Melbourne is well-known for all its famous tattoo shops ; Hidden Moon, Love Tattoo Parlour, Chapel Street to only quote some are part of the best in the city. To get tattooed, you just have to open your eyes between blocks in popular neighborhoods where you could catch in some lane the tattoo shop signs you wish. From Chapel Street to Brunswick with its fresh rooftop bars. Australian tattoo capital, Melbourne is where Mike, a 37 years old Kiwi, developed himself as a tattoo artist. Also singer in « Sweet Gold » a rock 60's band, swinging between fun and romanticism and such are his tattoos, this tattoo artist doesn't hesitate to fill up his motive with a huge dose of coolness wherever he's going even in his own shop; Blue Lady Tattoo. A singuliar « Aussie » vibe, we envied from the other side of the globe !
Did you start getting tattooed back in New Zealand?
Born in Auckland, Mike has been inking for 6 years. He arrived at 23 years old in Melbourne going from shitty jobs to shitty jobs with the only goal to save for touring with his band. The cultural agitation of Melbourne attracted him and offered him a better way to extend his music to success. « I just really wanted to get into tattooing but I didn't have the confidence but I was getting tattooed a lot and I just didn't think I was even good enough for drawing so I didn't even try much. It took a long time to get into it because of that lake of confidence. » A late start for the owner of Blue Lady Tattoo which is settled in the heart of Melbourne. I was playing in an hardcore band back in New Zealand in the late 90's, I was the youngest one and a lot of my friends were in their 20's late 20's and they had heavily tattooed arms, hands and necks and everything. I hung out in a tattoo shop then and it was a cool place just listening to hardcore and punk with friends, it was a really attractive place to be ! Eventually I got tattooed by one of the guy there, his name is Dean Parkin from Sacred in Auckland, NZ, he is still one of the best tattooist I've got tattooed by and one of the best one in the world and one of the people I look up to. He did my chest and this forearm for me. I got a lot in NZ and here too. I moved in Australia to be in a band and play music, I had a band back in Auckland, as I play guitar and I sing. We were doing all right, but I was stuck in this and I went to the States to make a record but it didn't really work out and I went back and I thought : Auckland is a dead scene, I need somewhere bigger. I thought that Melbourne is easier, I don't need to move to America because I would need a Green Card. Now my current band name in Melbourne's is « Sweet Gold » and I only sing. It is a sixties, romantic loved songs band and we are putting a record out next year. I moved to Melbourne just to be in a band with my friends, and to do that it was just working in a bunch of shitty jobs I could get just to pay the bills and just to follow the band.
Why did you start tattooing ?
Playing in a band, working in shitty jobs, fucking hated it, I lived in a backpacker four years, but it was super fun because the backpackers had shows and I got to see a bunch of cool punk rock bands from overseas it is called the Hot house ?? like a bit of a Melbourne institution for punk rock, I was in my late late 20's and I hated my job I just fucking hated it, and I was at the point where I was fuck it, I might just jump off a bridge or I've been learning the graphic design for nothing good , I was so upset with the grind of going to work in a job I hated and i was working in a warehouse, but most of them were cool some not but it was fine but if I don't know I will never try. So I saved up 3000$ quit my job and then I was fucked my money's runs out and i got my foot in a door of a tattoo shop or I better have something or I am fucked and it worked out.
Where did you go?
I was kind of lucky because a friend of mine was working in a shop and they need someone to clean and do the counter and he put a nice word for me and I worked there for an number of years. They just told me that I am not gonna tattoo and just clean because I wasn't good enough for tattoo and they told me to sit on and run the counter and then one day, one of them was :« Hey, come in and tattoo me », it was good, a bunch of people helped me then. This first tattoo experience was a big deal, you know. I already tattooed some people, like some of my friends, when i was at the backpackers I tattooed a lot of them with a machine they weren't pretty good, but lucky for me those guys were full of tattoos so they didn't care and they thought it was funny to get bad ones so I was lucky for that. My first one was in that shop, and few months after they pushed me to tattooing in the shop and stoped cleaning and I got another job in another shop called Side show tattoo and I split my week in two shop and eventually I had a full time in Side show tattoo and I worked 7 days a week for the first four or five years and you need to I think, and you need to do it especially when you are learning, you need to do as many walk in as you can, as many tattoos as you can. Not this many shops are busy in Melbourne, the shop were i was learning was not busy, Side show was busy, because there were less people working. After that I started to work in Saint Kilda and I worked 3 days a week and made like 3 ground in three days (don't quote that). That was a good experience, I didn't work there that long but it was good. That is amazing, that you guys have the ability to switch from shop to shop in Melbourne... I think for some people it is a problem, for some others it's not. Quite a lot of people that have worked here, have worked for two different shops at once, and I don't care personally but I know some who don't like that. But who fucking cares ? There is enough skin, there is enough to go around, like if it is not busy enough to go around, it is fine to move.
How would you like to describe your style ?
I am just doing, I guess American Traditional with a twist on it. My twist is that kind of positive and funny version of ideas. I am not into super negative and dark imagerie, I like those kind of tattoos but for me I just really want to do something that reflects my general outlook, which is I kind of think is just kind of funny, I just like to have a relax and fun attitude. I am into bright colors, sunshine, cocktails, animals. It is a modern twist of traditional. In any artistic field and for anyone, the hardest thing is to have their own style and own mark, and I think everybody tries, in anything that they do and I think everybody tries in every degrees of success, everyone I think is trying for that so if I have that, I am happy. I don't really know how much I am gonna have as far as people ??? but I know what I am trying so I am trying to have something. I think it is like in music everyone has their own fields and everyone want to go through same thing with drawing, if you ask Brad to draw a ripper it looks like that and you ask me it will look like that. It depends on your ersonality that is you coming through you up. I grow up with skateboards graphics, skateboard movies, tee-shirts and all that kind of stuff is a big influence, metal album covers, punk album covers, it is like those kind of things are a big influence, and I like things that are really stylized. I studied graphic design and my favorite thing was logo design. Because it is distilling a whole bunch of informations into a symbol and i really like that. It is really tricky to do it well but when you do it well it is amazing. When I got into tattoo, that's also why I liked traditional, it is kind of distilling information into the simpliest way to be readable, the simpliest way to convey information, instead of ? details in favor of a bold statement. That is how i think about things I think about shapes rather than details. When and why did you decided to get your own tattoo shop ? Two years after I started tattooing, like for the first couple of years, after one year of tattooing I went to New Zealand and guest in the shop Sacred were Dean used to tattoo me and in Tow Hands, back in Auckland were my sister used to work, and that was like a big deal for me and it was really cool to have that because Dean and Dan owned and runned Sacred so well and seeing them while I was there working really opened my eyes, on how a shop should run and how the shop I was working didn't run, as I was working in a shop were the owner had a really erratic personality and somebody that, I feel, made his decisions not based on the shop futur but on personal income, its fine but it was not the kind of shop I wanted to be in. When I saw Sacred and how passionate they are by tattooing, and its not just about money but a ration about client and them, a deeper sort of experience. I worked there and I was out of Australia and I realized I didn't really want to continue working for people like that so I thought, fuck that ! I open my own shop. It's a thing, It's a thing I shouldn't have done because two years it is not really long to be able to open a tattoo shop. It is pretty early into tattoo community, but it is one of those thing, I was sick of working for erratic personalities, like crazy, I was just: you know what, I just want to work in a shop, that treats people fairly, the person who runs it is not insane, you can turn up to work and it is gonna be the same as yesterday, no random policy... Eventually I was doing it anyway, so I was like fuck it !: « I must do it now , if not know so when kind of thing» so, I kind of took a gamble on it and did it» I wrote a jingle and sold it to Weebix, it is an australian cereal, I had a bunch of cash and I was going to fly to Vegas and buy a 1964 epiphone casino and blow up all the money, but I finally though I would start my own shop instead, I could go to vegas anytime.
What about now ? Could you introduce your co-workers in Blue Lady Tattoo ?
The shop now runs for 4 years, our first shop was down in another laneway, we have had a lot of people coming and going, we have had a lot of different artists and guest artists, a lot of transits and its a part of being a tattoo artist, to be able to travel and move. But a couple of guys have been here for a few years at the moment and the crew is pretty solid now, since we have moved it, is had only gotten a bit more busier. We have got Dave, who does kind of traditional European style, Ben has cleanest traditional, Brad who does neo traditional stuff really cool and nice details, steady and smooth, we have got Emett, he is from the Gold Coast and he can do some really bold traditional and japanese stuff. Kieran has been working in Norway, UK, he has settled here now and he is really good, we have got TJ at the back doing American New-York style traditional. And Jamie August does big Boy Pin Up, he is at the time with us. We are 7 and mostly 8. How do you feel you run that place, is there a special atmosphere here? It's tricky, I used to have business partners, but I think it's easier to run it without business partners. What i was set up for, when i started the shop was that the place where the people working there feel that they were treated fairly, the environment is nice, clients and people have a good experience and there is no egos and sets of power trips and usual shit you get from people who think that they are the boss, and whatever. I try to keep it pretty melo, i run a pretty loose shit I guess, they come and go, they are pleased, I don't have a set time for people that want to leave, they can do whatever they want, because I kind of feel like they know they need to make money for themselves and I don't need to tell them about that. One of the reason I get into this job is I dont want to have to fucking wake up at 7 in the morning and come back at 8.15 am you know what i mean and get in trouble if you are 10 minutes late. If you need to take your car to the mechanics, you should be able to fucking go and do it, whenever you want, if you want to have breakfast with your girlfriend, you should be able to fucking do it ! So yes, I run it pretty loose, and I think the vibe is really good cause everyone have a lot of freedom, autonomy, because they run their own business their own day, they can take a week of if they want it is fine, so I think that creates a nice atmosphere to me, because I don't feel like I have to tell anyone to do anything.
What do you think about tattooing in Melbourne ?
I am not sure about the new challenge of tattooing in Melbourne but I think Melbourne is the new challenge of the southern hemisphere, it is like you can throw a stone in any direction and finally find a good tattoo artist in Melbourne. It is ridiculous, my five favourite tattoo artists are here in Melbourne. When I first got here I get tattooed in Chapel Tattoo, those people over there are phenomenal. I have been tattooed by Jane and Andrew, amazing work class tattooers, and iIremember back then being like : « wow, this shop is so good and I saw some other work then and i was, like Melbourne have got so many good shops » and now fast forward 14 years, there is so many good shops, it is insane. It is kind of reaching a point where, like I went in LA, one year ago and i was working in LA, and I saw in the street : punk shop, tee-shirt shop, legal weed shop and tattoo shop then again and again, it is mental there is so many, and I feel like Melbourne in another 14 years could be that, but I think if you are good at what you are doing it is fine. There is hips of tattooers but there is also hips of shitty ones. So the people who aren't good or don't care about it are not gonna stick out and the people who do care about it that are nice to their clients, and do good work, you can't fuck with that, and that's a formula that works in any industries, if you have a bar and the staff is nice everyone is gonna come and gonna like it, if the staff is dick no one is gonna go over there. I think it is the same thing.
@blueladytattoo @mike_tea_tattoos
