I am the owner and artist at Tsunami Tattoo, Lucky 13.I have been tattooing professionally since 1991 but my interest in tattooing started when I was around eight years of age.As a child I was interested in art from quite an early age, in fact the first picture I painted at school was a green dragon.It all started when the friend and bass player of my father's band, who was a tattoo artist, would call at the house for visits and band practice.It was then I asked him to draw a tattoo design on a piece of paper that sparked a lifelong passion for tattoo art.Each time I met my father's friend I would ask him to draw him another tattoo design, to which I would practice over and over again until it looked exactly like the design I had been given.This itself created a chain reaction.I attended Oak Field primary and took my newly discovered art with me to lessons.With a pencil case full of felt tip pens, my fellow pupils were only to keen to let me practice this tattoo style on there arms.This carried on through to secondary school, still penning on tattoo designs on the pupils and friends there.So as a natural progression, I was keen to become a tattoo artist.This was no easy task as tattooing was not nearly as popular as it is today.There was no TV shows or Youtube video's to watch, as there was no internet at this time, so to get the tools needed to tattoo was impossible.The tattoo business was in a decline and still suffering from the Aids scare of the eighties, which almost ended the whole of the tattooing trade.This made getting any information about tattooing very hard indeed and finding a tattoo artist willing to talk to you was near impossible also.Undeterred by all these struggles, I pushed on knowing this was what I wanted to do with my life.With no one willing to take on apprentice's, I had no choice by to teach myself the techniques needed to successfully apply a tattoo.​This was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life, especially as there was no information available to even begin with.With no supply company willing to sell to a unknown novice, I had learn how to make the equipment I needed. Starting with the needles, I would need to hand make every set of needles for every single tattooing job.Then there where the inks that were used at this time.​They also needed to be made by hand and every artist had his own unique secret recipe to make the perfect constancy that suited their technique.