Life & Work with Nick Rizzo of Long Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Rizzo

Hi Nick, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve been tattooing professionally for 16 years. I surf, make surfboards, mess around with cars and motorcycles blah blah blah, but I would love to take this opportunity to share a few general things for everyone reading this to consider while shopping for a new tattoo! Here it goes.

1. The amount of followers someone has on social media has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with good tattooing.

2. “Scratcher style, “ignorant style,” or anything of the sort used to get you fired on the spot from a real tattoo shop. You, and your skin, deserve way better.

3. “Private studios” ran by tattooers with one or two years experience, or “hobbyists” tattooing out of nail salons, are a dead giveaway to the simple fact that their work does not belong coming out of an ethical, reputable tattoo shop. Most of the time, these studios not even backed by the board of health.

4. A Range Rover’s starting retail is over $100,000 dollars. They are also one of the worst designed and most unreliable vehicles you can own. A lot of people know this. Same thing goes for tattoos; just because some Instagram-famous person is charging you a $1000 dollar minimum, does not mean you are getting a good product. Snake oil sales 101.

5. We are in an age of information overload! Your phones run the rest of your lives, get on Google and research where to go! Have a read on Los Angeles tattoo history. Look up Spotlight Tattoo, Classic Tattoo, or Tattooland to name a few. Go see Outer Limits and their tattoo museum. See what tattooers these and other shops follow on social media. Patronize people that live and breathe tattooing, not the ones that are running amuck with it! Choose EXPERIENCE over VANITY.

As for me, I like Toyota-style tattooing; it may not the fanciest, but I try to do the best I can, and design it to last as long as possible. My minimum won’t send you to the poor house. There’s an entire sub-culture of tattooers all doing the same thing in this fine city, simply for the love of proper tattooing, not to make a quick buck before moving on to the next cool thing.

I hope this all helps!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I cracked the engine block in my Subaru on my way to work as an apprentice back in 2009. I made it to the shop, let it cool down, then I got a few raw eggs from the bagel place I used to get breakfast at. I cracked them open into the radiator, and then after work, I drove it home. I kept driving it like that for a while until the engine was almost completely seized. It got so bad the top speed was around 40mph when I asked my mom to follow me to the scrap yard. I think it overheated like 4 times in 20 miles. I neutral dropped it while going pretty fast. I laughed like a maniac, then I got $300 dollars for it. Then I got another car.

Tattooing’s kinda been like that.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I shaped a board from scratch when I had my shop, Loose Change, in NY. I was driving around with a blank in my car for about a week; one day I had a cancellation on a tattoo, so I put plastic down in my shop, pinned it up to the chair rails, hit the blinds, and blasted Motörhead and Dick Dale while trying to figure out some dimensions from a Surfers Journal article on a board style called “the fish.” It ended up being a mash up between Skip Frye’s and Steve Lis’ boards. I drew the outline directly on the blank, and cut and ripped all the foam by hand. Sammy from Bunger hooked me up with the factory for a glass job, old man Mike Yanelli hooked up some fins, a few months later I paddled that thing out in all-time conditions at a surf break called Robert Moses. I tucked into a wide open stand-up barrel right in front of my friend Alex and his legend of a dad Ed, and got the living shit kicked out me when it clamped down and drove me to the bottom like a boat anchor.

I caught the longest wave of my life later that day on that board, but nothing can top tucking into a barrel on a board I made with no knowledge and none of the proper tools.

I hope my tattooing speaks for itself.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
“Good Luck” is the result of hard work and dedication being rewarded.

“Bad Luck” is the result of second guessing yourself, and not learning from your mistakes.

“It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon.”
-Tsunetomo Yamamoto

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Nickrizz_tattoos

Image Credits
Nick Rizzo