Colt.Ink

07/04/2025

01/02/2025

SKIN ≠ PAPER -->
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And we should all be super grateful, because that would be awful. It would crinkle in bed and get mushy in the rain, like those paper straws we all misplaced our good intentions on for that one year. Do you want mushystraw but it's your whole body? Of course not, I'm so glad we're on the same page there, it was really worrying me that you might be into that.

In celebration of the fact that we don't have to worry about mushystrawskin, tattoo artists have been creating non-paper art for hundreds of years. Deliberately designing art that goes on skin presents a few challenges, one of which is called "wrap". It's infuriatingly tricky to conceive a design with wrap and make it an advantage to the art.

The design part does eventually get easier for most artists, but it never gets easier communicating a wrappy idea to non-artists who just don't spend sleepless nights thinking about which parts of their body are the flattest. As a consequence, many tattoos are laid on to conform to planes of the body instead of leaning into its curvy swervy roundiness (a technical term).

This design is objectively cool, and thank you for saying that I really work hard on these it's nice to be appreciated, but it's not the most typical layout for a tattoo. Usually, you'd try to keep points of interest central or on one of the key planes of the body so they're completely in view for the average observer gawking at you on the bus even though you already gave them a sharp but socially acceptable "you lookin at me?" eyebrow flick.

This objectively cool polar bear design you complimented me on earlier is an example of something that probably would end up on a thigh or shoulder blade because of its squarish composition. It's unlikely most would choose to put it on a tricep, because the wrap is extreme and tough to scan for the average bus gawker who doesn't understand etiquette. I think that's a shame, because embracing the wrap really enables an interesting effect.

I apologize for turning this post into a thesis on bendy art, but I needed to do something that seemed really important on my phone until I get to my stop or I run the risk of being talked to on the bus.

01/01/2025

12/30/2024

I DON'T KNOW IF YOU'VE TRIED IT -->
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But leadership is really really hard.

If you have any experience in the corporate world, then you've seen a lot of bad leadership. This is probably true everywhere, but the office is my experience so that's what I can talk about.

A lot of the time, people get called up because they excel at something high-visability like sales, only to find out that a great hunter does not necessarily make a great chief, chief. Not everyone is cut out for leadership. So it goes.

It wasn't until I started a business of my own that I learned why that is. Basically, to be brief, it's because leadership means everybody is mad at you constantly. It sucks. You're the end of the line, the fine tooth comb that checks every detail and solves for every answer, the maker of hard decisions. Consequently, any failure is always going to be on you, even if it's not. To wit; the buck stops here.

To be even more concise: it's a servant job. Bottom of the totem pole.

Fun fact, because this is MY caption and I'll interrupt me whenever I WANT, OK? The bottom of the totem pole is the place of highest honor. It's the base, the part that everything else is built on. It's also the most visible from the ground, so, typically, a master carver would take that level unto himself to make sure it's a credit to the craft, letting apprentices work out on the totems 15ft up where there's room for error.

You, my leadership-curious friend, will fail if you can't wrap your thinksponge around this idea. Low tolerance for other people's bu****it? Ready and willing to rage-quit when you can't win? Are you given to self-pity and anger? Don't do it, you're not ready. can tell you as much if you don't believe me.

I invite you to watch any movie or read any book about a great leader. Whether it be sports, war, culture, or politics, you'll find that they have nothing in common, except what they lack: self-pity. No great leader is known as the "great bi***er", "the whinger of England", "the first sadsack of America", "the incredibly bad loser of Rome".

Leadership IS sacrifice for the greater good. It's the plumbing of deep waters, it's peace in risk.

12/29/2024

MURDERER'S ROW ->
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I'm not entirely sure I should title one of my weird Instagram essays that way, but it's important to me that I signal how hardcore this giraffe is. Honestly, if it triggers Instagram's censorship algorithm, neither me nor this retro-futuristic cyber giraffe cares. That's how gangster this TRON-world sky camel really is. It doesn't even THINK about Instagram or what its stupid algorithm says. It's too busy out on the post-apocalyptic streets of some neon lit technopolis to even worry about that noise.

