A Shaver That Could Not Be Bought

For a few years I had been marking skin with a sewing needle and thread dipped in drawing ink, first on myself, then on friends. In November 1988 the needle gave way to a machine.

I was living in Sevastopol then and had come back to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for a month or two. Both were closed border-zone cities, about as far apart as two places in one country can be. There an acquaintance explained how a working tattoo machine could be built around a wind-up shaver. The explanation turned out to be the easy part. Like so much in the Soviet Union, the shaver simply did not exist in the shops. I spent a long time going through specialised stores across the city, and none of them had it.

Then one day I walked into a toy store for a completely different reason. It had just opened a small consignment section, and among the lots was exactly that shaver. It was a pure accident, and it turned my life. Everything that came after, every machine and every year of work, grew from that counter.

The machine itself was the shaver, an empty ballpoint cartridge for a tube and a guitar string from a music shop, sharpened into a needle. It was unreliable and awkward to hold. I made dozens of small tattoos on friends with it, and changed something in it after almost every one.

The Only Source of Truth

Where does a young man in the Soviet Union learn how a tattoo machine is made? Tattooing existed there almost entirely in the criminal world, and in a small part of the army. There were no shops, no magazines, no suppliers. Whatever anyone knew about the tools had been learned inside those communities, and nowhere else.

The man who explained the shaver machine to us had just come out of prison. For that time and place, he was not a strange source. He was the only one that could be trusted.

Motors From Broken Toys

What followed were machines built from whatever was at hand: a block wrapped in electrical tape, a pen tube, a needle that had to be persuaded to run straight.

Around 1992 and 1993 came a transition. Small electric motors were easiest to find inside household things, so cassette players and toy trains from children's railway sets were taken apart for them. We built rotary machines around those motors, with proper frames and grips. They were better, and they were not made for the work. Under a heavy load on the shaft the motors burned out quickly, and every burned motor was an argument for a different kind of machine.

Looking back, this was also the time my attitude changed. The machine stopped being an improvisation and became a tool, and a tool asks for a more conscious way of working as a whole.

A Machine Seen Only in a Photograph

By then I was working with my friend Taras, and he played the key role in what came next. We had decided that building our own machine was a better way than trying to buy one. We wanted a coil machine, the kind already standard in the West, and neither of us had ever held one. As far as I remember, the only coil machine we had seen was a small figure in a photograph on a record sleeve.

So we worked out the principle from scratch. Endless technical drawings. Parts ordered wherever someone could make them. Coils wound by hand. Frames polished. It took a couple of years of constant experiments before we had a machine we could trust.

Mosquito

The machine that came out of those years, in 1996, we called Mosquito, after its sound. We had rethought the whole concept to make the machine smaller, and the result sounded nothing like anything we had built before.

Mosquito was the first of our machines we began to sell. Not long after, I stepped out of the business to give all my time to tattooing itself, and Taras went on building. For many years I worked only with machines we had made. A couple of them still sit in my collection.

Knowing Which Part to Blame

Since the rotary revolution that began in the middle of the 2000s, the idea that a tattooist should build his own machine may sound strange. In the years I am describing, it was the whole point. A machine you built with your own hands keeps no secrets: when a line goes wrong, you know which part to blame.

The wider path these years belong to is told in Shugyo Without a Master.