somnambulance

hi guys.

i’m back from europe, and happy to be home. i had a good time (copenhagen was especially fun),  and big thanks to allan and amalie for accomodating me so well, i loved it there. but i still like home best.

as usual, i’m feeling a refreshed perspective from my travels, and am happy to announce a few changes around here. it’s a new era, change is good!

-first off, i won’t be carrying a waitlist anymore…. it’s become far too stressful for me to manage. there are still some folks on it who are awaiting appointments and they will be scheduled as originally planned, but beyond that, i will simply book 3 months at a time, 4 times a year. once those months are full, booking will closed until the next booking period, which i will announce here on the blog. because i’m still booked for the rest of 2011, the next booking period will start january 1st, 2012, for appointments in feb, march, and april. so if you’re looking to get tattooed, email me in january and no earlier (unless you are a traveling client from far away and need to make travel plans). it will be first-come, first serve. if you miss out, you’ll have to wait until the next booking period.

i also will no longer have a set schedule of days at scapegoat, and will now operate solely by appointment only. this doesn’t make me any more or less available than before, as i’ll still be at the shop more often than not. it was just inevitable. for those of you looking to track me down… email is still best, but you can also call the shop 503.232.4628 and check to see when i’ll be around. i’ve revamped and updated my info page to explain the scheduling changes and included some more relevant information to my current workload. have a look through and maybe let me know if anything seems unclear or if i forgot anything.

this is all in effort to reduce stress on me, to help me focus more on the quality(not quantity) of the tattoos and client experience, and not spend every day dealing with scheduling, constant emails, and other crap that bogs me down and turns me into a jerk every day.

-our crew here at scapegoat is turning over a new leaf as well. henry rodriguez and dylan fram are both leaving scapegoat this month on to bigger and better things. with some sadness, i wish both them and their respective families the best of luck on their new endeavors. that said, there’s always a silver lining, and i’m happy to announce the new arrival of allyson bennet to the scapegoat crew. we think she’ll fit in nicely.

SO, after all that, my trip to europe seems a little mundane. good thing i have pictures.

hey. this was amber’s FIRST tattoo. seven hours of work in london. fucking badass.

bear done at the convention. dan got the back of his forearm done by chad koeplinger the next day, poor guy. must’ve felt terrible on all that swelling.

kittyyyyyyyy

i was stoked to get a healed photo of this strongman i did in london last year, on faridah. looks an awful lot more like freddie mercury than i remember.

this was also laura’s first tattoo, done in copenhagen. i think it’s cute.

rebecka got her whole lower arm done in one session, all the way around with a fox and a hare, in 6 hours. i didn’t get very good pictures so this is all i have to show, but i’m pretty happy with it.

kasper’s magpie. i did this is copenhagen with uncle allan and eckel looking on. those guys pretty much wrote the book on tattoos with this subject matter so it was little nervewracking, but i think it came out nice.

matthias came from germany to get this hourglass done in copenhagen. nice guy, fun tattoo.

fox neck in london on a lovely italian lady.

more like this please

it’s funny to do adorable tattoos on necks. like, it looks all badass to have your neck tattooed until you realize it’s some cute little tanuki daruma, and your only reaction is “awwwwwww…”

finished sam’s peacock. the tail feathers are the only part that’fs fresh in this photo, but i’d really like to get a healed one to see how everything levels out. otherwise i’m happy with it and hope to experiment with this kind of rib/thigh placement on other tattoos.

this elephant was actually finished in one session way back in june, but i just got a healed photo. iiii like it!

ok, i don’t really have anything else for ya’ll. i’ll be working my ass off this next month, so check out tumblr if you wanna see more in-progress stuff. thanks for checking in!

 

it’s labor day, and i’m tired and sick. great day for internets.

i usually get sick with a sorethoat/stuffy nose/upper respiratory bullshit when i’m exhausted and stressed out, and this time i’m blaming it on scheduling and traveling plans…london and copenhagen are coming up real soon, so i’m scrambling a bit to finish things up and/or clear some workload before i leave, in 12 days. aaaaand i still had no idea i was leaving that soon until i just typed that. wow.

k, fun’s over. work time. lots of stuff happened this month.

four half-sleeves, in various states of completion, on girls wearing tank tops. must be summertime.

them kids on tumblr are gonna love this one.

no elbows on the dinner table, because it will fucking hurt until these heal.

that snake on the right plays for the lakers

pretty stoked on how this one came out.

healed, and upside-down, kinda. this is on a wonderful longtime client of mine who is moving to alaska… hopefully temporarily, but i will miss working on her just the same. good luck megan!

done on a really nice tattooer from hawaii… eventually we’re gonna do a white horse on the other side when we can get her back out here.

i owed this lovely italian lady a tattoo for some trade work a few years back, and she finally visited portland again so i made good on it with this conch shell. and i also got a chance to photograph her arm, which we completeed over about 6 weeks, start to finish, in summer 2009. design-wise it’s pretty different from how i would handle a similar request nowadays, but i love the way the greys and  rich colors have all settled in together and really become part of her arm. i think it looks great on her and for that i’m really happy with it.

