Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Bones.
Hi Dan, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I had been working as a video editor and motion graphics designer for an animation studio in New York in 2006 and started dating the shop manager of New York Adorned. At the time, Adorned had a full staff of some of the best tattoo artists in the country, and I was fortunate enough to meet Thomas Hooper, Timothy Hoyer, Steph Tamez, Bryan Randolph, and half a dozen other tattooers that are huge inspirations to me to this day. These are the artists that showed me how far you could push tattooing as an art form and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
The big push to actually becoming a tattooer was losing my editing job to the 2008 recession, and by 2010 I was professionally tattooing at my first shop. I worked at Leathernecks Tattoo in Brooklyn for a few years alongside my best friend and favorite tattooer, Gerald Feliciano, and both of us went on to work together at East Side Ink in the Lower East Side. During these years, I got introduced to Derek Lewis in Toronto, who became my unofficial mentor, so I spent a lot of time up at his shop in Canada as well. I was doing a lot of freelance illustration work during these years, mostly album artwork and gig posters for various bands, and playing in my own band as well.
In 2018, my wife Meg and I relocated to Los Angeles to escape winter, where I worked at Incognito Tattoo. When tattooing shut down in LA County during quarantine, I had a major career pivot into set design and art direction for a bunch of commercial work and a short film. I also stayed busy during this time by getting back into the animation world and managed to fully animated music videos for the bands Antivillain and Red Fiction. In 2022, I got hired at Memoir Tattoo in West Hollywood, and couldn’t be happier to call this shop home. At present, I’m tattooing full-time, taking on illustration and animation commissions, and playing in a new band called Hyper Psychic.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I love tattooing dearly, but this is absolutely the hardest, most stressful job I have ever had. It’s an appealing job because you get to be your own boss, but you are also your own employee, and I was mercilessly overworking myself to keep all my clients happy. The long, long hours I was putting in for years had a pretty harsh effect on my eating and sleeping habits, not to mention the toll it was taking on my body. In 2016, I actually overworked myself so hard that I developed permanent double vision from the constant strain on my eye muscles and had to go through a pretty gnarly corrective surgery. Thankfully, it was successful!
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a tattoo artist, I specialize in technical illustration and highly detailed black and grey work. I tend to do very in-depth consultations with my clients and spend a lot of time focusing on how a design is going to conform to and compliment the shape of the body. I put a lot of time and effort into giving my clients the best work I possibly can, and I also try to give them the best shop experience I can. I have a lot of clients that come to me for their first tattoo, and I want their introduction into tattoo culture to be awesome and welcoming! At the same time, my reputation for doing intricately detailed illustrative work has gotten me a lot of long-term clients who I love and appreciate dearly.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I’ve been building an art book collection for about 15 years now, and places like Kinokuniya in Little Tokyo, the Skylight Books Arts Annex, and Wacko in Los Feliz are amazing local resources for a lot of my recent favorites. I still do a lot of my client drawings by hand, but supplementing that with ProCreate on the iPad Pro has been a HUGE help. Procreate also makes it incredibly easy to mock up designs for my clients to see ahead of time.
Pricing:
- $200 deposit for projects
- Hourly rate of $250
Contact Info:
- Website: www.danbones.com
- Instagram: @danbones
