AD: Had you ever written anything before? (Jonathan looks at me like I just sprouted an extra head.) Of course I know you did, but this is supposed to be an interview, so I gotta ask, right? Interview. Readers… Remember?

Poem written by JS in 1972

JS: Oh yeh, right, sorry… (laughs) Well I’d always dreamed of being a writer. Ever since I was a kid. I was a real strange, anti-social, introverted child and I always read a lot of books, reading compulsively ever since I can remember. That was just about my whole world as a kid- at least until I discovered drugs. The drugs allowed me to act a bit more extemporaneously, and interact with other people, so once I got into all that shit I eventually stopped reading so much and started just running wild in the streets… But the seeds for writing had already been planted, I guess… You know what they say, if ya hang out for long enough in a tattoo shop, sooner or later you’re gonna end up getting a tattoo? Well if you read a lot, sooner or later you’re gonna end up writing, or at least wanting to write… at least that’s how it worked out for me…
Over the years when I’d been reading a lot, I’d always written a whole lot too, even written professionally some later, on and off…. but that writing was always just a sort of a sideline, a hobby while i was mostly making my living as a tattooist and devoting most of my time and energy to getting ahead at that shit. On some levels I think I musta liked the tattooing cuz I somewhere deep inside, I knew it was gonna be a lot less demanding than writing….

First Issue of International Tattoo Art Magazine

Still, even as a full time tattoo artist, I always ended up writing a lot of articles and stories for the tattoo magazines and stuff, right from the very start of when I started to get established as a professional tattooer, practically… I guess I fell into that tattoo writing niche sort of by default, like I was the only guy in the fucking tattoo business who knew how to read and right or something (laughs) You gotta understand, back in the day when I started tattooing in the 70’s, it wasn’t like today where ya got all these art school types and college graduates running around slinging the ink. Back then it was still mostly a pretty rough crowd, not the kinda guys who sit around sipping cappuccinos and reciting poetry and shit (laughs)…
But seriously, I even did a stint for several years as the founder and Managing Editor of the very first big, glossy internationally distributed commercial tattoo magazine. International Tattoo Art magazine, I started that fucking rag, ya know… And that’s where i really made my bones as a full-time working journalist and editor and writer too… Some of my so called ‘peers,’ people in the tattoo business really hated me for it, man, for standing out above the herd. Sour grapes mostly. There’s always been alotta that shit in the tattoo scene. I remember my tattoo mentor, my adopted uncle, Bob Shaw telling me a long time ago, “Tattooers are like a buncha jealous old whores…” They just can’t stand to see one of their own doing too well… It’s like that old Japanese saying, ‘you don’t wanna be the nail that stands out, cuz you’ll be the first one to get hit!” And I took a lot of hits, boy! But that’s a whole other story, I’ll save that shit for my book (Laughs)…. But I just kept going with the magazine work, and I actually helped alotta people in the tattoo business out, even many of the ones who ended up hating me the most for it. No good deed ever goes unpunished… But I still really considered all that writing about tattooing basically hack work anyway, a far cry from the sort of real writing that had always attracted me since I was a kid. Literature, poetry, philosophy… stories, mythology… ideas, ya know?

to be continued