I just started a new website to rant about what I think to be the devolution of Tattooing! it is called http://suckytraditionaltattoos.wordpress.com. cue the diatribe, here is our about:

Here at Sucky Traditional Tattoos, we are waging war against what we feel to be a fad of mediocrity within the tattoo industry. Tattooing has been a part of human culture since the dawn of recorded history, and has been through many changes, ever evolving and advancing into what it is today, a fine art. Yet despite this constant push forward toward refining tattoo styles and techniques, we here at Sucky Traditional Tattoos have noticed a disturbing trend in popular culture which seeks to cause the tattoo culture to backslide into history. With the coming of Ed Hardy brand clothing, popular culture has seized upon tattoo culture and made a particular style of tattooing from the past a retro trendy fad. Ed Hardy brand has gotten so ridiculously trendy that not only do they have a clothing line dedicated to the childlike designs of Ed Hardy, but just about every consumer product has an Ed Hardy line, from perfume to watches to alcohol. This mass marketing of tattooing is an exploitation of a legitimate fine art, and the rebirth of Traditional American Tattooing makes a mochery of this ancient and spiritual form of living art and its modern, more evolved, fine art styles. People with no real artistic ability, or appreciation for the world of art have fallen pray to mass media marketing, and are helping to support a regression in the evolution of tattooing as an art form. This is a website dedicated to exposing the trendy cult of traditional tattooing for what it really is…a marketing gimmick!

Here at Sucky Traditional Tattoos, we pay homage to the past…by keeping it in the past. The “style” of traditional American tattooing developed between the 1920′s and the 1960′s during a time period in America when tattoos suffered the social stigma of being something that only criminals did as a way to prove how tough they were. For this reason, serious artist focused more on common artistic mediums, like painting and sculpture and left tattooing to be done by more second rate artists. In the 1960′s came the counter culture movement, and gave birth to a time where all artistic mediums began to be experimented with as an open form of self expression, hence tattooing became more and more accepted, and allowed for more serious artists to be taken seriously by the public despite the medium. In this way American tattooing began its journey of evolution from a very rudimentary and overly simplistic style of art to branching off into many different styles from new school to photo realism.

Then came the tattoo explosion in the 1990′s and early 2000′s, as the populraity of tattooing began to rise many second rate artists began to seek work as tattoo artist as its popularity made it very lucrative. Hence the mass of ignorant consumers that wanted to “be cool” by getting a tattoo was herded into tattoo shops to get their mark. Soon tattoo shops all over the nation began to pop up on every street corner, this high demand coupled by the rarity of true artistic talent resulted in the rebirth of “Traditional Tattooing,” a style of tattooing from Americas past that was designed to be overly simplistic and easy enough for just about anyone to do. This particular “style” of tattooing harkens back to a time when sailors lined up at tattoo parlors on shore leave to get a tattoo a quick as humanly possible simply as a souvenir of there trip to this dock or that. It was never designed as a form of art to be respected and revered as the fine artists of history are revered. Though now due to mass marketing hype and trendy pop culture, Traditional tattooing has become the bane of every serious tattoo artist, because the ignorant consumer, who is not educated in the arts, doesn’t want to get anything else…anything of substance, all because pop culture and mass marketing tells them that Traditional tattoos are cool…

What makes this disturbing trend even worse is that even serious and talented artists are feeling compelled to specialize in “Traditional Tattoos” because they feel that they cannot make a living otherwise. Likewise any “serious” tattoo artist that expresses a dislike for the childlike “style” of Traditional Tattooing is met with utter distain from “Traditional Tattooists” as if they blasphemed against the tattoo gods, revealing that this Traditional Tattooist trend has become something of a cult, which worships their tattooist ancestors. I compel every serious tattoo artist and every tattoo enthusiast to put more thought into your art work…and do not allow tattooing to regress into this Traditional retro fad. We must put on a pedestal true art and true artists, by definition an art is something that only a highly trained and talented individual can do. Traditional tattooing is so simplistic that just about everyone with rudimentary tattoo training can do it…it is not art…it is trendy, pop culture, trash. Stop Traditional Tattooing!!!!