Tattoo Artist Magazine - The Quarterly Trade Journal for the Professional Tattooer

Craig Driscoll
by AS.

AS: So you did a weird maneuver; you left your own tattoo shop in Ottawa and went to work for a tattoo shop in a shopping mall in Edmonton. What was that all about?

CD: Yeah, this shop in a mall in Edmonton approached me about doing a guest spot. They wanted me to work with their artists to improve their work. I went out and met everyone who worked there. Their shop seemed to have a lot of things going for it.

AS: It's a beautiful shop from the pictures I've seen.

CD: It is a beautiful shop that has a lot of things going for it but it also had a lot of things going against it. The owner isn't tattooed and doesn't do tattoos. He doesn't have any love for tattooing. So for him, not knowing much about the industry, it's hard to set up a shop that's going to be good for the industry. He's in one of the busiest malls in the world so they have ample opportunity to do some great work because there's constantly people coming in wanting to get tattooed but regretfully, they're misspending money and making management decisions that are a little bit backwards.

AS: So you got hired on as a business consultant to help turn their problems around?

CD: I think I got hired on more as a teacher because they have a really bad reputation in the industry because of being way more concerned with money than the quality of work they're producing. I think they base a lot of their work on tourism, like they're not going to see (their customers) again so they don't really care what the work looks like.

AS: Do you think that the owner and the management were conscious about this so they hired you to try and turn this around?

CD: When they hired me that was what their intentions were; they wanted to turn things around and do things correctly. The owner being a non-tattooer and not having any tattoos and the manager being a body piercer without any piercings, they really didn't have any insight in to what was the right way to do things. I think they felt that I could come and help them with that.

For the complete Craig Driscoll article from Issue #5,
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