Aldo

Aldo got his first tattoo shortly before turning 24. He’d always liked the look of tattoos and body suits, and his sister persuaded him to get tattooed by the artist who had been tattooing her.

His first tattoo was his whole left side from the bottom of his left armpit to the top of his left hip. It’s an hourglass flying in a storm, holding a rose, with the grim reaper’s skull in it. “It’s a lot of symbolism,” he said. He picked it out of the flash-book of the person who would later become his mentor.

He had never imagined becoming a tattoo artist. But after about four months into getting tattooed, after he’d had both of his sides done, and was talking about doing his stomach, his future mentor off-handedly made a joke about teaching him.

At that point Aldo was working as a produce manager at a local, small-town grocery store, a job he disliked. One of the older men Aldo worked with encouraged him, saying, “If you have somebody willing to teach you to tattoo others, go for it. Give it five years of your life; if it doesn’t work out, the produce-manager job, or jobs like it, will always be here… you're not gonna lose anything by not being here.”

“I took that to heart,” Aldo said, “and figured yeah, I’d rather take the opportunity and see if I can, rather than sit around and think, well, what if I would have…”

As far as getting tattooed himself, a “full suit” is a goal, but he’s not quite there yet. A full suit is up to both wrists, up to the collar line on a t-shirt, and down to the feet. The top of the feet are debatable: you may not want tattoos to be visible if you have open-toed shoes. Aldo currently has tattoos covering his full torso, back, one full arm, and almost his whole neck and head. He’s still working on his legs, both butt cheeks, and his left arm.

During the pandemic, the shop where Aldo now works was closed for two-and-a-half months. “But from the time we were allowed to go back to work,” he said, “we were beyond our regular ‘busy.’ We were booked out, as many people as we could handle a day, full throttle.”

“When people can't travel, and don't have the ability to go on vacations, if they’re stuck at home and worried about money, something that’s relatively cheap that you can do, that’s sort of fun, is getting tattooed. It’s fun, it’s local, and it gets your mind off it (the pandemic). So a lot of people get tattooed instead of taking vacations.”

When he’s not tattooing people, Aldo feels like he doesn’t have a purpose. During the pandemic lockdown, he tried to find new outlets for expressing himself creatively, such as building castles in Minecraft and helping to remodel a bathroom at the shop where he works.

He had thought it would be good to spend time doing water-color painting during lockdown. “I don't paint enough at all right now; it’s something I need to get back into.”

“All of a sudden, I had all this time on my hands, and I could’ve gotten back into painting, but the medium that I'm really used to and have fun doing and enjoy the most is tattooing, working on someone’s skin. Also, there’s the social aspect of tattooing, the social interaction, the conversation. It’s a lot harder to sit down with just a piece of paper that doesn’t talk and lay down work on it.”

Aldo’s long term goal is to do solid, clean work he’s proud of, so that locals in the Raleigh, NC area (even local tattooers—if they want his kind of tattoos) could come to him and leave wearing his artwork. Nothing more than that, as long as he can make a decent living. He sees himself working as a tattoo artist for all of his adult life.

Aldo says, like any other form of art, tattooing is something that’s evolving and changing. And you’ll get what you put into it. “If you can face what your flaws are in any part of the process—composition, application, backgrounding, color theory, etc.—you can get better,” he said. “There’s not really a ceiling to it.”

I asked him if there was a particular technique or skill that he’s aspiring to master, and he said, the whole process can always be better. “You’ll never achieve perfection. That’s an ideal you’re always chasing, but you never get there. You can be proud of your work, but it’s a mistake to think, that’s it, I've done it.”

Check out Aldo's work on Instagram, @dadpantstattoo.

Thanks, Aldo!