This Article first appeared in September 2006 edition of ‘Total Tattoo’
RICHARD PINCH
Exclusive interview
I have lost count of the number of times world-renowned tattooists have said to me “when are you going to interview Richard Pinch?” Over the years this intriguing tattooist has built up a world wide circle of friends within the tattoo scene, who certainly hold him in high regard. Despite this, Richard remains relatively unknown and is something of a low key, even mysterious figure. He freely admits that he likes the fact he can wander round conventions ‘incognito’, with few people knowing who he is. A case in point was this years Aberdeen convention. It might be Richard’s home town but many there didn’t have a clue who he was, despite him virtually sweeping the board in the competitions. “I guess that might change after my face appears in this magazine!” he told me.
Originally from Derbyshire, Richard has been based in Aberdeen, Scotland for the best part of 20 years, he sees the city as his home now, having a well-established
Studio there along with a Scottish wife (Joanne, daughter of legendary tattooist Terry Wrigley) and a small daughter. I was intrigued as to how he came to live so far from where he grew up. “I was working in a tattoo shop in Sheffield,” he told me. “A guy came in one day who had a studio in Aberdeen but his interest in tattooing had faded and he wanted to pass the shop onto someone else. My boss sent me up here to work the shop and send the money back to him, which I thought was a novel idea! I was 17 and I hated it here. I went back to Sheffield after only a short time, ready to say ‘Don’t ever send me back there again’. However, my boss had already filled my place so that was that. I worked in various places for a while and then the guy in Aberdeen got back in touch with me and said did I want to take the shop on myself. For some reason I did, so back I came, aged about 19, to run my own shop. I had so little money I slept on the floor of the shop for quite a while. It was a bit grim.”
Deep down I think Richard has a great affection for his adopted home city, even though it is disguised beneath his dry sense of humour at times. He mused on the path that had brought him here. “I don’t really believe in fate. The path you take is the path you take, but I do wonder how things could have been different. My path happens to have been twenty years in dismal, rain-sodden Aberdeen simply because I was sitting in that studio in Sheffield when the guy came in to sell his studio up here. Why couldn’t someone from California have come in instead?”
Quite where Richard’s love of tattoos comes from is a bit of a mystery to him. There were none in his family. “It was just what lads did,” he told me. “I was 16 or so when I got my first one. They weren’t so strict with the age thing back then. If your shop was a bit quite back in the mid 80s, you tattooed anyone who came in. The AIDS thing was hitting and no one knew how it would affect the trade you see.”
At first, Richard no want or desire to become a tattooist. He was mechanically minded, however, and a friend asked him to make a tattoo machine, which he did, using his dad’s lathe. “It was rubbish but it made the right noise. I didn’t know any better then” he laughs now. For some reason, it was Richard who made more use of the machine, rather than his friend. “Perhaps I wanted to try out the machine because it was something I had made myself. Anyway, that was it, I was off!”
At school Richard excelled at art, metal work and technical drawing – a recipe for a tattooist, if ever I heard one. Perhaps teachers have little or no imagination when it comes to careers because Richard was told to become a draughtsman. That didn’t appeal and when a local tattooist saw some of his tattoos, his future career path was decided. “I didn’t know if it was right place, right time or wrong place, right time but the tattooist saw some work I had done on a guy, looking back, it was appalling work but it did the trick. I went in there on the Monday and started work on the Tuesday. That’s just how it was back then in those days. I wasn’t an apprentice. It was just ‘There’s the chair, there’s the machines, now work!’ Oh my god, it was crazy. A real baptism of fire. Sink or swim.” And Richard swam, albeit with “an awful lot of doggy paddling and gasping for air!”
The mid-80s was a pivotal point in history. The Dunstable conventions were getting going and Richard’s contemporaries included such influential names as Lal Hardy, Louis Molloy and Darren Stares. Richard recalls “There was some great work being done at that time. My bible was the first skin shows book by Chris Wroblewski. There was so little material around about tattooing – people who have grown up with as many tattoo magazines as there are now have no idea. We hunted around for anything we could find. If anyone gave you even a tiny hint of information it felt like you had been given the holy scriptures! I remember years ago seeing Ed Hardy’s work in the first skin shows book – a tiger ripping out of the skin, a bear on a guy’s ribs – and I thought ‘Bloody hell!’ Seeing this stuff was like gold dust. I knew it was the way forward – tigers that looked like tigers, roses that looked like roses instead of cabbages!”
“Now it is a lot easier for people to find information or see lots of varied tattoo work, with the magazines and the internet, which has really opened the flood gates. The world has shrunk too, with cheap flights meaning you can pop to Europe to a convention or visit a particular tattooist. If someone had told me ten years ago that I would be popping over to get tattooed by Filip Leu every few weeks, I would have said they were mad! Who knows what all this will do to the environment but we’ll all be dead by then anyway at least I can take my tattoos with me when I go!”
With the benefit of hindsight, one can see the immense changes that have gone on in the profession, changes that those within perhaps barely noticed whilst they were happening. “The work has moved on so much. I look back at stuff I and other people did back then and it’s laughable. Some of it holds up today but not much of it. But that is not to take anything away from the artists at the time. That was what you did, that was how tattoos looked and there were only a few people – Ed Hardy and so on – who were helping move it forward.”
