AD: Some people might find it surprising to hear a tattoo artist of your stature speaking about tattooing so harshly…

JS: Yeh, well not if they know me or know anything about me…. But don’t get me wrong, it was never so much the tattooing itself that got me down on it so much as the kinda people it put me in contact with for the most part. I actually really liked tattooing, especially in the beginning once I got to the point where I was proficient enough to be able to do things with it creatively… I loved it, was super passionate about it for a long time, and I was really pretty good at it too. Not the best, but pretty good… but then I went from working on a strictly custom, appointment-only private studio basis where I was really setting trends that were changing the face of tattoo history to suddenly just opening it up into a commercial walk in tattoo place one day. How that whole transition took place is another long story in itself, but it happened and that was really like the beginning of the end for me. Basically I got greedy for more money and then I just opened up the gates to hell. By the time I realized I’d fucked it all up, it was already way too late. I didn’t even know it at the time, but for years I musta felt like I’d gone from being some kinda visionary artist to just being a fucking whore!
After a few years of that shit, I was just so fucked up and full of hate and confusion and self-loathing towards the end that I just couldn’t deal with the fucking crowds of stupid trend-oriented people anymore. The customers and the other tattoo artists, the whole fucking daily zombie parade in that fucking goddamn tattoo shop, arggghhh (laughs)… It all just degenerated into a big long surreal nightmare for me… Some really stupid, narcissistic folks were attracted to that whole tattoo deal, and I just didn’t have the patience and tact or emotional backbone to deal with them and all their fucking shit anymore…
Towards the end I remember thinking how I really wished the customers could just drop off their arms or whatever hunks of skin they wanted tattooed overnight or whatever and just let me work on it in peace and then they could come pick it up the next day (laughs)… So yeh, you might say I finally just totally burned out on tattooing…
But it was never so much the art itself I had beef with, just all the fucking people I hadda deal with. That and the whole public image side of the tattoo business too, arggghhh… the magazines and the fucking conventions and all that shit, the persuit of fame and material security and ego-feeding dreams that went with being a well known tattooist…. I got to the point where I really just fucking hated it all so much, there was really nowhere left for me to go but out!

AD: When did you realize you wanted to get out?

JS: Well, I’d been sorta fantasizing about it for years, I guess. But the decision to really do it didn’t come tome till I sobered up. That’s when things became real clear to me, that I’d already wasted way too much time doing shit I didn’t wanna do with my life… You gotta understand, I was drinking real heavily and taking more and more drugs just to be able to get through the days and deal with the whole fucking hamster wheel I was on… Well it started to catch up with me, as those things eventually do… And then I just found myself totally spiritually bankrupt one day. Shit. Time to grow up and face the music and make some serious changes in my life or I was gonna die….But my real downfall just totally manifested itself in real bad chronic alcoholism and drug addiction and I had to get immediate help for that shit cuz I was totally dying from it… so I went into a 12 step recovery program to get the monkeys off my back.

Well, as I started on the recovery path, it was like a big spiritual awakening for me… I soon discovered that all the stress and the drug addiction were really just the tip of a massive iceberg for me, just a surface manifestation of much deeper, darker existential maladies, and that I was gonna have to really work hard to recover from all the psychic garbage and repressed rages and terrors that had led me down the road to hell in the first place… That meant a total reshuffling of all my old values and priorities, all the things I always thought were so important and valuable in my life….

Long story short, one thing led to another and soon it became very obvious to me that tattooing just wasn’t something I wanted to keep on doing with my time anymore as an artist… One thing led to another some more, and it became clear to me that the only thing I really wanted to do anymore, besides throwing myself into my recovery and traveling a lot and getting the fuck out of the States and finally moving back to Brazil… was writing. And that’s exactly what I been doing ever since. Writing. Full time writing. Books, poetry, short stories, essays, rants, journaling, magazine articles, whatever. Writing. Just writing….

to be continued