this is where I want to go, this is the kind of work I want to do, and I have submitted some work to Tatrix and they did post it. So that was cool. I was really proud to be a part of that part of their lineup of artists that they kept kind of a catalog of.
Micah Riot:
But I still never felt like I had a niche, Like I would still do kind of whatever people brought to me, and part of it is, I feel, like it's my job as a working tattoo artist is to do whatever people bring to me and I still say yes to things that people bring to me is to do whatever people bring to me and I still say yes to things that people bring to me If they're not copies of custom work, if they're not ripping off of modern artists that should be getting paid for their designs, I will do. You know very much like inspired pieces by like classic art or modern kind of references. You know there's some imagery that's just sort of like generic in a way. I'll still take it on. It's money, right. Like I need to live, I need to make a living.
Micah Riot:
But I'm starting to emerge with work that feels like it's coming deep from my soul and I used to do those pieces like once in a blue moon where I'd be like, wow, I got to do this piece and I drew it from the the ground up and I tattooed it from the ground up and it's gorgeous and it's one of a kind and it fits this person perfectly. And now the opportunities that I have to tattoo work that comes from my soul are more common. More of my clients want that from me. More of my clients trust me and come to me specifically for this type of work, and so I really have a chance to let my creative mind run wild. And also, up until now I probably wasn't ready, because early on I remember people asking me what would happen if they just let me have complete freedom, and it scared me. I would have said no, I cannot do that. I can't just do whatever I want on you Like what if you don't like it. And now, because I work with people who already know me and know my work and have seen my work, because I have a body of work built up, I feel like I trust their trust in me and so I can go there.
Micah Riot:
And I did this, this piece, recently. I posted it this week, so this is early April and I just posted it. And it's this flower um, it's a big flower, it's on this person's side. It's got like an orangey, golden kind of a head, and the petals are. I don't know if they're petals, but they're like kind of petals. They are white and gray and teal and they're different shapes. And then the leaves kind of frame the butt, the side of the butt, and they're black and teal and they have spots on them, different shades of teal and then there's kind of like a smokiness up at the top that traces the person's like a curve around their rib cage and up around their breast.
Micah Riot:
The whole point of this piece was to enhance this person's natural curves and to sort of, you know, highlight the femininity and the beauty of their body, and it does that. But this piece in and of itself is very ethereal. It's beautiful, but it's not cloyingly so. It's complicated, it's unique. There's death and decay as well as life and brightness. It's more dusk than it is morning, although it's probably early morning as well, but it's not daytime and it's more rain than it is sunshine. It's moody, it stands out, it's gorgeous, but there's a darkness to it and a moodiness to it and a folding in of it that is interesting to me. It was interesting to me to create with that tension across those things and then who it's on. Each person is very complex and complicated and I wanted to give this person the first thing that they asked for is to enhance their curves, and complicated and I wanted to give this person the first thing that they asked for is to enhance their curves. But then you know what happened is we created this piece that's got layers of complexity and this person loved all of it and that's super cool. It was really cool. It was really cool to be somebody this person trusted enough to blindly.
Micah Riot:
Let me just create a piece that came directly from my soul. There was another piece recently that I did that felt similarly to me, although I think that I channeled the client's soul more than my own. But in making it happen it felt like that too to me, like I really let, I was really allowed to run wild and to create it's um, also on the hip. Um, well, down lower on the hip, and visually it looks like a. There's a moon around the side of the butt, cheek, and then there's a braid, messy braid of hair curves around the, the back of the kind of side butt, and then around the hip and the thigh and it kind of comes down through honeycombs and there's a red string running through the hair and then there's this like egg that's broken and mended with gold and has some color in it and all the whole thing kind of emerges from this egg. And so that piece was also like that, like it came together piece by piece, puzzle, piece by puzzle piece, and it came from like an allowance and a trust and like a growing connection with the person that I put it on and it really felt like my style right. So this is what we're talking about.
Micah Riot:
My personal style is emerging and it's hard to put it into words, but I'm like feeling it, like really feeling it for the first time. Of course, I would love to just put out work online that I feel that close to because it feels so good to do it, but I'm still doing a lot of all kinds of work and every single you know, every single new piece I do. I do put more and more and more of me in it, because my trust in myself grows, my trust in the client grows more, like my trust in the fact that they trust me grows, and it's really cool, it's really beautiful, um, to feel that way. Um, and you know, what's funny is I'm getting um a lot less requests for tattoos, but I think that's due to the economy and not so much due to what I'm doing, what kind of work I'm working on, and also, like the kind of work I'm doing is not for everybody by far. It's, um, it's a rare and special human that would want the type of work that I'm doing, but it doesn't matter to me because it's my deep soul, work Like what I consider to be my own art, and those connections are very special, those people are very special and to me, um, and if a person comes to me with a want for something like that, then you know that's what they're getting and if we're not a match, we're not a match, that's okay. But yeah, I mean, I'm still doing all kinds of stuff I'm imagining as I keep growing in this style that feels like my style. I will continue to lean more and more towards these elements and ask for more and more freedom from the people that I'm working on, and it will continue to happen. So that's where I'm at with this conversation. I continue to feel so inspired by so many people online.
Micah Riot:
I think that I would like to put out an episode where I talk about the work of a bunch of tattoo artists that I follow and that I love. That feels very individual to me, very unique. Unique individual in a sense of like, unique stylistically and something you don't find when you just like scroll through any old, you know, tattoo blog. I would like to put together a list of people like that, talk about them and then offer the links to their socials and their websites, et cetera, on in the show notes, et cetera in the show notes. I don't know if that's going to be a successful episode, because I don't know if listening to somebody describe somebody else's tattoo style is interesting or annoying.
Micah Riot:
And you know, podcasts are kind of a passive way to spend time, Like you're walking your dog and you're listening to a podcast, you're not watching something, you're not looking at something, but maybe, if it sounds interesting enough, you'll go and look at the person's work. Anyway, you know, regardless, it's up to you if you do or not. Perhaps you just listen to this podcast because you like to hear my voice, which I also heard people say, and I'm down with that. All right, my darlings, I hope this ramble was interesting to you. I hope you're having a good week and enjoying the blossoms that are coming out all over, I'm assuming, the country, many countries, because it's springtime for many of us in the world not all of us, but many of us and I wish you a good week and I love you.