How much more forward development can there be from where we are now, I asked Richard. “Well, I don’t consider myself anything special. I just consider myself a street shop tattooist. What I do should be the industry standard – should be,” Richard emphasises. “That’s the development that needs to happen. Personally, I am pleased with some of what I do but a lot of it makes me cringe! I’m always looking for ways to make pieces better or push my work forward. If you get to the point where you don’t do that, you’re in trouble.”
There is a fine line to be walked in the tattoo profession between confidence – an essential requirement – and arrogance, which is far from desirable. Richard sees the dichotomy: “To be a tattooist you must be a people person. You’ve got to be able to talk to people on all levels, from an 18 year old who is nearly passing out with fear to a 70 year old who lived through the war. Having said that, I have had to deal with all manner of things in this shop – it is a street shop on the harbour front of a port. You can imagine what we have had coming through the door and sometimes I’ve had to pout on a bit of a front. I’ve done my fair share of barking or certainly a bit of growling in my time.”
“I think it’s important that you don’t become arrogant though. Some of the egos in this business are unbelievable. A lot of that comes from people who are not comfortable with where they are. It’s ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ the whole time. Who cares about that sort of attention? I certainly don’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice when people look at your work and appreciate it, but I don’t go chasing the limelight as some do.”
Richard’s name may appear on an awful lot of winners’ lists, including the prestigious London show last year, but he is picky about which conventions he actually attends. “If I go to a show, I want to be blown away by the work there. I want to be knocked back it, to come home thinking ‘For fuck sake, I thought I was doing alright until I saw so-and-so’s work!’ Then you can try and get to that next level. And then you go to the next show thinking ‘Yes, I’m now doing OK’ only to find that someone else has gone to yet another level! That’s what drives the profession forward.”
Associating with many of the worlds top tattooists, as Richard does (“I don’t want to name any names in the magazine because that’s not my style”) has doubtless raised his game considerably. “How can you not absorb knowledge from these guys? I’m not saying I have deliberately approached them to bleed them dry of information, but just by watching them work, looking at the tattoos they put on, you can’t help but pick things up. And I like to think I have given things back to then too. Some tattooists just stay in their little world in the studio and never look beyond those four walls. And I’m sure that’s fine for some people. It really depends on how far you want to cast your net and who you get caught up in the net with.”
Much of the tattooing Richard produces these days is large scale, Japanese inspired work. “I guess it has always been in me to go in that direction,” he said. “It just took me a while to find the path towards it. I like my customers to have a bit of vision. If someone wants a sleeve, I hope they tell me right from the start because there is nothing worse than someone with a few bits and bobs here and there saying ‘Now can you fill in all these gaps?’ Well, why didn’t you say you wanted a sleeve at the beginning? You know, three things make a good tattoo – size, placement and flow. It’s not rocket science, but it is beyond some people to place a tattoo satisfactorily on the body. They just plop things any old where.”
The term ‘ old head on young shoulders’ is one that springs to mind when talking to Richard Pinch. He may still be just the right side of 40 but he has many opinions that can only be described as ‘old school’. “Remember when every tattoo shop had a sign up saying ‘We don’t tattoo hands, necks and faces’? Well, I still don’t. The boundaries have changed and the shock value has gone to some extent but I still don’t want to do it. I don’t want to make someone unemployable and I believe that public skin tattoos do exactly that. I remember when I first saw young girls - in their 20s – at conventions in the States with great big tattoos on their necks and chests. I t was shocking then and I still find it so now.”
With typical self-depreciation, Richard tells me he is only just beginning to tattoo in a way that he is happy with. “I’m still feeling my way. I have been doing large scale work for only a few years and I’ve got so much still to learn. The good thing is the more you do backs and sleeves and so on, the more your customers ask for it. They see work on other clients and your reputation grows. Also, because I wear large scale work myself now, I can show customers examples of what I am talking about on my own body. They often say ‘I want a flower like you have’ or I can ask ‘Do you the shading like this?’ You can’t force people into making decisions they are not happy with but a tattooist can ask the right questions to make sure customers get a tattoo they will love for the rest of their life. When they are old, their tattoo may be blurry and blobby – that’s unavoidable – but, if you get the placement and size right, and the lines and shading are good, the tattoo will still look right. All I want to do is create tattoos that look right. But you must never do the perfect tattoo, even if such a thing were possible. Once you have reached perfection you have nothing to aim for.”
Richard’s Tattoo Studio runs with a small crew at present however possible expansion plans are afoot. “As I get busier with large custom work, I hope to extend the shop to have more work stations. We’ll then be more set up to have guest artists and probably take on another full time tattooist. Actually, I’d like to hear from anyone who might be interested.”
Like many tattooist who are aiming for a high standard of work, Richard gets frustrated by some people who settle for mediocre – or worse – tattooing. “Some of the shit people have on them amazes me. You can look at it like this: If what you see on the skin was on paper, would you still be impressed? Would you buy it and hang it on your wall? If the answer is no, walk away.”