CHRIS O'DONNELL: I tell everybody I'm two years out.
Like, I won't take a new customer.
It wasn't really self-promotion.
I've never been good at that.
Like right now, I don't even have business cards.
I don't know.
I just tattooed a couple key people, tried to do a good
job, and then it just sort of happened from there.
I don't even really know.
It's all kind of a blur.
You just end up--
it's like one day you're thinking, wow, I wish I could
do a real back piece.
And then a year later, you realize you've done three.
You know, it's that kind of thing.
It just kind of happens.
You look back and you go, wow.
It's almost like I wished for it and it happened.
I started tattooing in 1993 when I was 17 years old.
It was my after-school job.
It was my senior year of high school.
My parents were divorced, and they didn't really have any
money to force me to go to college.
It was just always like, what are you going to do?
How are you going to survive?
What are you going to do with your life?
But I told my mom one night and she said, tattooing?
Aren't you worried you're going to
make a lot of enemies?
I still don't really know exactly what she meant by
that, or why she would say that.
But I thought that was interesting.
That was literally the only thing she ever said about it.
I'm Chris O'Donnell.
This is my art studio, my art room where it all happens.
I'm working on something now--
drew a tiger on tone paper so I could use white colored
pencil to make it pop out.
There's tons of stuff that I could draw that I couldn't
tattoo at first, and still.
It's a lot harder than drawing, or painting, even.
It's got different considerations, like
leaving open skin.
If you fill it solid, it's going to be brighter, better.
But you've got to leave the open skin to reflect a certain
amount of light through it so it pops off the skin and
becomes more graphic that way.
If you fill in those dark backgrounds so completely
solid, it just kills the whole thing.
You've got to show some restraint for sure.
That's the hardest thing to do, is just be able to back
off and know when it's done.
Most younger guys get into it and they think, like, it's
going to immediately be easy because
they can draw or paint.
It's definitely not the case.
It's very technical process learning.
I started at a total biker shop, just a total biker shop.
It was kind of a miserable experience, but
I'm lucky for it.
This is almost identical to the actual first tattoo that I
did on a friend.
Tribal-- tribal was quite popular when I first started,
early '90s.
I learned to do color--
I used the single needle in a seven round, which is absurd
now to think about.
But again, I started in a biker shop, so
that's what they did.
When I first walked into that tattoo shop that first time,
when I was there, this was the magazine that
was on the news stand.
They would get the issues and sell them.
And I didn't know who any of these people were at all--
like Don Ed Hardy, Dan Higgs, Alex Binnie, Marcus Pacheco,
Elio Espana, Timothy--
but these are some of my favorite people in tattooing
to this day.
And then there's this "Primal Urge" article, and they're
doing really interesting things, like stuff I didn't
even know was possible.
And I would just study this stuff and think, like, how do
you get these effects, and just slave over these
drawings, just racking my brain trying to figure out how
this stuff works.
Like, how do you compose these images?
How do you do water?
How do you draw fire?
How do you color it?
It's so complicated.
This stuff blew my mind and made me-- this is part of what
made me go, oh, I want to do tattoos that I drew, that I am
excited about.
It's like these four guys in a private studio just working on
cool people, getting whatever they want to do.
So that was my--
that was the moment.
TIMOTHY HOYER: I met Chris O'Donnell in Richmond,
Virginia, probably around 1994.
I had moved to Richmond to open a tattoo shop.
It was called Absolute Art.
He would just come over and hang out after he was done
with his shifts at the other shop.
I think where he was working was more of a commercial shop,
more walk-ins, less custom stuff.
I think he wanted to branch out and be able to draw and
have a little more freedom.
And we were at the point where we were getting more of that
kind of clientele.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: Before long, the guys at Absolute Art--
which was like the cool guys downtown, the cool older guys.
They had their own shop.
And they noticed me, and the drummer at the time, the
drummer for Avail came in and got tattooed by me.
And eventually, that led to me tattooing Beau,
another guy in Avail.
But I had to come to Absolute Art to tattoo him, because he
wouldn't come to my shop.
Of course, I jumped at the chance, just to be able to
hang out with those guys and tattoo him.
And then before I knew it, I was getting hired, and I
started working with Timothy.
