In its January 1990 issue, Thrasher magazine kicked off the decade with a special section called “Stained Skin.” In this package of reported articles and personal essays, the magazine explored the growing trend of skateboarders joining “bikers and rockers” in leading “the ranks of the illustrated” by getting tattoos at a time when it was still illegal in many parts of the country. Over three decades later, the worlds of skateboarding and tattooing have only become more intertwined. It’s not uncommon for touring skate teams to have a tattoo machine in the van, and skateboarders like Braydon Szafranski, Chris Senn, Richard Kerby, and others are taking on second careers as tattoo artists.
Ben McQueen, a tattoo artist at Idle Hands in San Francisco who has been tattooing for about 15 years and skateboarding since he was 11, set out to find just why these two cultures have been so intrinsically entwined for his new book, Let It Kill You. McQueen traveled around the country and to the skateboarding mecca of Barcelona, interviewing other skaters/tattoo artists such as Jamie Thomas, Eric Dressen, and Tyler Bledsoe. GQ caught up with McQueen to learn why so many people share his two passions.
Let’s start with the obvious, perhaps hardest, question: Why are there so many parallels between tattooing and skating?
It’s really tough to nail down, but I think that there’s this unspoken bond between skateboarders and tattooers. When a tattooer meets another tattooer, or a skateboarder meets another skateboarder, you can bypass all the small talk, the get-to-know-you stuff. You can just dive right in and cut out all that extra fat. As a younger kid I didn’t feel like I had any sort of community until I found skateboarding, which really gave me a purpose. I didn’t feel that same thing again until I found tattooing…. The parallels also extend to just how we exist in the world, day to day. We can’t turn that part of our brains off. We’re always looking for skate spots; we’re always looking for references for tattoos. We’re just constantly on all the time. It can get in the way of having strong relationships with people, too. I think deep down we’re fairly selfish people. We love what we love and sometimes it’s hard to articulate exactly what that means and how it feels to people who don’t do it.
Tattooing used to be a fringe thing, but now there are shops all over the place. Is there any tension between the old and new guards?
Yeah, absolutely. We’re at a point now in society where we’re accepting of everything, which is great. But tattooing was so rough around the edges for so long, [so] when young art-school students started getting into tattooing, these older tattooers were beside themselves because it was the first time they felt threatened. People were getting really good really fast, you know? And it’s the same with skateboarding. This access to information that exists now, where someone can upload a trick to Instagram 30 seconds after they’ve filmed it, or post their process on how they’re drawing an eagle for a tattoo, people can just plagiarize that. People like Chad Koeplinger or others in the book, they’ve worked their entire careers to be able to do what they do now, and it feels like younger people are cutting in line. It’s neat that that can exist and tattooing is so well received at this point that there’s a place for it, but it can still sting. That would be, in my opinion, the biggest thing—young tattooers opening private studios and taking money out of these long-term street shops’ pockets.
Jonathan Smith
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