The last time I got a tattoo, it was a little, innocuous "C"on my left wrist. That same day I also broke my iPod earbuds, and bought my sister a huge, pricey bottle of
Veuve Clicquot to celebrate her promotion. Also, it rained. Going home on a packed Dufferin bus wearing a ludicrous, borrowed, children's raincoat, I accidentally dropped the splurgey Champagne on the downhill sloping bus floor and chased after it shouting "Shit! Shit!", which I couldn't hear for the giant, alien-esque studio headphones I was using as earbud backup blasting whatever at an unreasonable volume, all the while sporting the mandatory post-tattoo white gauze bandage around my wrist. Not so innocuous.
Never one to really learn a life lesson on the first go-round, I forgot to wear long-sleeves to get my other wrist tattooed last weekend, and was in for a similar, if less overtly tragic, bus ride home. Once again, I was inked by Chino, a much-travelled, much-lived, well-read tattoo artist who now works at
Imperial Tattoo. The shop, a minimal, friendly space on the third floor of a building on Ossington just north of Queen St. West, was opened early this year by
Ronan Gibney after King of Fools on Yonge St., where both he and Chino were stationed, was shut down.
Imperial Tattoo is a custom tattoo joint, which Gibney differentiates from a walk-in style street shop. "People getting tattooed at street shops are more into, generally speaking, smaller pieces. They walk in, they want to get something done that day, the shop is set up such that customers can be accommodated that way. A custom shop would be more [done] by appointment; you have a consultation; you do a drawing."
Gibney, (nicknamed "
Badger" by Chino for his semi-wild, gray-streaked hairstyle), started out drawing comics for fun, like most of the tattoo population that swings nerdy. He started out at
Way Cool Tattoos' Uptown location in North York, and says"You basically have to just decide to do it; you get in through people you know." His own first attempt at tattooing was "a peace symbol with rainbow colours throughout it. And was there fire around it? I think there was fire around it." Gibney sports an expected amount of ink for a tattoo artist (a lot). "The last person I got tattooed by was Rob, the manager here. He just did a funny little dollar sign on my ankle." I ask Gibney how that worked out. "Poorly", he says, and reveals a hella squiggly, Junior Kindergarten-esque effort on his leg. (My friend's cool girlfriend also did this,
a bee instead of a dollar sign, and fared infinitely better).
Gibney now has a months-long waiting list of clients (I'm booked in February [February!!!] for a consultation, despite having a few decent "ins"). His specialities include wings ("I just like drawing them") and "Anything that's illustrative and comic booky. I like to do a lot of religiousy, archangely kind of stuff. I've tried to learn to do a lot of different things, not just one kind of style."
I interview Ronan in a back room with a massage-style table between us. When Chino's fart machine isn't randomly going off and sullying my recording (I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the dude I trust to perma-draw on my pale Irish skin carries the fart machine remote on his key chain), Gibney tells me the table is for tricky bits like the backs of arms, where he'd want the client to lie flat and hold still. Since I don't, for the first time, have a friend around to hand-hold me through the tattoo process, I'm unusually interested in the pain factor, and ask Ronan what kind of work hurts the most. "I would say, probably your stomach or ribs or anywhere you're ticklish. Anywhere your body is protecting your vital organs. But then again it's different for everybody... it's completely individual." I need to know if women or men are braver about it, just because. Gibney says "I think it's totally individual, I think men and women complain about pain differently. Pain is one of those things where it's kind of impossible to quantify."
The human element of tattooing (this is, after all, just flesh, flesh that will eventually fade and rot and decay on your bones, your sweet Misfits tribute lost to the soft earth) is something that's maybe lost in the process, especially after one is much-tattooed or has much tattooed. Gibney says "You forget that, that you're working on humans sometimes. If you've done it for a while, when you're doing the tattoos, that's not the artistic part, that's the craft side, and you forget sometimes that these are humans, and you hurt them. Every time someone squirms you kind of realize. I feel bad, hurting people sometimes, because I just imagine what it would feel like to me."
The stigma of tattoos and the tattoo industry has significantly and obviously diminished of late. Gibney characterizes the growing popularity of tattooing, which includes the highly visible and large-scale stuff, as partly due to the acceptance that comes with a critical mass, and partly due to that old harbinger of mainstream culture, TV. "I maybe evolved at the same time that the industry exploded. It just keeps getting busier and busier and people want more and more [work done]. A lot of people that are getting first-time tattooed, they'll go for a full sleeve or they'll go for a back piece... It's more acceptable to be tattooed, the bar keeps getting raised, it's harder to, not shock people, but to have something impressive. The reality shows on TV like Miami Ink, Inked, L.A. Ink... Just before those shows came out, I couldn't have expected that the industry could be any busier. It just exploded, even more."
Gibney goes on, saying "It's also because tattooing is quote-unquote addictive. Those people that have a lot of visible stuff started getting tattooed, say, in the early '90s; that's just an evolution of that. People just start running out of room to have stuff, so stuff keeps going down onto your arms." Gibney adds "Toronto is a really tattoo-friendly city. There's a lot of shops."
A guy who helped renovate the Imperial Tattoo shop in exchange for a Ronan Gibney half-sleeve runs into the back room and tosses a business card on the table, telling Gibney that the lead singer of a certain hugely popular teen-punk band needs his sleeve fixed. Ronan glances at the card and says "OK... I hope he can wait 'til the new year."