TIMOTHY HOYER: I went through stage of doing
very painterly, rendered--
like almost kind of fine art things, experimental things,
just trying a bunch of stuff.
So I think that our styles started out a little farther
apart and then sort of came together.
Yeah, he definitely had his own style even back then.
I think he probably had three or four years under his belt
at that point, so it was still kind of forming, the look of
what he was doing, the feel of it.
But it was very, very solid, very, very clean tattooing,
even at that point.
It started that way.
We've always been really good at kind of pushing each other,
and just sort of keeping the ball rolling.
On Monday I'll see, oh, you did that.
And on Tuesday I've got to come in with something else,
and on Wednesday he's going to come in with something else.
There was a lot of that when we worked together because it
was just me and him.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: I started traveling after I started
working with Timothy.
He took me to a lot of conventions.
He started taking me on trips with him.
Like, we'd go up to New York and work at East Side Ink.
Yeah, I was really nervous.
It was great.
New York City is daunting enough when
you're not used to it.
I remember pulling up totally disoriented, didn't know where
I was in New York.
It was obviously the East Village, Lower East Side.
Pull up, and right away I see Tin-Tin and Elio hanging out
in front of East Side Ink, by the dumpster, smoking a joint
or whatever.
And Tin-Tin had a cast-- it was just a surreal experience
because I hadn't seen either one of those
guys in person ever.
It was definitely an easy situation to choke in, like,
too many good people around, I'm too young, I don't really
have a developed style whatsoever.
I don't even really know what I'm doing.
But Timothy was always really supportive.
And it would be like, oh, yeah, Chris Trevino was here
two weeks ago.
Here's all these drawings that he left behind.
And you're like, well what am I doing here?
Why would I--
Dan Higgs was tattooing there at that time.
That's where I met Dan.
Looking back, I'm surprised that I didn't just choke and
run out of there.
But I remember doing a big Japanese snake half sleeve,
and I don't know if I'd really want to see that thing now.
Had wind-- aw man.
I used to do that all the time.
I'd draw full tattoos, do color studies, hang them up in
my station, and then eventually someone would
finish a project and say, what about that?
I sort of imagined--
I had no idea who I would do it on.
I didn't have a portfolio full of stuff.
But I knew that I had ideas, and I knew that this is what
it would look like if I tattooed it.
So I hung it up.
And I think, like, within a month, someone had gotten the
outline already.
It was just a tactic for me to be able to start doing big
work, to prove that, it might look good if you let me do it.
I'll put the time into it.
I'm not really sure what made me want to strive for
anything, really.
For me, I just wanted to be able to maybe take a style and
pursue it and be able to kind of create that kind of life,
where you're just making art that you're actually
interested in.
I think I just looked up to certain
artists that seemed to--
instead of sort of being a slave to whatever this random
person that comes into the shop wants, you could actually
develop a style, much like painting, and draw a clientele
based on that, where they would come to you, and you're
basically creating your own reality.
As far as the Japanese stuff, that's kind of complicated.
I was exposed to it and I liked it, but I didn't really
understand it.
It was, in my opinion, maybe too simplistic, to my
uneducated viewpoint.
And it wasn't exciting enough.
I mean, there was other things going on that were way more--
like Marcus Pacheco was doing the cubist stuff.
Marcus Pacheco, I guess he had an art degree.
He's a fine painter.
But he started tattooing, but he wanted to see what was
really possible for the art form.
All this really good, interesting work was happening
at the time.
And I was so young that I really didn't have an artistic
identity at all--
luckily, probably.
That's probably for the better.
And then I started working with Timothy.
And he was doing a lot of painterly tattoos, of figures
and space scenes behind it or whatever.
Really interesting stuff, but I knew that working with
Timothy, they would pigeonhole me in just being a copy of
him, like wanting to be just like-- you see
that all the time.
You see one really good artist, and then he works with
two younger artists that just do his style,
just bite him to death.
I started thinking about Japanese stuff, and pursuing a
little bit, just trying to understand it.
And then I just went that way.
The Japanese style of tattooing, yeah,
it's way more graphic.
It's designed to have a bunch of big images all over the
body and then tie it all together with a background
that will pop those images forward.
Younger kids, they look at tattoos sometimes and they
think they're too simple.
They don't understand the science behind making it more
readable to the eye, especially from a distance.
It's incredibly complicated.
TIMOTHY HOYER: I would say it's become a very--
like a refinement of just classic tattooing, classic
traditional styles that have kind of a
timeless edge to them.
Japanese, that's kind of where he went immediately after the
beginning stage of trying to figure out what you're doing.
He hit on that and just went with it.
CHRIS O'DONNELL: Yeah, it's incredibly difficult to start
doing the bigger stuff, especially
the first 200 times.
Just stenciling the whole thing, that makes you nervous.
I was doing back pieces before I knew how to draw things on
with a pen.
So I had to stencil background, every detail.
So it had to be perfect.
You'd spend two hours trying to piece
together the stupid stencil.
Then you'd just try to get it on right and hope it is.
And then there'd be parts of it that weren't in the right
place or cut off.
Then you're doing the outline, and then there'll be--
say it's a deity with like eight arms.
At least three or four of those hands are
really fucked up.
And more often than not, I would bite off more than I
could chew.
But then you finish it and move on, and hopefully you
learn from those mistakes.
That's the weird thing about tattooing, is you do learn
from your mistakes, and the mistakes are on people.
The problem with tattooing, in a way, is that
it's too easy to start.
Maybe not correctly, but I mean, you could get stuff and
you could start tattooing, and you're just going to mess
people up endlessly and not get anywhere.
But you see it on TV.
You go, oh, those guys can do it.
I can do it.
I'll just go order a kit and start.
Why would I buy art books?
I'll just buy the kit and just scribble away
and fuck people up.
Going off on a tangent.
I don't get really depressed about it anymore.
I used to get depressed about the state of my industry.
But New York is an easy place.
You can kind of create a bubble.
The tattoo artists around New York, they seem to be
separated from all of that nonsense.
What I do for myself is mainly through my friends and
everything.
I kind of create my own world, like this room.
This is like a safe place away from that stuff.
I have all the books that originally inspired me, and I
go back to that place and kind of retrigger those ideas,
those thoughts.
Like, oh, this is what tattooing is.
You could obsess over all the things wrong with tattooing
these days and you just want to quit, and
you might as well.
But I just try to stick to what I always thought
tattooing was, and not let anybody else ruin that for me.
I literally try harder every time, because you get to a
point periodically where you're so disgusted with your
own work that you just want to quit.
And the only thing left to do is either quit or find ways to
become better.
For me, I was always striving for inspiration, always
searching for inspiration.
So I would want to meet Eddie Deutsche.
I would want to meet anybody that I looked up to.
Ed Hardy, because I would glean inspiration from that,
come away from that and my work would get way better,
because I just was so excited.
I always felt behind because I was always trying
to figure it out.
And it never felt like I was ahead
of anything in tattooing.
I'm always just squeaking by trying to make it happen, make
something--
Yeah.
I'm always kind of like--
I feel like I'm always one of the last people to get it, of
the grouping that I'm in.
But that's just me, I guess.
It was maybe a year, year and a half after I'd
moved to New York.
I don't know.
I was tattooing and the assistant
walked up, and she goes--
she had the phone.
She said, "There's an Ed on the phone for you." And I
said, "Ed who?" And she goes, "He didn't say.
Maybe Ed Hardy?" I was like, "Uh, OK.
Let me take it."
And I did, and he said, "Yeah, I like your work." In fact, he
said, "I like your work a lot.
You should really keep it up.
I really like what you're doing." I'm losing my mind,
because that's what you always want, someone like Ed Hardy to
call you and say, yeah, you're doing it right.
You're finally doing it right.
I remember drawing when I was a kid, or when I was a young
tattooer, thinking, man, imagine if Ed Hardy saw this
and said, wow, that's really good.
I like what you're doing.
And then that's funny that that actually happened.
It's funny to look back on that thought and see it
materialize.
It was just definitely encouraging, because the whole
time, you're thinking, what am I doing?
I'm not as good as this person or that person.
You're never happy with your own work.
But to have someone call you of that stature and that
pedigree, and be able to say you're doing good, it's
encouraging.
You don't want more rambling?
I could ramble much longer.
-No, it was very good.
So many gems in there.