**My Sebastian is inspired by my own personal demon, though mine manages to stay out of trouble slightly better. This chapter is also dedicated to her and is extra long to keep her entertained.**
When I was 14, I was sleeping on the floor in the apartment that Bard shared with his bandmates. It was filthy and it smelled like mold and dirty laundry. The guys were loud, obnoxious, and drunk nearly all the time. It was a teenager's dream. The building was a squat that was taken over by a group of punks in the late 80s. They'd done some amazing work updating the electrical and fixing the major structural damage, though some of the rooms had holes in the walls and there were windows missing glass. There were definitely more rats than people living there and it certainly wasn't up to code, but it was safe and it wasn't the street.
It was in D-Squat where I met a dude who turned me onto a job opportunity where I could make some quick cash. I could do as much or as little as I wanted as long as I could be fast and keep my mouth shut. Those were two things I figured I excelled at.
I started doing errands for a shady character named Lau who had me running parcels from Chinatown all over the island for a good hunk of cash each time. As long as I didn't ask any questions or pay too much attention to the people I was delivering to, I kept making money.
I grew up knowing how to keep my mouth shut and my head down, but I was also a bit of an opportunist. When the chance arose, I began to skim a bit from the packages. Sometimes I would sell it, but I was curious and eventually started to use it myself.
One of my errands brought me to a tattoo shop in Brooklyn called the Crypt. It was here I met the strange man who would become my mentor and would save me from whatever horrible life I was setting myself up for. I was immediately obsessed by the walls of flash and the kitschy horror movie vibe of the shop and broke my rule of staying silent and ventured to talk to the man who called himself the Undertaker.
The Undertaker was a fixture on the little street in Brooklyn where he kept his shop. He was younger than the long mop of gray hair would suggest and despite his strange demeanor and propensity for laughing to himself for no reason, he was immediately friendly towards me. I figured there was more to him than appearance, after all most of the people I hung looked like they ate of dumpsters, but once I saw him work, watched as bottled of ink and bundles of needles turned plain flesh into living works of art, I appreciated his brilliance. There was a reason so many put up with his eccentricities because there was magic in the work of this artist.
I found any reason to end up in his shop and soon began cleaning up and running errands for him as well as Lau. For my 15th birthday, the Undertaker gave me my first tattoo, a koi fish in traditional Japanese style that I had so come to admire. He explained the tattoo was not only a beautiful image, but a symbol I would carry with me for life. A koi can climb a waterfall without concern for the current and will face the knife of a fisherman without fear much like a warrior facing the sword. Once the design was applied to the skin, I felt like I had been imbued with some of these properties through my skin and ink talisman.
He told me other stories about men who carried their own koi tattoos; Japanese warriors, bikers, gangsters, and sailors and so many other artists he listed by name that my head was soon full of an obsessive love for this craft. It was that day I realized I wanted to tattoo and I asked if it was possible.
"Is it possible? Anything is possible. What are you willing to do to make it possible? That's the question," the Undertaker answered cryptically. He sat hunched in his long black coat, hair in his eyes, a grin on his face as he watched me.
"What would I have to do?" I asked.
"You'd need a machine," he said kicking the little box at his feet. "And you'd need someone to take you on as an apprentice. You can't learn this at school." The last statement had him dissolving into a steady fit of laughter.
"What else?" I asked when he stopped wheezing and became silent again.
"You need to draw every day. I mean, every day. You got me?"
"I can do that."
The Undertaker nodded but said nothing else. He left me to figure out the rest on my own. I started to save every extra cent I had to buy my own machine, though I sidetracked occasionally by the work I did for Lau and was still skimming off tiny bits every time I wanted to get high. That unfortunately became more frequent as time went on.
Bard never said as much, but I could sense that his patience with me was running thin around that time. When I wasn't at the tattoo shop or running packages, I was lugging gear to and from music gigs with Bard. You would think I would have been busy enough to stay out of trouble, but eventually it still found me.
"Are you fucking sure about this?" Bard asked for the third time as I shaved the fine blond hair from his upper arm.
"Shut up, pussy. It'll be fine. I know what I'm doing."