 

thanks everyone, for your continued interest. the rest of this year will be very busy for me, and if you are looking to get tattooed i’d suggest getting back to me in december or january, as i think i’ll be changing my booking system a bit to manage demand a little better. let’s hope that works out. thanks, ya’ll… see ya when i’m back from europa!

 

 

 

 

 

hello friends,

i’ll keep this one short… everything is busy busy and i’m mostly having fun with it.

-i’m booking appointments for london (sep 19-25) and copenhagen (sept 27-30) now. if you’re interested in getting tattooed in either city, send me an email at ryanscapegoat@gmail.com, including a good idea of what you want for a tattoo and what days are best for you.

-it’s probably safe to say at this point that i am waitlisted/booked out for the rest of 2011. i will probably be re-doing a lot of my scheduling/waitlist stuff in the coming months to accomodate for the higher demand, hopefully for a fresh start in winter. in the meantime, thank you, everyone, for you continued interest and patience.

-i don’t know if ya’ll knew this already, but i have shirts for sale here. i’ll have some in london, too, though in years past they’ve sold out quick so it might be easier to buy online!

 

carl sagan as holy man? now that’s a tattoo idea.

dustin still has an arm to finish, but we decided to just knock this thing out while we had the chance. i’m pretty stoked on it, and the whole thing only took about 7-8 hours. that said, i think this will be the last deer/elk tattoo i do(with the exception of completing a few that i’ve already started).

carrot-man playing a concertina. from an awesome old german postcard.

picture sucks, but you get the idea?

matt moreno was in town doing tattoos at scapegoat this month, , and he had me tattoo this snail-helmet battle-lady on his hand. i thought it was a cool idea. looks like mr. moreno will be in town for a while, so hopefully we can get a healed picture at some point. thanks matt!

 

and theeeen, there’s all the ongoing stuff… if you like seeing the in-progress work you might like my tumblr page, which i’ve devoted solely to documenting the process of larger-scale tattoos.

 

 

oh, and then i had fun. also, i’m 28 now… you can tell because my office is full of balloons and a lovely lady made me an excellent cake.

 

 

 

good job.

 

right after i made my last post, i started to realize that maybe this thing wasn’t so obsolete after all… i just never had the time to write anything worth writing. i still don’t, but i now recognize that i’m not done just yet. as we learned in my last post, i have all kinds of anxieties and assorted malaise about my ability to maintain my chosen field of work, and i think with that there will always be something worth sharing there. because as we also learned, in the comments of my last post, people tend to think of “artistry” and “talent” as the driving force behind this tattooing thing… and i strongly, yet respectfully, disagree. it is, at least for me, much more a product of focus, patience, determination and resolute stubbornness that i’m able to keep doing this for a living. i’m sure there are plenty of other tattooers whose artistic passion and creative muscle paves the way for their tattooing, which i admire greatly… because, in truth, i am not one of them. this is where i think things get interesting, and where this blog starts serving a real purpose. so it’s not dead yet.

anyway. to continue on would be heavyhanded. i have pictures for you now.

*summertime commences*

i’d like you to meet my new new girlfrie… i mean, motorcycle. she’s beeauuutiful.

picnics

fernhill park

mt. tabor

cooooooaaaast!

i also went back to new england for a minute, to celebrate the wedding of two of my favorite people anywhere.

stayed here

the backyard

the moon, one hot night over the atlantic.

in between all the real fun, i was working my ass off.

an dear old friend of mine from NH visited portland from phoenix, and had me tattoo a tiger-moth on her throat (!). it was the first time i’d ever worked on a tattoo with that placement, and i’m pretty excited about it. she sat like a champ and it was, all-around, and excellent experience. thanks lexy! more tattoos like this, please.

cris cleen spent a week doing classy tats at our shop earlier this month, and we traded tattoos on each other. i basically stole his entire aesthetic for this tattoo i did on him, which was smart because it’s better than my own. i think he’s got a photo of the st. bernard he did on me on his blog.

i started a pile of big new tattoos over the past month, so that i wouldn’t have to stay home and draw during the summer….we’ll see how that actually works out.

and now, since it’s summer, i’m going camping. happy birthday, america, you are now 235 years old!

hello friends.

so, although it’s been a good run, i think this blog has become mostly obsolete. i think at first, it was a time when i needed a thoughtful release from the day-to-day travails of my own mind and heart, and it served well as journalistic therapy for me as much as a medium to connect with folks interested in the tattooing. i’ve often seen myself as an underachiever in the context of tattooing as a profession, weighed down by the responsibility and workload presented to me every day, continually buried in the self-doubt that comes with navigating my way through it.  permanently marking another person’s skin calls for a great deal of confidence, especially when you have to do it every day. but i’ve never felt that i’ve had that confidence, and have had to find a new way around that requirement every day of my life. maybe i thought there was something interesting there, something worth sharing within those daily misadventures of a left-brained math-type constantly being mistaken for an artist. i think it’s probably common for people to imagine this line of work as easy for me, as if i shit art or something. but i assure you it is not. this is really, really hard for me, and it never gets any easier. i’m a human being with emotions and deficiencies, my brain always hurts, i can’t sleep most of the night, and i’m convinced that stubbornness keeps me going more than anything else… but i ‘m still doing the best i can. perhaps that is all i ever really wanted to show.

