Andy Perez

Give us a brief introduction on yourself here.

Andy Perez, been tattooing a little while, probably not long enough. I work in Jersey City at Jersey City Tattoo Company and I also work at Thicker Than Water in Manhattan, where we are right now.

You’re one of the few people that actually had other jobs before tattooing, you didn’t go straight into it.

Yeah, I did a lot of things. I worked in a kitchen, I briefly worked at NASA when I was eighteen years old as a subcontractor on the GE compound repairing satellite dishes in Florida, in Cape Canaveral. I used to build exotic animal enclosures. I built cages for giraffes and baby tigers and got to play with tigers at work all day,that was cool. What other ridiculous shit have I done?

I know you spent some time in the music industry, too.

Yeah, that part of my life was awful. I worked in the music industry for six years. In promos, starting out, and then kind of weaseled my way more into production and graphic design, which is what I wanted to do anyway because I went to art school for two years and got really broke and had to drop out but I still wanted to continue on.

Before I went to art school, years ago when I got my first tattoo, I was in a band with a guy who was a tattooer. His name’s Scott White. And Scott was kind of positioning me to be next in line and was like, “Dude you should apprentice here when I’m done,” and saying I should try to get George to teach me how to tattoo. And George was this burly fucking biker dude who I think is a wrestler now, a pro wrestler. Literally, I’m not kidding. He’s got a fucking tattoo of a unicorn on his neck. He’s super insane. So right when that was about to happen, George just skipped town completely. He disappeared and handed Scott the keys to the shop. He left Scott there to kind of slug it out on his own.

Then when I was in Gainesville, before I moved to New York, I’d been trying to get an apprenticeship at this shop called Body Tech and the guy Wayne who worked there was going to apprentice me and things just didn’t work out. Tattooing was something I’d always wanted to do but I’d put it off and kind of abandoned hope after the last time that I was going to get apprenticed and it didn’t happen, I just gave up.

And then things just changed. One day I said I want to try to do this again and somehow I managed to pull my shit together and it got done.

Did you work at a certain supply shop as well?

Yeah…while I was learning how to tattoo I worked at an infamous tattoo supply company in New York where a lot of people –– and I wouldn’t want to blow up their spots –– but a lot of people did the same thing. A lot of really good New York tattooers [have worked there], so I figured I was following in their footsteps. It’s basically taught me everything not to do.

So you didn’t have any kind of formal apprenticeship.

No.

I think when I first met you, you’d just started tattooing.

Yeah, I kind of got thrown into it. I was trying to dip my feet in the water carefully and then got thrown in head-first when a friend of ours passed away and a bunch of people wanted simple little tattoos. I slogged those out over one day and I did more tattoos in one day than I’d ever done in my whole life up to that point.

I also had some great, kind, generous tattooers who were really supportive and helped me out. When I first started I was expecting everyone to treat me like shit. And some people did, and I’m not gonna name names of the people who were mean to me, but they had every right to be.

There were people like Rich Muller –– who I think is probably the most underrated tattooer in all of New York City –– who is just incredible. He was my neighbor at the time, but he said if you need anything call me. He’d come over to my house and look at my machines and say, “This looks good, maybe you should tweak this a little bit.”

Myles Karr was the same way. He was always really cool to me and he was the one that made me jump in with both feet when I was only working at Jersey City a couple days a week and still working at that horrible place we were just talking about. He really pushed me and that was awesome.

Somehow in that brief six months that I was tattooing on my own, I don’t know how I got my shit together enough to trick Adam [Paterson] to give me a job at Jersey City but I pretty much owe my entire tattooing career to Adam Paterson. He was the one who opened the door for me and working with him and Chuck [Daly] has taught me so much.

I really owe everything to that dude. He really has helped me along so much. It’s like a dream shop. It’s funny, I hear shit from other tattooers and they’ll talk about the vibe in their shop, like “Oh, there’s this asshole who steals my shit,” or “There’s this kid I work for who’s such a dickhead.” I’m so incredibly lucky that I’ve never had that experience anywhere I’ve worked.

