Aloha friends!
Welcome back for another installment of the story of my apprenticeship!
I was working in a shop in Waikiki a few minutes away from my apartment and I had tracked dog shit in on my first day of working at the shop. There were some things about the area itself and about the shop mechanics that were red flags for me personally but I stayed there for a little while and committed to 5 years of working there after my apprenticeship was up.
I still had my tattoo with Trevor at the Collective scheduled in a couple of weeks (he's the artist from Part 1 that declined the apprenticeship but still offered his guidance) but I would continue showing up at the Waikiki shop and doing my best to learn from what I was being shown. It was an overwhelming amount of information and I felt like I had just walked into another dimension.
The week of my tattoo with Trevor I spoke with my then girlfriend if she thought it was a good idea for me to be potentially spending almost $1000 on a new tattoo when we were still unemployed and making ends meet on unemployment for an uncertain amount of time. I'll never forget that she asked me if I was doing it just for the tattoo or as an opportunity to change my life and pursue a new career. I answered the latter. She did not hesitate to tell me to go and get it then. Now she is my wife.
The date of my tattoo with Trevor arrived so I went to the Collective in Kailua to get it done. When I parked, a sticker from my buddy Drew, (mentioned in Part 1 ) was on the parking meter in the stall I parked in; a little weird synchronicity for me to see on my path?
Trevor was very easy to talk to and had a gentle soul. The time we spent together went by quick despite the fact that he was packing a significant amount of ink into my skin. I picked Trevor as my artist because I love his bold and bright style, so he definitely got it in there. Almost 3 years later it is still just as rich in its color, a testament to his skill and the longevity of his tattoos.
I learned during our conversation that he had moved to the island earlier that year (2020) literally right before COVID shut everything down. I also learned that his apprentice (also mentioned in Part 1) hadn't worked out because it was his girlfriend and they broke up. So there was a possible opening as his apprentice BUT I was already committed to the spot I had just recently started at.
I decided (against all CDC recommendations) to invite him to come out to a Halloween Party some close friends and I would be having in Waikiki; not JUST because of the apprentice opportunity, but he seemed cool and also like he didn't have many friends since his short stay. He ended up coming out in something that totally suited him...it was grotesque and also incredibly convenient yet also inconvenient for him lol. I don't mean that he was grotesque, but he certainly enjoyed the more macabre things. He also stepped on his own toes in some ways that are more obvious in hindsight and his death makes a little more sense now.
His costume was just his normal clothes, but he had purchased the prosthetic face piece that looked like his eyeball was bulging out of his head. So he was comfy in every other aspect except that he had plastic glued over his eye that he could barely see through rendering him almost half-blind all night. SMH.
I don't have any pics of him from that night unfortunately, but here are my wife and I dressed as Cheech and Chong from that party.
Anyways we had a good time and he mentioned it was a bummer that I had already taken the apprenticeship at the nearby shop and that he could probably get me into the Collective. He also mentioned that he'd like to get his current living space set up to be able to host. Trevor had an outdoor space / back yard that needed some love and so he invited me over to give him some feedback on what could be done to spice it up.
I went over shortly after to his small 2 bedroom 1 bath house in a small housing development neighboring a taro farm in Kahalu'u. It was a cozy little bachelor bad that screamed single tattoo artist. His art desk littered with colored pencils and velum paper, art books everywhere, a private tattoo studio room, beautiful paintings and knick knacks littered the walls.
We chatted briefly before I mentioned that I had some reservations about the shop I had chosen. He told me I should bail and that he'd call the shop owner of the Collective right then. So I paced around outside and thru his house while he called her up quickly. I had forgotten that I had left quite an impression during my tattoo with Trevor by letting the whole shop know that I had gotten my sac and crack waxed before. So when Trevor asked if he could bring me into the shop, Lisa, the owner, asked "are you talking about the ass wax guy?!" and Trevor said, "yeeeahhh...". I'll be forever grateful for his speaking up on my behalf to get me into that shop because I am where I am now because of it.
Trevor told me a good day to come by the shop to meet Lisa and so the interview was set. I showed up and Lisa asked my goals, what my preferred styles were, as well as reviewed some designs I had brought with me thanks to Trevor's guidance. We talked about timelines and other things about their expectations for the shop before she began walking me around the shop and showing me how everything worked and where all of the supplies and such were. That seemed to be my indication that I was in at this new shop.
The one small issue was that I had already committed to another shop at the penalty of $500 if I went somewhere else within a distance from it. I spoke with the owner and told him I was sorry but there was an opportunity I couldn't pass up and if he could let me off the hook since I had only been at his shop less than 2 weeks and hadn't gotten enough knowledge / information to have really "stolen" anything. He agreed to shred the contract for $100 which was worth it to me.
Lisa said that I could start whenever and I decided my first day would be November 15th, 2020 since we were camping that weekend and I would need time to recover.
I spend a lot of time for the next month drawing everything they assigned. I traced Polynesian Traditional, drew Japanese dragons, colored pencil realism roses, skeleton mermaids, lots of skulls.
The apprenticeship hit a bit of a hiccup right around the winter solstice and I was caught day drinking through a few days that I was supposed to be at the shop and had "called in sick".
That's a wonderful place to leave off until next time where I'll spill the tea on my workplace drama and I actually start tattooing!
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for Part 3!