About me
In the Spring of 1996 I stumbled into West Coast Tattoo and met Thomas Lockhart. My life has never been the same. Within a year Tom and I were talking about filming and documenting the last traditional tattooing practices of indigenous people around the world. Calling our journey "an adventure" is one of the greatest understatements of all time.
On September 6, 1999 I launched the Vanishing Tattoo web site - www.vanishingtattoo.com - with no idea or inkling of how the site would grow and evolve. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
Two years later (almost to the day) in 2001 we were filming in Borneo for National Geographic International. And in those years I lost track of the times we heard from television broadcasters, "Who would want to watch a television show about tattoos?"
And in the intervening years, hundreds and thousands of people have helped us make the web site what it is today - with their enthusiasm, their support, their encouragement, their ideas and suggestions, and most importantly of all, with their questions. My God, the questions! S
o many people had questions about the origins and history of tattoos and tattoo culture that, early on, we created an Ask Us feature. And those questions, in their thousands, compelled us to create the content for which we have become so well known and which we think has made us unique among tattooing and body art sites - Celebrity Tattoos, Tattoo Designs & Symbols, the Online Virtual Tattoo Museum, Tattoo Culture, and the list goes on.
As we approached the Tenth Anniversary of the Vanishing Tattoo web site and with our traffic swelling to over 1.5 million visitors every month, it seemed that the very best way to celebrate our success was to share it with as many people as possible. And the people who have made our success possible in the first place.
My.Tattoo.Tribe.com is the natural child of VanishingTattoo.com, and has been created to offer an online community where tattoo enthusiasts can share their stories and their passion, their knowledge and their expertise, and in doing so, create a community to foster and nurture this incredible art form - the tattoo - with in which we have all of us, fallen madly, deeply, hopelessly in love.
Asked on one occasion in an interview to explain my fascination with tattoos, I replied, "Beauty is skin deep. A tattoo goes all the way to the bone." Years later, that is still the best explanation I can come up with.
Tattoos, they really do get under your skin.
