Miami Ink Changed My Life(Don’t Judge Me)
Growing up in a small town in Georgia in the 90’s, tattoos weren’t exactly the norm, nor were they accepted, appreciated as art, or seen as anything other than a declaration of owning Harley Davidson motorcycles and/or potentially selling drugs. The only tattoo shop I knew of in my small hometown of Forsyth, Georgia, was conveniently attached to the local tire store. Or was it a hot tub store? I can’t recall. Either way, you could get a new set of tires for your Harley or a new pump for your hot tub to go with your tribal barbed wire armband or the Tasmanian devil tattoo on your ankle. Pretty sick, right?
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I started really getting into the idea of tattoos. I had always thought they were fascinating and badass, but I never really considered them for myself when I was younger (and deeply embedded in Southern Christianity). That’s when those pesky rebellious teenage hormones started kicking in and helped me see the world in a different light.
Naturally, this was the time in my adolescence where I started listening to pop punk and hard core bands. I started wearing checkered Vans sneakers and studded belts that I purchased from the Hot Topic located on the second floor of the Macon Mall. *Looks off longingly into the distance - I can still see the wall of band tees and the shelf of Manic Panic hair dye…sigh.
Then, as the final touch, combine that all with a shocking amount of eyeliner, overly straightened swoopy bangs, and a new found taste for the skater boys in my school, and you have yourself an emo teenage Cori James.
I fell in love with the counterculture of pop punk/metal bands and tattoos because the stuffiness of being raised as a southern baptist in the deep south had finally started to take its toll. I deeply craved uniqueness in a sea of conservative, christian, and often camouflage-clad teens.
For the longest time I had dreamed of becoming a veterinarian because I’ve always loved animals. Take me to a party where there is also a dog in attendance, even now? I’ll be content sipping my drink and conversing with said pup rather than talking to strangers. However, my love for animals couldn’t trump my distaste for school and my undiagnosed ADHD. You mean to tell me you have to go to college for HOW LONG to be able to be a vet that takes care of tigers and shit? Yeah, no thank you. That’s not gonna work for me. My fall back? Art.
Growing up in the 90’s with an art teacher mother and a former photographer of a father, art was always a part of our household. Art was also, however, constantly being touted as “not a real job that will pay the bills.” My mom had always been an amazing artist, but felt like she had to be a teacher to financially support our family of four. The idea of depending on selling art as the sole source of income was too unreliable and deemed unrealistic. My dad ended up giving up photography in his 20’s to become a construction worker/contractor, because working for the local newspaper didn’t pay well enough. So when I realized going to college for damn near a decade so that I could maybe pet lions on a regular basis wasn’t going to work out, the idea of becoming an artist as a career seemed like a joke.
This is where Miami Ink comes in. This early 2000’s tv show was like a gateway drug to tattoos for me. It was the first time I had ever seen tattooers as real career artists who were making a real, steady income as opposed to what I had seen depicted in movies or seen while driving past the tattoo shop attached to the tire place : big burly dudes with scraggly white beards, smoking cigarettes and wearing leather vests while tattooing some equally big, burly, and bearded man under a painting of a naked lady getting mauled by a panther or some shit. (These tattoo shops still totally exist, of course.)
Some of the tattooers on Miami Ink were happily married with families and they lived in nice houses in the nice part of town and drove nice cars to their nice shop. I couldn’t believe how….well, normal they seemed. They were doing tattoos on people on a regular basis and making a proper income doing the art they loved. The fuck?? That’s a thing??
This doofy reality tv show essentially opened my eyes to the fact that it wasn’t a requirement to sell drugs in order to become a tattooer.
I knew by the time I was 16 or 17 that I wanted to be heavily tattooed. I’ve never been very good at moderation and only really know how to love things whole-heartedly. I’m a fan of whole-assing life, you could say. I knew in my soul I wasn’t going to be a gal who would get a couple of tattoos here and there and would call it quits. No, I wanted to be like the people in the bands I loved who had neck, throat, and hand tattoos. I wanted to be like the tattooers on Miami Ink who were covered from head to toe. In lots of ways, I live and thrive off of extremes, and becoming heavily tattooed was an extreme I was so sure of. (Though I have kept my promise to my Mama that I made when I was 18 and not gotten any face tattoos…the ones on my ears don’t count!)
However, growing up in the aforementioned small town in the deep south of Georgia, my talk of getting covered in tattoos was regularly met with, (imagine this being said in a snarky southern accent, okay?) “Oh you wanna get tattoos? Well you ain’t gonna get no jobs lookin’ like that. Ain’t nobody gonna take you serious.”
That’s when the light bulb goes off in my tiny little, hormone ridden, not fully developed brain: I’m pretty decent at art so…if I make tattoos my job…I can get as many of those mother fuckers as I want. I mean, they do it on Miami Ink and make good money, so why can’t I?
Next thing you know, I’ve graduated high school and packed everything I could into my 2001 Honda Civic hatchback and headed north on I-75 to move my happy ass to Atlanta, Georgia. The biiiiiig city! I mean, the biggest city I could conceive of moving to at the age of 18, that was also the location of Georgia State University, a college I managed to get accepted into that had an art program and would have in-state tuition costs that my family could afford…WOO!
And there begins my saga of living in Atlanta for about a decade longer than I had originally planned, dropping out of college because I hated it and because I had wiggled my way into a tattoo apprenticeship, experiencing the trauma and growth of a traditional apprenticeship with all male tattooers as my mentors, developing an eating disorder, meeting my now husband, becoming a triathlete, growing as a tattooer, and eventually peacing out to Colorado.
More to come. :]