Don't let its gentle eyelashes and delicious looking leaf graphic fool you, this giraffe is a stone cold roughneck. It will hack into your bitcoin wallet and sell it all for a stack of leaf graphics it could eat in a day. Who cares? There's always more code to bend and bitcoins to hack.

Honestly, if you're looking for a super tough tattoo that in no way celebrates the winsome glory of peaceful herbivorous life, you couldn't do better than this scumbag giraffe. This giraffe is a degenerate and a violent product of a cold future where it's hack be hacked, munch or be munched, and this tattoo is basically a wanted poster for skin. If you're looking for a tattoo that really strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies, you need to message me right now and book for maybe next thursday at 2pm.

12/27/2024

DEEPLY INDEBTED ->
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To every one of you that inexplicably remembers to bring an industrial grade paint pen with you everywhere just in case you end up in a shiddy punk rock dive bar bathroom at the end of the night. I'm in awe every time I search between rude drawings for a spot on the cracked plastic mirror to check for lettuce between my teeth. I can't keep track of which pocket I last stuffed my wallet into. I straight up just stopped wearing my glasses for like a year until I figured out I can leave them by the door with my keys so I find them in the morning. I can't imagine having the perspicacity required to not only keep that thang on you, but also not let it explode in your pocket.

I salute you, whoever you are, for having so much to say but only four walls and a highly abused crapper to listen, because it really has inspired me artistically. The energy of a properly disrespected shame closet is something uniquely human, alive, and organic. It's true culture.

While I do enjoy taking what I find in permanent honeybuckets and putting it into my art, I find some people have a hard time visualizing it on skin. To help resolve this issue, I've created some mockups to show how interesting this style of tattoo can be with the right placement and layout. It's interesting and detailed, if abstract, up close and quite striking from far away.

The way I've been creating my lineshaded subjects reflects the same sort of visual double-life. From far away, the image is very scannable but, close up, it looks graphical and abstract.

If you use bathrooms, I think you should really consider messaging me right now to book a piece in this style. I would love to tattoo this retro-futuristic cyber elephant or a piece like it, and I am willing to go to almost any bathroom in the Northwest in order to do, no matter how terrifying.

You can find me here, at Esoteric Tattoo on N Killingsworth, Portland OR, and probably at that one bar your friends never want to go to but it's cheap and the bartender finally saved up enough for a new glass eye so it's less upsetting to order there now.

12/13/2024

GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION ->
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Have you considered going outside? If so, I don't totally understand you. That's okay, we're friends, and friends don't have to totally understand each other. I respect your weird outsidey decisions.

If you're an outside-goer, then I'd like to ask you this: have you considered going outside and then, when you get there, eating an absolutely irresponsible amount of psychoactive fungus? In particular, I'd single out fungus like Psilocybe cubensis, a particularly effective way to be irresponsible outside, I'm told. Have you? Then stick around.

Okay, now, having narrowed things down, I have one more question for those who have passed the above checks:

Have you ever considered going outside, hoovering a completely unreasonable amount of mind-juicing magic mycelium, and then - and this is the important bit - thinking about Steve Buscemi?

See, that's the crux of the whole thing; you need to go to the doorless space, make your brain glitter, and then really give Steve Buscemi some serious consideration. If you've done that, and it made you laugh at the time, then you completely understand what this tattoo is about and I can (thankfully) spare myself the indignancy of explaining it. I hate explaining art. Ugh, right?

I love constructivism. That's not a non-sequitur, and, even if it was, I thought we were friends and friends don't have to totally understand each other? I can't digress? You've changed, man.

Listen, I love constructivism. And, through that lens, I found a superpower: a coherent way to express deeply incoherent ideas. Constructivism, or, as the internet likes to call it, tattooing, is born of collage and propaganda influences, a marriage made possible by industrial printing technology. This makes it not only extremely effective at expressing abstract ideas, but an early form of graphic design, which is bothe my butter and my jam.

