Slinging Ink

Some might still remember -- once there was a time where computer people could make boatloads of money by just looking smart and by talking well below the signal-noise ratio. Those golden days were known as the dot com boom.

At that time I had freelanced for a couple of years in the IT sector and was both getting pretty annoyed by the mindless buzz everyone was spewing and attracted to all the money everyone seemed wanting to get rid of. While I continued to do freelance IT jobs to make a living, I decided it was time to cut back the bullshitting a little and try out something not computer related.

As I'm quite good with graphics (hopefully you can sense a glimpse of that when looking at this site) and always had a considerable interest in tattoos (carrying quite a lot of them myself) I decided to become a professional tattoo artist. This was not an easy decision to take, but I had taken quite a bit of practice with a friendly tattoo artist for the past years just out of curiosity and interest and I was getting pretty good at it.

To cut a long story short, for a few years I co-ran a tattoo studio. Bet you hadn't expected that.

Far below you can see some tattoos I've done. As you probably see I never was the worlds greatest tattoo artist. Nevertheless I did some solid work, had serious fun and in general just a great time.

In 2001, however, the novelty wore off a little bit. Coincidentally the dot-com hype starting becoming sour at about the same time. With the startups going bust left and right I decided that it'd be the right time to simply go back to business-as-usual and trying to get a normal job. And actually I found a pretty good one, developing Voice over IP protocol stacks for TE-SYSTEMS.

Some Old Samples

The pictures shown below are from the 1996/1997 timeframe, when I still was far away from being a real pro. At present I dont't have pictures from my (short, mind you) professional career available, as most of them are still glued to display frames, rotting away down in the cellar. Perhaps I'll find some time to scan a few of them later on.