that said, the therapeutic benefits of sharing my workdays and thoughts here have fallen to the law of diminishing returns. i don’t have much to say that i haven’t said before; this  has more or less turned into a photoblog with too many words. so, what it’s all lead to and what i’m trying to say is, i’ve started a tumblr and i don’t really know what to do with it yet. i do intend to keep up with this stuff and keep sharing, probably in much the same way and about as often as i have in the past few months, but i’m pretty sure the tumblr page will be more photography and process-oriented, and updated way more often…. but i don’t really know yet. you never know just how the cookie tumbls.

now that’s out of the way, onto the good stuff…. i’ve been busy.

i did this tattoo two years ago, and just got a healed picture this month. i love how tattoos look after a year or more, with everything all settled and really looking like it’s part of that person. it’s also great to see it after that much time and realize you like it more than you did when it was just finished. i had another one of those recently, too, probably done around the same time:

it’s a shoe. i still like it.

dustin’s arm has been done for a while but i just got one decent picture. oh well.

this arm got completed awfully quick… 3 months. maggie came all the way from DC to get this texas-themed lady done, so we did a few two-day sessions to make the most of her visits here. i had the idea to make her dress all huge and lacy and frilly, and have that form the basis of the background in a similar way to the black and grey wind and water bars used in japanese body work. i like how it worked out.

i don’t really remember why the owl has ram horns, but it made sense at the time.

i am really happy about this tattoo and wish i got to do stuff like this more often. you can’t go wrong with traditional japanese themes…. this might be my favorite thing i’ve done in a while.

*brief hiking interlude*

*back to town*

BUT, this month was more about the stuff i started than what got finished:

yikes.

aaaand, that’s about all i care to show for the moment.

also some of you may be interested to know that i have confirmed that i will be at the london tattoo convention again this year in september, and though i haven’t set dates yet i will probably be tattooing in copenhagen with the good folks at conspiracy inc. around that time as well. i probably won’t be booking any appointments for the convention or copenhagen until august or so, so if you’re interested in setting something up, email me in august!

april is easily my least favorite month. i’m not even going to make any qualifying statements to support that admission, or even welcome any lateral movement to that thought. april just always sucks and it’s the worst ever, hands down always no matter what all the time.

so i’m pretty pumped that i still did cool stuff anyway:

ron wells tattooed my shin and i’m so thankful because now i never have to get my shin tattooed again.

i found a tree swing in the nieghborhood.

i FINALLY did tattoos from some dan rick flash we have here at the shop. i’ve been trying to get people to let me do this stuff on them for years! GET WITH IT, PEOPLE.

i finished laura’s pheasant. blues/greens are healed in this photo, hopefully i can get fully healed ones soon.

finished matt’s squid. most of it is healed here, except the lower tentacles.

i started a bunch of stuff.

oh, and then i went to mexico.

i saw dolphins.

i swam.

…with sea lions.

i saw whales.

and, most importantly, i came home.

my plan now is spend most of the next two months working my ass off and getting tons of shit done… so i should have a bunch of new tattoos up next time. for those of you who are curious, at this point it looks like nearly all of my summer will be booked pretty solid… so most new projects will have to get done in fall or later. just a heads up!

thank you, everyone, for the continued support and interest.

ok. it’s been a month. that seems like enough time, right? this blogging thing isn’t really a priority for me these days… it’s starting to get somewhat intermittently nice/sunny out once in a while so i try to enjoy that and not spend all that time on a computer. i think that trend will continue into the summer, so i hope monthly updates are sufficient for ya’ll for the next 6 months. i’m just not interested enough in my own life to share much of it lately…. i bore myself just thinking about it.

i’ve actually been pretty stressed out lately, as i always forget that people GO CRAZY for tattoos every march. like, literally, as soon as daylight savings time “springs forward,” my email inbox gets about a 70% increase in average daily volume for the whole month of march and most of april. it’s nuts. so if you’ve tried to contact me, or you plan to anytime in the next 4-6 weeks, please be extra patient with replies because i can only handle so much typing indoors on a beautiful day…. sorry. again, i’m just one mediocre dude with a mediocre WPM speed. also, it looks like the bulk of my summer might be pretty booked up between ongoing clients and personal travel, so some of  you may want to know that i will probably only have limited availability in portland for new tattoos this summer. i do think i might do some tattoos in europe and new england at some point this summer, but that’s tbd. don’t worry, i’ll give you plenty of notice!

i don’t have a lot to show for my past month, but i assure you i’ve been working my ass off.

RENO:

PORTLAND:

one session, on alexander….all the way from the uk!

kirsten gets cool tattoos on her hands and makes killer spanish rice.

she wanted her grandpa’s old binoculars… which just happened to look exactly like WALL-E’s eye-parts, on a strap.

i never do lettering and usually hate it, but this was on a dear friend and the kind of lettering that i actually enjoy.

see ya next time!

-r