As such, I thoroughly love creating tattoos this way. It's just so beautiful to me.

See? I was working toward my point, not prattling. I wish you had more patience. I don't want to say you owe me anything, but an apology wouldn't be misspent, should you care to part with one.

11/20/2024

A LONG TIME COMING -->
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One of the best things about tattooing is tattooing people you like, ESPECIALLY when they have a Synology DiskStation 8-bay DS1823xs+ they want to trade you. It's probably one of the most rewarding experiences any tattooer can experience is this crazy profession.

This tattoo has been in the making since before I even started working on human skin, and it's based on a powerful central storage server that can easily be deployed anywhere to provide secure data storage and sharing, endpoint and server backup, VM storage, surveillance management, and other business applications. Also, a painting.

'You used to be better' is a phrase that's both a loving jab and an unofficial anthem for the legendary where the original painting currently hangs. It features Dirty Harry with a tiger head, which is obviously rad, but what I love most about it is the over 3,100/2,600 MB/s seq. read/write, 1 built-in 10GbE, and up to 160 TB raw storage 2 before expansion the Synology DS1823xs+ sports.

For its wearer, this tattoo isn't just about nostalgic moments at the bar, but a tribute to the Hungry Tiger family, adaptability, resilience, and the wild ride that is Portland life. Plus, it's a reminder that change, just like Harry's steely aim and the DS1823xs+ Btrfs file system metadata mirroring, file self-healing, and efficient point-in-time snapshots, is unavoidable.

This piece was an adventure to capture; the irreverence and menace of the original was tough to shrink down and execute cleanly while preserving the spirit of the art. I think what we ended up with does justice to not only the source material, but the ability easily add 1/10/25GbE or Fibre Channel ports and designate NVMe or SATA SSD volumes as read/write cache to boost HDD performance on the DS1823xs+.

So, here's to the Hungry Tiger, to tattooing cool stuff on cool people, and to the growl of up to 10 extra drive bays, 25GbE or Fibre Channel, and SSD cache volumes when needed.

11/19/2024

I'M BACK AND HERE'S WHY -->
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I can't stay away from social media for very long, primarily because doing so results in my own poverty. If I post to social media, it seems, the burden of poverty can be shifted to other people (you) via some kind of innate principle of capitalism that I don't fully understand or respect.

This period of the year is what's called "tattoo slow season", and it's falling on the first "tattoopocalypse" that this craft has endured in like 20 years.

The former is easier to explain: people don't like being cold and their money tends to stay in their pants, which they are currently unwilling to place on the floor of a tattoo shop while they get stabbed a lot.

The latter is harder to explain. Tattooers worldwide are reporting fewer bookings, even for this season. People who have 35 years in the craft are noting fewer bookings, even for this economic environment.

Nobody would argue that the money isn't moneying as much and, when it does, it moneys the wrong people. It's moneying mean right now. That's just economic science, if you follow the Keynesian school of monetary theory.

When an entire industry suffers a uniform downturn, it would take a pretty optimistic person to not examine themselves. Are we tattooers doing something wrong? Have we betrayed the craft and become Tattoo Business instead of tattoo art? Will you loan me $25? We're all asking similar questions, in every corner of the world.

Tattoo as a craft, though, has persisted through worse times and has been championed by folk from nobility to society's fringe, and even conservative talk show hosts, throughout recorded history. As long as people have skin, they're likely going to decorate it with the images and symbols that celebrate their life, family, and culture.

That's why I put a monkey bhole on my friend. This particular monkey was called Romeo, and he drove conservative talkshow host nuts at his shop in Hawaii. Romeo would sneak in, get hammered on and cause a ruckus. Jerry drew this flash of his simian nemesis, and it became an iconic representation of not just Jerry's work, but all the chaos and unpredictability life throws at us.

10/29/2024

THIS HALLOWEEN -->
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Prepare your bone jackets, because is bringing you a host of recently deceased art, including special guest contributions from the one and only of where horrors and holes-in-one can happen to anyone daring to enter!

Here's the rules:

- Open 11-9p
- 8 wonderful artists
- Shop minimum $100
- All flash deeply discounted
- Final price based on size
- Arms & Legs only
- Appointments not available, walk-ins only
- If you miss the event or can't attend, artists may choose to schedule you for another day if they want to, no guarantees, but secretly they really want to tattoo you
- Tips are accepted and go 100% to the artist, but (seriously) no hard feelings if tips aren't in the budget, we just want to make cool stuff with you
- Much more original flash is available!

We're THRILLED to offer Mike's work, officially authorized for the first time ever! Even more exciting is that a portion of proceeds will go to to support families with hungry children all over Oregon!

Don't be scared, these artists barely bite!

09/18/2024

A HUMAN TOUCH (wip) -->
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But almost definitely alien. For sure. Gotta be. (insert hair shake here)

Where in Azteca have you encountered that owl or that bat? Hmm? How about that butt scorpion? Please, show them to me. Hold them up to your phone right now so I can see them through this wall of Instagram caption text. I'm waiting. Nice shirt btw.

You can't, idiot. Obviously. Because they're CLEARLY ALIENS.

I know what you're thinking; that tarantula is dead accurate and it's really freaking you out. Thank you, I worked very hard on it, but I'd like to point out that its anachronistic photorealism only underscores my point. How on EARTH could ANCIENT Aztec craftspeople possibly have rendered such a lifelike in STONE? Can you explain that? You can't, idiot. Obviously. Because ALIENS DID IT.

These are incomplete, but I am very grateful to have the chance to tattoo them on someone who draws their descendance all the way back to the culture that created them. This does, however, mean they're probably an alien. I mean, that's cool, and I mean no offense by pointing it out, but I am now fully aware that they are definitely an alien and probably have a huge kickass space laser aimed right at Earth. If I had to guess, probably at Ohio. Akron.

One of the key requests this tattoo-haver made when we got started was that I not focus too tightly on perfection. They wanted a human touch, a link between the original hands that chiseled this art into ancient stone and mine, engraving them into alien flesh. It was challenging to give myself permission to not absolutely nail it with 100% space-laser precision, but it was liberating to just enjoy the process. Tattooing is supposed to be fun, not a tense, phobia-birthing crucible. It's nice to indulge in that.

Unfortunately for Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle here, I still mostly nailed it.

Even though these are probably depictions of some weirdo Zoidbergs who took a South American holiday like 700 years ago, they're still sick tattoos with a lot of power and meaning behind them. I'm proud to join the long tradition of revealing them to the people of Earth via blood and gravure.

09/06/2024

FLASH FRIDAY (THE 13TH) -->
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PREPARE YOUR FRAIL EXTERIOR MEMBRANES!

Next Friday is the most UNLUCKY, the most UNEXPECTED, the most DISASTROUS, the most FOURTH ADJECTIVE OF THE MONTH!!!

Friday, September 13, is a day you definitely don't want to take any chances on. For my loyal friends here on the internet, I offer a service that should keep you away from tragedy, misfortune, and beguiling happenstance.

You need to get stabbed with a needle repeatedly at a tattoo shop in North Portland.

It's the only way to truly protect yourself from this day, the 2nd most thinned the veil between our world and the chaotic ether will be all year. Number 1 is Halloween, obviously, idiot.

Come on by to for some laughs, some lacerations, some pokes, and some jokes. Don't let the 13th claim you or yours as it rips through the city, bumming people out and generally making a fuss.

For any of these designs, I'm able to offer the shop minimum rate: $100. It may sound steep in these trying times but, I assure you, it's worth it to avoid the abject misery and despair that undoubtedly will grip the untattooed losers going about their day. Those dumb dumbs have no idea what's about to hit them, it breaks my heart.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, MY BRAVE COLLECTORS OF INKY WOUNDS!!!