The Undertaker looked on with a steady giggle in his throat as I prepped my first human client for a tattoo. Before this, I had been relegated to pig skin in the form of random dismembered body parts gifted to me by my mentor. I was used to his style of teaching and knew that despite his inattentive demeanor, he was in fact watching and would step in with instruction, though perhaps too cryptically worded that it would take me some effort to unravel it before any serious mistakes were made.
The stencil went onto Bard's skin easier than it had on the cold, stiff pig's skin and I remembered what the Undertaker had said about tattooing a living client.
"The ink will go in easier, so you won't need to push it so hard. Remember, they're alive. Usually. And they can feel it. Whether or not you care about that is up to you, but remember not to go into it pushing hard. Keep your lines clean. You can always go deeper and darker, but you can't back off once you've gone too deep."
It turns out that would be good advice for a few aspects of my life beyond tattooing, but in this instance, I was dealing with Bard and I didn't want to hurt him necessarily. Even if he was sort of like a pig.
When my needle first hit his arm and I saw how the ink exploded into the skin I was so hooked I knew I had found what I was meant to do with my life. It was unfortunate that this same day a couple of cops would pick me up on my way out of Chinatown with a backpack full of heroin. I used my one phone call to apologize to the Undertaker and to ask him to put my gear someplace safe where Bard wouldn't find it and sell it while I was gone.
My years as a courier came with the essential training to keep my mouth shut and I spent hours on end looking blankly at an assortment of police officers and social workers until my fate was decided. The attorney who was appointed to me pushed the fact that the backpack wasn't mine and I had no knowledge of its contents, but without a name of its owner I was still nailed with possession. Somehow I escaped any charges involving my intent to sell.
I served a year and a half as a minor in a corrections facility. The time away allowed me to finish my high school education. I also decided to learn as much about auto mechanics, strength training, and art, just for good measure. It was a college crash course in life that spat me out when I was 18, somewhat worse for the wear, but also a fuck of a lot smarter.
Bard had moved out of the squat by the time I got out and was living with a girlfriend who had gotten him in with a different group of jerks, this time deathrockers and rivetheads. Basically the goth kids who listened to heavier music and wore more leather. He was still hauling gear and playing gigs, but now it was behind the Bowery and it was sometimes just DJ gear instead of guitar rigs. He was still the same asshole, but now he made it a habit to wear goggles around his neck.
The Undertaker was much the same as when I left him. When I stepped back into the shop he said not a word about what had happened or where I had been but asked if I had been drawing.
"Every day," I responded.
"Have you been tattooing?"
"No. There was no way to keep it clean." Actually, I had many opportunities to tattoo in prison, but I couldn't tolerate the idea of doing it wrong and unlearning any of the good habits I had built so I stuck with drawing.
"Good. I saved you a pig."
About a week after I was released, the Undertaker started on my demon tattoo.
"It's been on your back this whole time anyway," he said.
"What has?" I asked as he drew it out on my back with a red permanent marker. He had me sitting in an old massage chair, or maybe it was one of those backwards chairs girls sometimes had in front of their vanity tables. Either way my knees were locked in and my back was exposed while he explained the tattoo in his own insightful way.
"He's been clawing at you since I met you, kid. We're just going to give him a face so you can remember how ugly he is."
...
By the time I was 21, I had been working regularly with clients for two years and the Undertaker was confident enough in my work to send me to conventions to represent the shop. Honestly, I think the old man was becoming too eccentric to work with the general public. He seemed to do better in his own shop with clients coming to him who already knew what they were in for.
Of course he was well known in the tattoo community and when I did my first big show in London, I drew a lot of attention. Strangers would shake my hand or slap me on the back after seeing that I wore a convention badge naming "the Crypt, Brooklyn NYC" as my home shop. The name was well known and I had a reputation to live up to.
I was assigned to share a booth with the most straightlaced, stuck up looking tattoo artist I had ever encountered. He showed up with his black rolling equipment case, not a scratch or a sticker on it, wearing a black suit with a pressed white shirt and black tie.
"Hey," I offered my hand in greeting. "Claude, is it?" I said looking at his convention ID that hung against the front of his suit.
"Yes. And you are Sebastian, the first and only apprentice the Undertaker has ever taken on."
"You know him?"
