A tattoo artist having a bad day...?

Damn! It has happened to all of us, who hasn't had a bad day at work? What about 2? Well, tattoo artists and tattooist are not exempt from these inconveniences. We are not machines, we are humans and we screw up now and then, some more than others as in any profession, but the problem I see is; you can

not screw up in tattooing!! At least not in a level that will bring all kinds of damage to our customers.

Just think about it for a second, if you screw up when drawing, painting, sculpting, etc, fine, you just start over, but when you screw up when

tattooing.......boy it has consequences, very serious, permanent ones, and what most people don't realize is that these

consequences can even be life threatening when a poorly trained person holds a tattoo machine on his/her hands and starts putting ink into someone else's skin, and that danger is what I want to talk about here.

I get emails very often, like most people working in tattoo studios do, from people who want to learn how to tattoo. I have thought about it but I haven't done it yet for many reasons, time, working space size, lack of real commitment from people, I forgot to answer, they don't show up, just to mention a few; though probably the biggest reason is because I don't consider myself yet at the level of being anybody's guidance in this industry, and I do respect it. I don't know if you ever actually get to that point anyway, at least if you are serious about this and push yourself constantly to satisfy not only yourself and your loyal (for better or worst) customers but also your most skilled peers.

But it has made me think what would I do if I would actually have an apprentice some day,

where would I start from? So I made a kind of program once and the first thing I would definitely cover is cross contamination and everything related to hygiene. Why? Because it doesn't matter a fuck if you are the most skillful big-shit visual artist who could build a tattoo machine with his feet while having his eyes wide shut if you don't know the potential dang

er and seriousness of handling body fluids without responsibility.

I have seen many great artists in conventions answer their phones while having the sam

e gloves on they are tattooing with, tattooist using nothing else but toilet paper to create what they think is a barrier between the surface and the working station.

And I could wrote a novel about the astonishing stupidities I have seen tattooists and tattoo

artists doing in terms of hygiene. And the thing is, I do care because it affects the industry I love and the people who are doing things right. To add to this, at least here in Finland, I have had health "inspectors" coming to my studio and "checking" all my stuff. Well, I could again write a novel of the incredible things I have seen, but just to keep it short I'll mention a couple of situations I have actually gone through with them:

SITUATION 1

Me: Yeah so here is my autoclave and ultrasonic cleaner.

Inspector: Oh, you have one of this!

Me: Well.....yeah....and I have my autoclave checked every month by this lab to which I send my spore tests..

Inspector: Test what?....

SITUATION 2

Inspector: So why do you have 2 different gloves?

Me: Oh, that's because the black ones are latex, I used them for cleaning only, when I am not handling petrolatum-based products, the others are nitrile, I used them when tattooing since I am using petrolatum-based products on the skin basically during the whole process.

Inspector: Oh! So why can't you use the latex ones when tattooing?

Me: Well, as I said, because I am using petrolatum-based products at that time....

Inspector: Is it dangerous?

Me: Well...........you know about the condoms and not using petrolatum-based lubricants?

Inspector: Mmmmmm...yeah....ok....

Me:.........................................ok

Not to mention that they called me one day earlier to let me know they were coming at 2 o'clock on the next day.......which they shouldn't!!!! They are supposed to bust you on the spot, what's the p

oint

of coming over if they are warning you 24 hours earlier, by that time, anybody would have already cleaned the place on every corner, even if done once a year, putt each thing

on it's place, changed the trash bins with new bags, hidden all the porn magazines, etc!!

And well yes, I know customers have their guilty part, nowadays people should be educated about this very basic things, and moreover, most of them are really common sense, but at the end is us, the ones representing this industry who should really take things seriously, tattooing is not a fucking game!! And people who don't understand this shouldn't be tattooing, there are no shortcuts in hygiene and sterilization procedures, every single screw and millimeter of space used should be taken into consideration because germs, viruses, bacteria and all those mother fuckers, who will still be here waaaaaaaaaaaaay after we are already gone as a civilization, need much less than that to screw somebody's life up, and tissue of toilet paper won't certainly do any good.

Customers, whether they should or not,usually trust the man/woman behind the tattoo machine blindly, and we should correspond to that immense act by being responsible offering them the greatest possible degree of security...

Rode

Science and religion = opposite poles

I finally got a brief space to update my blog (yeah right, I wrote that line about a month ago). I would like to discuss about the differences between science and religion. This came up after somebody proposed to me the argument that both are ultimately very similar, both try to find answers to the origin of the universe, our planet, life, etc, and so that they shouldn't be arguing against each other because at the end, none of them are sure about the answers anyway. Well, this is clearly a fallacy and I will try to make my point here.