I worked with Adam first and I still work there. Then I went to work at a shop that Myles suggested. It was crazy. A couple days I worked alone and I’d go in there and there would be three people waiting at the door. I’d open the door, five more people would come in. And it would be just me, sitting there by myself in this fucking station with no one there to help me. There would be days I wouldn’t eat, I’d just tattoo for nine, ten hours straight. Sometimes I’d stay super late and the bus wouldn’t come and I wouldn’t get home ‘til fucking one in the morning. It was a madhouse.

When I got tattooed by Bert Krak he said, “Well, that’s how you learn to tattoo. You get tattooed and you do a bunch of tattoos.” I think getting tattooed I’ve learned more than I have from anything else. I think it’s hugely important that you get tattooed by people you admire if you want to tattoo.

Well, I was going to ask if you feel like you missed out by not having a formal apprenticeship but it doesn’t really sound like it.

You know, I don’t because I feel like I had it. Adam treated me accordingly when I was green and came in; he gave me shit. I don’t feel like I missed out, I think I had it different but I don’t think I had it easy. I don’t feel like I fucking cheated, I’ll put it that way. A lot of people just jump in the game but I definitely don’t feel like I cheated. I feel like I laid everything down. I left my job where I had insurance. I quit everything and just decided to fucking do it. I worked a shitty job and tattooed when I could, however much I could. I took the hit. I bought the ticket, now I’m takin’ the ride.

How about any past masters that you look up to? Or even just contemporary tattooers. The list is probably neverending.

Well, I can distill it…

Let’s go deceased first.

Dead? Fuck. Greg Irons was rad. He’s not a million years old or anything but he was awesome. You know, I respect the old traditions and the old flash –– I love it, I base half my work around it –– but it’s really hard to say, “Oh, this tattooer in that era,” because there’s not that much of it left. You don’t get to see a tattoo that Percy Waters did or a tattoo that Milton Zeis did. Their flash is cool but the designs were all repeated throughout their catalogs. It’s more about what they did for tattooing than their actual tattoos. Paul Rogers, his machine building is the cornerstone of all machine building and I worship him for that.

I think tattoo history is super important for tattooers. Same thing with machines, Adam made sure I knew how to rebuild and change springs and tune a machine. Because if you fucking tattoo and your fucking spring breaks and you have to mail it back to your fucking builder, you’re a chump.

As far as the old guys there’s all the usual suspects, like Charlie Wagner. It’s cool as a dude who learned to tattoo in New York. I’d rather focus on the living legends that are older.

You really won’t catch me pushing any kind of artistic agenda on anybody, I’m just not that dude. I like doing this job a lot and I like making people happy. There’s always a balance to strike because people will come to you with stupid shit. But I’m not one of those dudes that is gonna force my artistic vision on anybody. I just like making it happen, laying down the nicest tattoo I can for whoever walks in the door.

My ultimate goal would to be somebody like Alex McWatt, who can do Japanese as good as he can do traditional as good as he can do anything. There’s nothing he can’t do.

Why do you think there’s been such a resurgence with traditional style tattoos?

When I started getting into tattoos in the 90s, everything was biomech and desert chrome and just so fucking lame.

Yeah, that’s where these super bright bluebirds came from.

Yeah, like twisted fucking spray cans shooting flames and shit. I’ll go back and look at my sketchbooks and I’m so lucky I didn’t start tattooing back then. Or getting tattoos! If I got more tattoos back then, I would have the worst tattoos in the universe. Well, I already do have some of the worst tattoos in the universe.

The first time I saw traditional stuff that I fell in love and thought “This is how it should look,” where it just clicked with me in my brain, was right around 1998 or 99. ITA had an interview with Jef Whitehead and he was doing all this traditional shit. There was also a Dan Higgs thing that I’d seen a little bit before that and  living in Baltimore and seeing that dude around was cool. When I went to art school I was in Baltimore and that’s when Read Street first started. I met the guys at the Tattoo Museum when they were building it. Me and my best friend Mike would go over there and we were friends with those guys for a minute, and Mike was getting tattooed by Fudgey. It kind of opened up my eyes, so to speak, and I realized “Oh, this is what tattoos should look like. That other stuff is garbage.”

Do you think other people started to realize that?

