Big smiles and butterflies...

I've been tattooing a lot of butterflies again... and I like it. I don't know why they're the hot tattoo again right now. They've never gone down in popularity at walk in shops but I haven't done one in forever and I've recently done a pretty impressive handful. No, it's not the same thrill I get from doing one of my experimental, Stream of Consciousness tattoos or finishing a sleeve or a backpiece but it's cool. I haven't done small tattoos like these for a long time. They're like candy. They're small and quick to complete and have a pretty little package that you can cram all kinds of bright and happy color into and they make the people that wear them smile. It's a different kind of smile than you get out of someone with a Satanic, bio-mech landscape on their back. It's an innocent smile. A pure, childlike, soft kind of thing. They're not always tiny of course, my wife has a butterfly on her leg that took three sessions to complete. Of course those sessions were spread out over several years because she doesn't like to bother me to tattoo her after I've been tattooing customers all day.

I received a couple sweet and happy little tattoos the other day. There's a bit of a backstory. I had a regular client cancel his sleeve appointment on Friday at the very last second which left me with a nice chunk of time to fill at the end of the night. My wife, who often comes to the studio to help with paperwork and general management of the business brought my 4 year old daughter, Presley Jayne (P.J.), to work with her. Presley is a big fan of tattooing and has sat with me and watched me tattoo many regular clients, friends and family members. While tattooing my mother a couple weeks ago, I let Presley draw on her grandma with Sharpie markers while I worked on an ongoing fairy piece my mom has going on her thigh. Presley was the proudest little girl ever when grandma decided to get PJ's initial's tattooed on her foot. Presley had drawn the initials on her foot, off to one side, kinda crooked and very cute so mom decided we should commit the masterpiece to permanence and we did. Anyway, Friday Presley and Michelle and I were having a great time in the studio and Presley was having a lot of fun greeting my customers and letting them know that she could do "whatever she wanted" because she was in "her daddy's workshop". When everyone was gone for the day and my last appointment had cancelled, I offered to tattoo my wife and finish her butterfly that had been unfinished for so many years. She accepted the offer and I got to work on the insect. While I tattooed my wife, my daughter drew on my wife and on herself with Sharpies and pretended to answer the phone, "Presley Jayne Wells, CUS-TOM Tattooing". When I had finished my wife's tattoo, I asked Presley if she wanted to tattoo daddy. "For real?" she asked. "Of course" I said. She was ecstatic. I set up a liner needle grouping and tube in my Godoy Brothers' machine and poured some red ink that I wanted to try out and I dipped the liner into the ink and placed it in her hand. I helped her position her hand comfortably on the tube and the machine looked huge in her little hand. She was excited but dead serious because she understands that "real" tattoos are on there forever. Mommy nervously warned P.J. to be sure to not touch the needle coming out of the end of the tube because it would hurt her and leave a permanent mark on her. Presley carefully positioned her self above my left, inner calf and drove the needle into my leg up to the hilt. I set up very straight and reached down and stopped her hand. "That was a little too quick and hard" I said, "let's go a little more slowly and take our time to make it pretty". Presley then took her time to ink a wobbly little smiley face on the inside of her dad's leg. When she was finished she was beyond excited and still hasn't stopped asking to look at her masterwork. My wife, never one to be left out of a good time, picked up the machine and tattooed a tiny heart with a "P" for Presley in the middle in a spot near Presley's smiley face. We left the studio with great big smiles on our face and went home for a rare Friday night family meal.

In other Wells household news, we've been in the midst of a massive room swap and cleaning adventure. We live in a small, single story, 3 bedroom home with a living room, family room, combined kitchen and dining room and 1 bath and we are busting at the seams. My collections of absurdities and P.J.'s never ending influx of toys has the Wells Family house at maximum capacity. One of the three bedrooms has been used as my office, art and music studio and storage for all my weird shit. One room is the parental sleeping quarters and the smallest room was P.J.'s nursery. Presley's little room recently reached it's limit and her stuff was starting to leave little "room" in the room so we decided to move Presley to the larger bedroom being used as my office. My office was to be moved into Presley's little room. I thought it would all fit albeit a little snug. I was wrong. After moving the contents of Presley's room to the living room or "front parlor" as we like to call it, I started moving the contents of my office into the little bedroom. Three quarters of the way through the ordeal, my stuff overflowed the little room and started accumulating in the front parlor and family room and kitchen and back porch and shed. I started the whole process at Noon and finally "finished" for the day at 11pm. It would take us several more days and we would have to sacrifice our larger family room to become my new office and my wife Michelle would gain something she never had imagined that she would want or need, a sewing room and office for Mommy. Of course, my stuff has a a way of being omnipresent so she has to share her sewing room with my record collection and half of my guitar collection.

I am still in the process of arranging and organizing my new home office and I'm finding treasures I forgot I had. For your enjoyment in the coming weeks I'm going to share some of the items and stories I'm uncovering including some old issues of International Tattoo Art dating back to the magazine's first year. I'm going to try to start pulling together some video and audio files to share as well as pictures and words. Here are a few pics from the beginning of the big room swap. I started taking these pics after the swap was already underway so you don't really get the see the old office 100% as it was. I'll try to find some pics of it so I can do a before and after later...

Under this window was where a giant homemade work surface made out of closet doors and milk crates used to live. The window and curtains above served as a super crappy but handy dandy way to show off some of my collection. Here we have an Iron Maiden banner, Anthrax backpatch, a dozen or so buttons, a towel covered in fake blood from Samhain's reunion signed by Steve Zing and assorted Spider-Man paraphernalia on top of the curtain rod.

Here you can partially see my drawing table and storage shelf with one of my first screen prints, a poster for Heavy Rebel Weekender, tacked up, a Misfits and a Motley Crue poster and assorted crap on the floor.

Another view of my drawing table with one of the first Rok En Rol skate decks given to me by my previous boss Brian Brenner and a singing Frankie in the foreground.

Pawn shop guitars and trash.

A closet full of stuff. The orange boxes that all match are NSync marionettes given to me by my former manager, Bradley Darrell.

P.J. made me leave up all the Frankie posters for her. They're mostly Electric Frankenstein posters by other artists. I've done a shitload of posters for those guys but I feel weird hanging my own shit up. There's also a poster of flash by MikeBelzel in the upper left corner of the page that I love. Pentagram necklace on the doorknob.

Better shot of the window. Notice the "Funeral" flag, procured from a funeral procession up there as well.

Awesome little sign my Uncle Randy made in the early 70's about how comic book artists need to learn to draw the "peace sign" properly so as not to be labeled as a "warmonger honky pig".

Starting to fill the little room. I did all that sweet nursery painting in there.

A BC RIch Warlock I'm painting for my client Wil.

Vinyl. Mostly 70's. Insane collection of rare Zeppelin bootlegs, KISS rarities and everything else from AC/DC to Zappa.

More rare vinyl and my prized 78 rpm records. That Roy Rogers on top has been with me since birth and originally came out in 1949.

Little amp on a stack of big amp.

My Spice Girls dolls. Unopened. Hell yeah.

A very tired Rev after a long day's work next to a painting by Little Billy Catfish of Frankenstein playing a banjo painted as a birth gift for my daughter.

Rev. Dr. Chad Wells
http://www.wellstattoo.com
http://www.myspace.com/revwells