Who gets tattooed and who doesn't? 

'I've met my best friends through tattooing. I've met some wonderful people through tattooing. My regular customers are eighteen year-old lads to people in their late fifties. I get people coming in every week for six months to a year and then I don't see them for one or two years and then they appear again, you know, it's something that comes and goes, there's no regular type of person.

Tattooing is like a drug. Once you've had it, you know - what I hear all the time is "I only want the one, it's all I ever want" and no one's ever walked in my studio and had one tattoo, ever. Once you've had that feeling, you want to have it again. I don't care what anyone says.

The whole concept of it, the thinking of having it done, the anticipation of having it done, the nerves, the actual having it done, which is uncomfortable, then the finished job - the exhilaration that you've done it, you've actually done this thing, and then if it's a good tattoo and you're looking at this piece on your body. People leave the studio a different person, they leave happy.

When I hear people knocking tattoos it upsets me to a level that they're not thinking about. We don't mind people not liking tattoos. I don't care if you like tattoos or not. If you don't like them you don't like them, you know, but I don't think people are really thinking about what they're saying.

There's always someone's got to come up to you and say "I don't like them myself" - well, there's several answers I can give depending on my mood, you know. I don't walk up to someone who I don't like the look of and say "I don't like your hair myself but...". That is rude, that is ignorant.

Tattoos have been with us forever. As long as mankind's been here he's been decorating his cave walls and himself. It's always been here.

This attitude that seems to have grown up over the last half a century about tattoos being bad, I don't know where it comes from, I don't know.'

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