I don’t know. The thing is, a lot of the traditional tattoos you see now are garbage. People are doing them wrong. Speaking of Higgs, the worst thing I can think of, is tattoos now that…you know, as somebody who was obsessed with Free Masonry as a little kid, and I was a little goth kid when I was into the occult and shit in middle school, but seeing people appropriate shit into these pseudo-mystical tattoos, it’s so empty and hollow and garbage-y.

Everybody now is doing the fucking wavy pyramid with the wrinkly eye. Everybody has it and it means nothing and it’s hollow and empty and allthe cool has been sucked out of it. Or you’ll see people doing weird shit for the sake of being weird.

And then there’s people like Robert Ryan. He lives it and understands the meaning of all that symbolism and has studied it.

He’s on a whole other level.

He really is on a whole other level. You have to learn it and feel it and live it. To be able to do that and have that electric power to it, you have to know. You can’t just think it’s a cool symbol and put it next to something, it takes all the realness out of it. And it shows, when you look at some of those [other] tattoos, it shows. It looks empty. And you look at any of Binky’s stuff and it’s so alive and so intense. I think that’s a horrible trend, the fake mysticism in tattooing.

I think John Poverty is amazing. I took the job here because I wanted to work with John. I think John has something really special. It shows in his tattooing and it’s not like anything else anybody else is doing. I just wanted to be near that.

You pretty much answered it already, but I was going to ask if you just naturally lean towards traditional tattoos.

I do. I think Shon [Lindauer] is very lucky in that he pumped out a bunch of really awesome traditional tattoos and I heard someone say one time that I think rings really true about your portfolio as a tattooer, that you do the tattoos you’ve done. You put those out there and that’s what people come to you for.

I think that someone like Bailey [Hunter Robinson], who is one of my favorite tattooers ever, he’s very careful about what he lets out there, what he posts on the Internet, what he shows people. He’ll do walk-ins and not everything’s a Bailey tattoo, but he’ll make sure that all the shit you’re gonna see is a Bailey tattoo. So people come to him for Bailey tattoos. I wish I could just go on a jag of doing my shit. And I think I’m being lazy and I think I could do it if I painted up a bunch of really rad flash and tried to get people to get it and just overhauled my portfolio.

I just get really wrapped up in doing walk-ins. Honestly, I could give a fuck. I really do love doing traditional tattoos, I think they’re the best-looking, I think they’re the coolest. Everything I do is going to pass through my filter a little bit. But I don’t have a style, I don’t think. Maybe I do and I’m just not aware of it. I lean towards not having one. I’ve been doing a lot more black and gray stuff lately, a lot more fine line kind of stuff. It’s like a whole new thing for me, I’m really amped on it and I wanna do more. But basically, I would be happy tattooing names for the rest of my life. Names and hearts, I don’t care. I just love what I do and I’m not picky. I think it’s a good quality sometimes to be picky if you have the luxury but I don’t feel like I do.

Good deal, that’s all I got. Anything else you dying to say?

I guess an addendum, in closing maybe. To all the five people that are probably gonna read this interview––

Dude, it’s going online and if you put it online, people will read it and it’ll also be true.

That’s true! So I’m just gonna say that I’m awesome and everyone should get tattooed by me. You should probably get tattooed by John Poverty, too, because he’s way better than me.

I just want to go on record and thank everybody that ever helped me out. Everybody that’s gotten tattooed by me. My girlfriend for being so super supportive while I was learning and putting up with my bullshit. Nicole is the best.

Other than that… If anyone out there is learning how to tattoo, just don’t half ass it. Just get into it or quit. Quit your job and do it for real. It’ll be hard but nothing worth doing is easy and if you’re just going to half ass it, get the fuck out. I’m not one of those people that says “No new tattooers!” because I had to start. I’m not gonna be that guy. And ‘that guy’ came up to me and yelled at me when I started tattooing but it made me feel like I should make something out of myself, when somebody who shall remain nameless told me I wasn’t shit and that I should fuck off and die. I really think if you want to learn how to tattoo don’t half ass it. Do it for real, do it the best you can and be true to it and respect it and don’t be a fucking chump. You know?