"There's not a soul in this entire venue who does not know the Undertaker. He is, how should I put this...infamous."
"Not a fan?" I asked. I felt myself bristle a bit at his attitude.
"I prefer a more subdued and elegant style," he said.
"So how'd you end up stuck sharing a booth with a freak like me?"
The dude decided to ignore me while he set up his end of the booth, unfurling a shop banner for Kumo Tattoo. Everything was clean and professional, black and red, lacking basic personality which seemed in keeping with the man himself. Conversely, my setup included the macabre themed banner for the Crypt, created with artwork that the Undertaker had painted directly onto the silk years and years ago. I also brought a skull to hold business cards. Besides my actual tattoo gear, I figured that was all I needed. It wasn't the sleek set up that my neighbor seemed to have going, but it fit the shop I was there to represent.
"I guess it's probably luck of the draw, huh? Just randomly putting people together so they can become new friends?" I tried again.
"That's cheerfully optimistic, but wrong. I was asked to share this space with you."
"Asked by who? No one asked me."
"That's abundantly clear and I'm afraid that a bit of a joke was had at both of our expense."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Again the passive aggressive ignoring technique was employed to diffuse my questions.
"Claude," I said walking around to the front of his table and leaning in close. "I know we're not friends yet, but you should be aware that I don't give up easily and I don't take fucking polite social cues. So, pretty please, tell me what the fuck you're talking about."
The man sighed and pushed his square-lens glasses up his nose. "Very well. I believe your mentor meant for us to…" he trailed off, clearing his throat.
"What? No, come on, man. Tell me."
"Date. He meant for us to hook up, or whatever the common parlance is within the community."
For the first time in my miserable life I didn't have a smart comeback. My poor brain short circuited as I tried to process his words. I had not once said anything to anyone at the shop about my sexual preference. Deliberately, I ignored that entire portion of my existence in the interest of merely surviving and learning my craft. So, why would anyone, and why in particular would the Undertaker think that I was interested in men? And why the fuck would anyone think I would be interested in this man in particular?
"You're gay?" is what eventually fell out of my mouth as I looked at the dweeb in front of me. He stopped fiddling with his ink setup to regard me fully.
"It's days like today that I wonder what has become of my life. I work hard to maintain a level of professionalism that is generally unheard of in this profession. I cultivate my art and grow a respectable client base, yet, here I am looking at you and dealing with this ridiculous situation."
"What's wrong with looking at me?"
Claude audibly exhaled and adjusted his glasses as if the very sight of me was enough to affect his vision.
"You're used to having your looks disarm people. You don't rely on your mind and when confronted with any minor conflict you default to this tough guy persona or whatever it is you think you're doing."
"You're a real dick, you know that?"
"I've been told as much."
"So, what you're saying is you don't want to fuck me?" I had to ask. The face Claude made was worth the curious glances I drew from everyone around us. "Come on. I'll buy you dinner first." I leaned over further and looked up at the increasingly irritated man, trying his hardest to maintain composure and keep working.
"How long have you been tattooing?" I asked. It was a fairly innocuous question.
"Nearly 10 years," Claude answered quietly as though he were afraid to give me any more material to use against him.
"And you have your own shop?" I looked genuinely interested as I flipped through the photobook he had placed out in front of his side of the booth. It was good work, excellent actually. Nothing compared to the work the Undertaker pulled off, but Claude's technical skill was nearly flawless.
"Yes. I own my own studio."
I hummed and considered for a moment. I closed the book and then looked up at him again. "You are going to be so embarrassed."
"What in the hell are you talking about?" he snapped, slamming the palms of his hands flat on the counter and leaning in until he was face-to-face with me. His eyes were dark and I knew that I'd hit a particularly sensitive nerve.
I should probably have backed off. I should have turned around and continued to set up my station so I could fuck off and hit some pubs with the other artists who actually wanted to hang out with me. I should have apologized and then kept my mouth shut.
What I did say was, "I'm only two years out of my apprenticeship under one of the most infamous and talented men in the industry. My first convention is the biggest and most attended in all of Europe. I'm younger than you, a better artist than you, and God knows I'm a hell of a lot sexier. You're going to be so embarrassed when I out tattoo you too."
And that's the story of when my future boss nearly broke my nose.