1850 Irons mission is to bring awareness to the Tattoo community.  In the beginning, and it wasn’t that much long ago, I made money selling needles, flash, and I saw other artist selling machines to survive.  Tattooing was great, but we suffer through bad months.  During those bad times, artist will sell ink, needles, flash, tattoo supplies, machines, etc..  Now, as a Tattoo Artist, what can you really sell?  The chinese invaded our industry, while making our industry more easy, they took away from our profits and options.  Google was suppose to be a reference tool, now is the most popular Tattoo Flash Art platform there is.  People would bring in pictures of other people’s tattoos, and then want us to duplicate them? Haha serious?  As you can see, in the last 15 years or so, our Tattoo Industry has changed that much.

In your bubble, hopefully the Tattoo Gods have been good, and been feeding you guys well.  But I’ve sold machines door-to-door, and i’ve consistently seen shops go down, and tattoo artist quitting and switching shops, or just waiting there for a miracle to happen.  I remember back in the days, if it was slow, we would go sell something and it would probably happen, because we generally support each other.  We respect the difficult journey of becoming a tattoo artist, and willing to support our brother by buying some needles, ink, or flash.  You can kiss that goodbye now!  

The Tattoo Machine, is definitely on this battlefield.  I can build rotaries, and trust me, it really is that easy, but I don’t.  I don’t want to support this trend, cause it really doesn’t support artist, well unless that tattoo machine company is owned and operated by one.  How many of your machines do you know follow those qualifications?  Tattoo in created by tradition, and especially in the US by the outcast, and poor people.  Pint said, “Tattooing is probably the only true artform, that will give us poor people a chance to get out of this class.  Tattooing belongs to the lower-class.”  Yet, alot of us are willing to give our support so easily to the people that wants to abuse and exploit it.   

Like I said earlier, 1850 Irons mission is to bring awareness.  We would like to share our love and dedication to the Coil Tattoo Machine, and share some of its knowledge about them.  We truly feel that because so many things were kept secret, a lot of the information got lost, especially in regards to taking care of the machines.  And because of that, a lot of Tattoo Artist turned towards rotaries as their solution.  Support your local Tattoo Machine Builder, it’s one of the last things us Tattooers have that belongs to us.