First of all, religion is based in pure believes, in fact, the main pillar of any religion in this world is called faith. Faith is nothing else than believing in something without the need of any proof, if you request proves of any kind, you are not having faith anymore.

Science on the other hand, is based on testable evidence that can be falsified. For any phenomena to become scientific, it must be tested first. But testing any hypothesis must be done correctly, the whole process should be available to everyone to avoid it being an anecdotal "testing". It's important here to emphasize the word hypothesis instead of theory as many people misunderstand and often confuse the both as being the same thing when they are actually not, but I will talk in a bit more detail about it later in this post.

Ok so first of all, when making a study to test a hypothesis, there must exist a random distribution of subjects divided into similarly sized groups. This process must be done responsibly and attention must be put to every detail in order to avoid any kind of bias from the administrators as well as from the subjects. As easy at it may seem, this step requires a high degree of attention to detail and a good deal of expertise so that the study doesn't become an invalid one, it's a very tricky step in deed, we practice this in school and it was a real pain in the ass not to fall into those biased procedures, so before you read an "study" that claims to be a valid one, you have to understand what makes a study a good one and then dig deep into it to corroborate it yourself.

And then is the blinding test, single, double, triple..I'm not gonna go into it as that is not the subject of this post and most of you are probably about to fall sleep by now if you are still reading that is. But anyway, after all the testing comes the publication, the study won't be published unless it has been peer-reviewed, and of course these people have to be experts on the subject with good credentials within the scientific community.

When you go back to religion, it has absolutely none of these studies, even though they sometimes make use of fancy scientific-sounding words like "intelligent creator" to make it sound more valid. Moreover, religious books such as the Bible have already been written, they cannot be put upon scrutiny, the story has been told and you are supposed to accept it, not to question it, then again, that's what we call faith. But don't get me wrong here, I have nothing against people having faith, my only point here is to make a clear difference between the both, what people believe is up to each one.

So religion then is not looking for answers, it has already "found" them, if science comes up with a new discovery that contradicts religion, the next step for religion is to find a way to deny it, to make it look unreliable and threatening towards that faith. Since religions have already written their fairy tails which explain us that a single creator has made everything out of magic, they don't need to look for anything new anymore.

Religion adapts whatever comes up to those stories, in other words, it goes from the result back to the evidence. Science on the other hand, makes the stories as the evidence comes along the way, in other words, it goes from finding the evidence, to testing it, to testing it, to testing it, to peer-reviewing it, to finally get to a conclusion. I know I am sounding once again as if I would be attacking people who believe but I am really not. It doesn't really bother me, I'm too busy and have enough of my own to deal with other person's ideals or believes, I would go crazy if I would really care, but I support science and skepticism (also not the same) and I feel compelled to present these two as they are, what you think about what I wrote here is a different story and feel free to comment and to disagree.

If anybody presents me a valid argument (careful with what makes a good argument) I have no troubles to change my ideas, I have done it before, I was raised in a catholic country, I was a strong believer but there was a point where it stopped making any sense to me as it has to many people that rely in evidence. Some religious people if not all will still try to present "evidence" to support their believes.

Many creationists or religious people that are against science based their arguments in the fact that the latter changes its theories all the time. Well, yes they do most of the time, but that's exactly the point of science. It updates itself as evidence comes along, a theory can become one only if it can be modified at any given point, once again, if it can be tested and falsified, if a theory has sufficient testable evidence and leaves no doubt or room for update, then is not a theory anymore, it becomes a fact. If it hasn't been tested yet, then it's a hypothesis.

And yes, science is full of unanswered questions, unsolved theories, being the biggest of all the origin of the Universe, and it is probably beyond our understanding, like trying to teach algebra to a dog as exposed in the elegant universe documentary (you can find a reference in my web page) meaning we will probably never know, and that is why people need religion, we as humans need to understand origins, it's just the way our brains are wired. From my point of view, science is for the adventurous, for the ones that at least try to find logic in what they perceive, while religion is for the lazy ones, at least in the times we are living in now.

Religion brings comfort, a feeling of safety, a lazy answer to what our brains cannot grasp...yet...it's the shortcut, the no-need-for-thinking approach. Basing your life upon a scientific and critical thinking is not an easy process, it requires you to let all those beautiful stories go, many believes that build up who you are now die with it, and probably the hardest part of it is that you have to recognize you were wrong, and the human ego is very hard to swallow. In addition to take that comfort cover away from protecting you, and you get to a point of thinking "and now what?" Well, probably no one will ever know, but who cares, using the brain in a logical way is in my opinion how we should really pay tribute to the extremely high improbability of being born!!