Frankfurt, 1999

My first tattoo convention abroad was in Frankfurt, in 1999. I walked into a hall full of accomplished tattooists working side by side, in the open, and I had never seen anything like it. Many of them I knew only from the pages of professional magazines. At home those names sounded almost unreal. Here they were a few steps away, with their machines running.

Stars Without Distance

What struck me most was not the work, although the work was extraordinary. It was how open these people were. The artists whose pieces filled the magazines of the time talked to anyone who came up to them. They explained, showed, answered questions they could easily have kept to themselves, and shared secrets of their experience with other tattooists as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

For someone who had learned the craft from rumours, a single photograph and his own skin, this was a different universe. The story of those years is told in Before the Industry. In Frankfurt I understood that the knowledge I had been hunting for had never been locked away. It simply had not reached us yet.

What a Convention Is For

From the outside, a convention looks like a show: a stage, contests, prizes, a queue of clients at every booth. All of that is real, and all of it is secondary. Contests and clients are elements of the show. The essence is exchange.

It happens on several levels. A conversation with another artist. A few minutes watching someone's hands. An evening spent going through a portfolio. None of it is on the programme, and all of it is why people come. London showed me this most clearly, but it is true of every convention I have worked.

Once I understood that, I stopped booking clients for all three days. At least one day, sometimes half a day, stays free: to walk the hall, watch and ask. Even the sales were part of the conversation. At one Frankfurt convention a flash set of mine was gone in ten minutes, a story told in Fourteen Sets of Flash.

A City of Tattooists

For a few days, a convention is a small temporary city with its own customs, regulars and newcomers. For years I travelled to seven or eight of them a year. One year Yana and I made it to eleven, the smallest ones included. Each one was different: in how it was organised, in its atmosphere, in who came and who did not. Some of those differences mattered more than any prize. They deserve their own pages.

What has not changed since Frankfurt is the reason to go. A convention is worth the journey only as long as people come to share what they know.