Some of my clients have asked me if I was one of those kids at school who sat up the back of the class drawing in my school books my answer is "pretty much just that". Though its not the best way to get an education, it did further my interest in drawing and art. Which is now not only an interest but my passion and livelihood.
After leaving school I went to work for a sign company as a labourer, Six months into this job I was offered an apprenticeship as a signwriter which I gladly accepted. Four and a bit years on I had passed Trade certificate and Advanced trade certificate in signwriting and was now a tradesman.

But being a tradesman signwriter wasn't enough to keep me satisfied as an artist so I gave signwriting up too work for a T-Shirt printing company as their in house artist. The chap who owns that company incidentally was a very well known tattoo artist in Wellington for twenty odd years by the name of Kevin Gray who had a studio on Vivian St. I worked as the in house artist at the T-Shirt Co for about a year until I started tattooing full time The Lower Hutt Tattoo Studio as I had been tattooing from home and the James Smith market which I'll explain in the next couple of paragraphs.

I started tattooing in 1993, Originally tattooing from home doing only black & gray work. After about a year of stumbling around in the dark, not really knowing what I was doing, but still managing to produce a few good tattoos in that time.
A couple of those tattoos were noticed by Ken Miller of Artistic Tattoo who was heading off to Auckland and needed someone to look after his shop in Wellington on Saturdays & Sundays. I thought this would be great and agreed to take care of the shop on the weekends, which was fine for about six months. But as the tattooing was only two days a week I also had to have my day job during the rest of the week at the T-Shirt Co. and working seven days became a bit tiring so I had to find something else that was a little less manic.

I approached Tom Downs of Lower Hutt Tattoo Studio and asked if there was any chance I could come and work with him, Tom said yes. While working with Tom, I learnt a huge amount about tattooing and the history of tattooing in New Zealand and around the world. Tom also encouraged me to experiment with different needle configurations, colour & machine set ups. So with both of us trying all sorts of different things, we could compare notes and weed out the good techniques and machine set ups from the not so good.
It was also during his time the Lower Hutt Tattoo Studio that Tom and I started to focus on the hygiene aspect of tattooing and body piercing, educating ourselves on hygiene practice's to cut out cross contamination of equipment and the spread of disease.

But once again it was time for a change so August 1998 I left Lower Hutt Tattoo Studio to open my own studio in Upper Hutt and TATTOO FREAKY was born. Since opening my own shop I has focused more on custom & freehand tattoos, this came about mainly because I didn't have a lot of flash. I am now well known for portraits and my diversity in the styles of custom artwork in my tattooing. I likes it like this, as I feels New Zealand's population is too small to get too specialized, which is a good thing being that I get the opportunity to tattoo all sorts of different styles.

Well my feet started to itch again in August 2004, after six years in the Upper Hutt studio I decided to move again this time back to Lower Hutt to my new studio in Trafalgar Square Waterloo Lower Hutt. My new studio has a bit of a different feel to my last one in Upper Hutt as I no longer have flash on the walls, just a few paintings, which I am aiming to add more paintings as time goes on. There is still flash for people to look at, only now it is in folders and books. My reason for this is to try and get my clients and myself too not be overly influenced by what has already been done time and time again.

I had always intended to get another artist in once I moved to Waterloo, but had been procrastinating about it until mid 2005. When Michelle Mac darkened my door and said she wanted to come and do some tattoos at Tattoo Freaky. Michelle's timing was great as I was starting to struggle with the amount of people wanting to get tattooed at Tattoo Freaky. Michelle has been cranking out great work since.
Well I thought tattooing had got about busy as it could get, I was wrong.

We started 2007 with waiting lists two - three months long for a tattoo, I started to think maybe we could do with another artist in the studio. As fate would have it Geoff Teague, with whom I had been in contact with for a few of months came in for a visit while Michelle was on a hard earned holiday. I asked Geoff if he wanted to fill in while Michelle was away, he said ok (I had to twist his arm a little). Geoff worked out great, so the evolution of Tattoo Freaky continues with same interior alterations to the studio to fit in artist number three (Geoff, that is for those of you not paying attention).

Well that's enough about me (us) for now, go and have a look for yourself....

Cheers

Dave McEwan