From Yesterday To Today — Episode 1 — Family Tradition

Nobody handed these guys a career. You came up in this trade by earning it. You swept the shop, you made needles, you watched, and you kept your mouth shut until somebody decided you were ready to put your hands on a machine. That's how Skotty and Justin learned it, and it's a long way from where tattooing sits today. Episode 1 gets into where it started for them. Who they came up under. What a shop actually was back then, flash on the wall, walk-ins off the street, and work that had to hold up for forty years because bold will hold. They talk about everything the trade used to ask of a person before it let them in, and how little of that it bothers asking now that anyone can order a kit and call themselves a tattooer. They also get into the fight that started Family Tradition in the first place, keeping tattooing in the hands of tattooers. For a long time this trade took care of its own. Now there are corporations circling it, pushing cheap product and cheap tactics, undercutting the shops and trying to strip the craft down to a margin. Skotty and Justin have watched it happen from the floor, and they talk straight about what it costs the people who actually do the work. They're not bitter about it, just honest. Some of what changed made the work better. Some of it they'll never get behind. Either way, this is where Family Tradition started, and these are the two who lived it. www.familytraditionsupply.com Shot by Iron Studios www.ironstudiocreative.com