“Blood-born pathogens, air-born pathogens – you can get cellulitis, skin infections. I’ll show you this photo of someone who got tattooed by one of his friends at home,” says Phil Kyle, reaching for his laptop. He shuts down an episode of 1980s horror series Tales from the Darkside and opens an image of a tattoo gone seriously awry – from one stomach-churner to the next. “It’s awful, a serious infection.” It certainly is. Patches of coloured ink are pooled with yellow-green pus, the actual illustration all but obscured by the infection. Poor technique or bad hygiene? “Both,” he says exasperated.
Kyle, 45, is a tattooist and the owner of Brighton’s Magnum Opus Tattoo, the lauded shop he opened in 2007 and where he works with five other artists. It’s a large open-plan space – light, airy and meticulously clean, the walls covered in retro tattoo prints, skateboard decks, punk rock posters, and paintings.
His private workspace is a tiny room set off the shop floor. A red steel sideboard stands next to an adjustable leather chair; tiny pots of black ink, pairs of black latex gloves, bottles of saline and a couple of expensive-looking tattoo machines are neatly arranged on top. One wall and most of the ceiling are covered in line illustrations on scraps of paper – designs Kyle has created and tattooed over the years. There are hundreds of them, three layers deep, each more intricate and lurid than the last: ships and owls, scenes from Greek and Roman history, runic symbols, a putrefying Christ. Most perplexing is a 20cm-wide illustration of Leonard Nimoy employing a Vulcan death grip over the legend “MAMA SAID… SPOCK YOU OUT”.
Stocky and heavily inked, Kyle appears every bit the old-school tattoo enthusiast. Raised in Edgewood, Maryland, he became obsessed with tattoos as a child after seeing the designs covering the arms of an English neighbour – “Daggers and snakes and skulls and things – proper tattoo flash from back in the 1960s.” Being only six, he embraced the next best thing: “I got hooked on the old lick and stick tattoos and covered myself with those,” he laughs. He began drawing seriously a few years later, inspired by the punk and skate artwork he found in Thrasher magazine, and got his first tattoo aged 15.
It wasn’t until he was 21, after three years spent persuading a local shop to take him on, that he was employed on what he describes as a “very hardcore apprenticeship” – a mix of keen observation and intense training in studio hygiene that saw a year pass before he was allowed to touch a client. “The first guy I did was covered in homemade tattoos, so anything I did couldn’t be worse than that!” Kyle says. The next 15 years saw him working conventions, doing guest spots and holding studio residencies across the US and Europe, before finally setting up shop in Brighton.
Those formative years instilled a discipline and a reverence for the job, and Kyle believes every aspiring tattoo artist should undergo this kind of training. It’s certainly what he would expect of anyone approaching his shop for work. There are no formal qualifications: dogged persistence, humility, a proclivity for hard work and genuine artistic talent are requisite, but patience is also essential. “It’d be a year before they could even touch one of those machines, aside from cleaning it,” he says. “It shows how motivated you are if you stick it out.”
Good tattoos do not come cheap, but the idea of a regular wage varies hugely. An hourly rate of around £100 an hour is normal for work of this level, though Kyle takes a small cut from his five resident artists to cover rent and bills. He’ll happily take tiny jobs as bread-and-butter work, but designs as intricate as those on his walls take much longer. “This would be about three hours, plus a couple on the drawing,” he says pointing to a saucer-sized image of a flaming knight above three hellhounds. “But a back piece could be a couple of grand.”
Eventually, an artist with a good reputation could earn six figures a year if they put in the hours across shop and convention work. As an apprentice you could expect to earn around 30% of the cost of each tattoo as a training wage.
The work is relentless, though this intensity is born of passion for the job as much as practical necessity. A typical day sees Kyle running errands and dealing with paperwork before opening around midday, holding consultations and tattooing clients until 6pm or 7 pm – and then working on designs late into the night. Inevitably, it’s a role that transcends being just a job. “When you’re in, it’s your life. You don’t clock out,” he says.
It’s this dedication and reverence for the craft that has made Kyle such a respected name, as well as a superlative artist. The learning, he says, never stops. “Every time you do a tattoo you try and make it your best,” he says. “Magnum Opus is Latin for ‘masterpiece’. It’s about constantly trying to up one on yourself.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion