Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Hedlund.
Hi Christopher, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
This is one of those things we get asked as tattooers a lot. I started tattooing over 15 years ago now, so there have been so many different layers to the story of getting to where I am now.
I am a musician and really put all of my energy into playing in bands, touring, etc. up until I was 24-25; I’m 40 now. I made it to the point that most of us eventually realize that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make a living doing music; and had become okay with that. Tattooing was something that I’d been interested in since I was very young. Visual art in general was always a part of my sphere, but tattoos were their own kind of magic; the artists that made them even more so. That fascination, when also coupled with the freedom to dress and look the way I wanted, really sealed the fate for me in making this my full-time vocation. I think independence has always been a major decision-maker throughout my life. I’ve never been great with micromanage(y) type positions and strict hierarchy in my life in general. And with my, at the time undiagnosed, ADHD I could never do an office/cubicle job.
I took a few drawing/painting classes in 2005 at the community college where I lived in Charlotte, NC. From there, I moved back to my home area of Wilmington, NC to try to secure an apprenticeship with the guy that had been tattooing me since I had turned 18. He knew I wanted to learn but wasn’t sure he wanted to teach. We worked out a deal that he let me clean the shop in trade for tattoos. At the time we were in the middle of tattooing my left sleeve we’d started on a couple of years previously. After a few months of cleaning, he told me he’d apprentice me and now “I’d be cleaning for free.”
There’s a lot that happened in this time of 05-07, but two major factors were his getting divorced and my splitting from a physically abusive relationship. During his divorce, he sold the shop to one of the other artists to avoid his wife taking half. And me having my girlfriend at the time arrested for domestic violence / destroying my apartment. He wasn’t happy about me having her arrested, later learning because he was interested in her romantically. So, even through having a court-mandated restraining order against her, he would bring her into the studio to tattoo her and I would have to be there to observe.
One of the things most people don’t hear about these days were the ways apprenticeships worked back then and previously. The general idea was to embarrass or degrade the apprentice to the point that they would quit or give up. If they made it through the process, then they’ve earned their right to be a tattoo artist. I’ve known of male apprentices having to dress in bikinis and wave signs at the road in front of the shop, to having to wait hand and foot on their mentor, to all kinds of other degradations.
There is more detail in what happened from there, but to cut it short; he was fired from the shop a short time after. I was in the part of my apprenticeship where I was starting to actually tattoo people and had no direction into what I was doing anymore. The shop closed a few months later because he was the main breadwinner as the former owner. I had been offered a job at a shop in Greensboro, NC, but really wanted to move to Austin. With advice from a fellow mentor-type tattooer I knew, I went ahead to Greensboro for a guaranteed job. I only lasted a couple of months before getting fired because I was still too fresh as a tattoo artist and they wanted someone with more experience.
The apprenticeship is where you’re supposed to not only learn to tattoo but also have a safe space to continue to learn for a few years after; while you’re still finding your way. With the way things happened in my apprenticeship, I knew enough of what I was doing to tattoo successfully, but there were difficulties in areas of the body/types of skin that I wasn’t fully experienced with and needed practice on. Having a “real” job as a tattooer though, they wanted you to know all of these things already and be proficient as to protect the reputation of the shop.
Once I was fired in Greensboro, I decided to go ahead and take the plunge and move to Austin in Feb of ’08. I landed a job at Atomic North where they had taken over Tattoo Zoo. They had me take pictures of all of my work and show them to the owner when I first started to make sure I was where I needed to be. This ended up working out okay for a little while, but then the recession hit. I went literal weeks without doing anything at all or having some of the artists steal some of my appointments for themselves and I ended up quitting tattooing altogether to survive. I went back to delivering pizza at night and doing catering in the morning.
I continued to paint and do art, but I didn’t have time to tattoo and be able to afford to live a the same time. I would occasionally tattoo a friend here and there when they heard I had been a tattoo artist and would see my work, but nothing consistent. I didn’t end up tattooing at a shop part-time again until late 2011 and into 2012. Even then, I was still delivering pizza and catering the same hours and I’d tattoo 2 nights a week and Saturdays. I was working 60+ hours a week trying to survive and also be able to tattoo at the same time. And this was back when I had a studio apartment in West Campus for $550 a month.
Dec. 26, 2012, we all got the call that the studio was closing and to come get our stuff. There were issues with the landlord and basically they were trying to force us out so they could tear down the building to build high-rises. You know, Austin stuff.
I made the decision then that if I was going to tattoo, I was going to do it for real. I looked through Facebook groups and web pages for artists looking for jobs and shops looking for artists. I found a shop looking for tax season help in New Haven, CT and made the decision to leave Austin behind to go become a full-time tattoo artist again. The problem with the internet, well one of them, is that you can’t always trust the shops and artists there. The shop I ended up working for only posted the art of the guest artists that came through to make themselves look more reputable than they actually were. When I got there and found that it was basically a heroin den with even less skilled artists, it really changed my perspective of what I was willing to do to make it full-time. I ended up reaching out to the more reputable shops in the area and one of them brought me on to work with them full time. Luckily, my time moving to CT wasn’t fully wasted.
I worked for this shop for eight months and it was exactly what I needed. It was busy and kept me woking constantly. I was able to get the experience to put everything I knew into practice over and over and to build a decent portfolio. The hard thing for me was: I knew what I was doing as an artist, but I didn’t have the technical chops to pull it off in skin. Tattooing is its own medium and the only way to learn is to do it over and over. Really in tattooing, once you learn how the machines work, how the skin reacts, how it heals, how to make lines, how to blend, how to get the ink in properly – that’s it. Once you’ve learned tattooing and its mechanical aspect, now everything after is art knowledge.
With the experience I’d gained in CT, I was able to secure a job in Austin again in 2014. This was around the time that the recession was fully over and people were back to having money for luxury expenses like tattooing. And finally, I was home again.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I definitely wouldn’t call it a smooth road! Haha Once I had gotten to this point where I was back in Austin again, tattooing full-time, there were new issues to deal with.
One of the main aspects of street shops is the percentage-based approach to compensation. A street shop is generally defined by the fact that it is mostly walk-in based. The artists working them don’t always have their own clientele or a following yet and rely on the reputation of the shop to get work. Generally, the shop takes 50% of everything you make; some 40%, but 50% is kind of standard. So as I had my art knowledge already and had now started gettin the mechanical aspect of tattooing down, I started to get really good, really fast. I made a name for myself quickly in Austin and stopped doing walk-ins altogether.
In my opinion, percentage based is good if the shop is providing that percentage of your sales. Once you get to a point that you’re not taking walk-ins anymore, paying a percentage makes less and less sense. So at this point, it was time to make the move away from percentage and to a shop type that does rent-based payment. These are your more custom shops where everyone has their own specialty and everyone basically handles their own business fully. The shop becomes more of a venue than a governing body.
As any creative reading this right now knows, this time around ’14/15 is where the almighty Instagram took over the marketing aspect of the creative world. Instagram had been around for a while, but around now is when it became THE way to get business as a creative; especially as a tattoo artist. The convention industry changed. Tattoo Conventions no longer were the way you found out about new upcoming artists or artists from other places. The tattoo magazine industry also toppled for the same reason. You now had every artist at your fingertips if you knew what you were looking for. You could see what every artist did that day rather than months later through a magazine. You now had a direct link to the artists.
This worked out extremely well for us independent artists that worked for custom shops. It bought us clientele that wanted exactly what we did. It helped us cater our styles to what we wanted to do and to only do those things, because we had educated clients now. Clients knew what they wanted and what they were looking for. Once they found one of us doing the thing they wanted; immediate ability to connect and book in.
Then you have the time around 2017 where Facebook decided they wanted to monetize Instagram. Algorithms became a thing. The chronological order disappeared and your reach was cut in half. We now had to pay to get our work in front of people. And then every few months they’d change the algorithm and you had to now research articles on why what you previously did no longer worked. Use hashtags! Use too many hastags? Shadowbanned. Use the same hashtag too many times? Shadowbanned.
Then this past couple of years Reels became a thing, as Facebook really wanted Instagram to be TikTok. Now the pictures of your work aren’t enough. Now they want a song and dance, literally. What was an organic platform for the visual artist became a whole second job you had to learn; on top of all of the other responsibilities you already have. And, as I mentioned before, the old ways are gone. Conventions, magazines, word of mouth; they don’t work like they used to. Now you HAVE to do what Instagram wants in order to keep your business. You have to learn how to make TikToks and witty videos and parodies. Everything has to have the “it factor” to hopefully make just one of your videos go viral and get your work in front of new people again.
I am very fortunate in that my work stands out. Without trying to be braggadocios, I am now one of the best floral and animal tattoo artists in the area. It’s something I had to focus on and really make sure I pay attention to all of the details and make every piece stand out. And through this, I do get word of mouth referrals a lot these days. I tattoo A LOT. So there is a lot of my work walking around Austin and the outlying vicinity from over the years. And in calling this place my home, really since 2008, that has helped so much in getting me into a place that I have stability, even when the most natural way of marketing has kind of been taken away.
And even in knowing that, it is still a stressor in the back of my mind. If Instagram goes away or the way it has now destroyed my organic reach to clientele, will the emails stop coming? It’s something I have to make a conscious decision to keep out of the forefront of my mind.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I pretty much exclusively do realism-styled nature-based tattoos and only in color. I do a lot of flowers, plants, insects, wildlife – but pet portraits have been big part of what I do for several years now. There’s something about immortalizing a part of someone’s life that is so important to them. Sometimes it’s even an aid in grief once the pet has passed on. It’s something I take very seriously. To be trusted for pieces that are so close to someone’s heart will never be lost on me.
Wildlife and songbirds will always be my favorite thing to do though. There’s just something about a natural scene of a bird or smaller mammals like foxes and raccoons nestled into their environment that speak to my artistic soul.
I try with every single one of my pieces to get as much of the actual detail of the picture into the final tattoo. I work on giving the image as much contrast as I can. I want all of the darks to be very dark and present to set up the foundation of the rest of the tattoo. It’s going to these deepest levels of darkness in the tonal spectrum that make the mid-tones, and the light tones especially, stand out against the contrast of the skin.
Since my style is generally without black lines, getting into every corner to set each section apart from the other is very important. If you don’t get each section precisely crisp in the proper places, as it ages, it will start to fall apart. It’s why I really try to drive home the importance of the foundation.
Tattoos will always fade over time, but if you’ve laid the foundation of the darks and the shadows in accuracy tone-wise and in their proper places; those tattoos are going to look good for a lifetime. It’s something that isn’t as necessary in other forms of visual art. One you put paint down, for the most part; it’s going to stay that way forever. The tattoo morphs and changes with the skin over time. It’s another reason sunscreen is essential every day for someone with visible tattoos.
What matters most to you?
To drive home again what matters most, it’d have to be longevity. I try to make every piece I do in a fashion that it’s going to hold up well and look as good as when I originally did it; for as long as possible.
I’ve spent all of my energy the last 7-8 years really trying to find all off the ways to make the tattoo stronger and more resilient to sun and aging factors. Every year I learn new things that I hadn’t noticed before. Even going back through my work from a year ago, I see things that I would do completely differently now. I think growth and knowing that you can always do better is the most important thing for an artist. Even though it’s not the most fun thing as it’s happening, having a general dissatisfaction in your work pushes you towards levels you didn’t even know you were capable.
In all honesty, if I’m 80% happy with a piece I do, then it’s probably a pretty damn good piece. It does make it a slight bit easier knowing that, even when I’m not 100%. There should always be room for growth and new higher points to reach. When you start to think that you’ve done it, you’ve arrived; that’s it. Your career plateaus from there and stagnancy builds and I don’t want that to ever happen to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: winterhalo.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/winterhalo
