Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool.
The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum.
I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the lettering as we couldn't afford to replace it.
This autumn, the studio will have been closed for 9 years. Time flies, hmm?
Two of the business cards I designed for Richard, back when MySpace was the site to be seen on.
These-days there's a tattoo studio on every street corner, it seems, but in those early years Richard had the city to himself. In its heyday, that small, cramped studio was a mighty money-earner.
He still talks about the studio sometimes, but he has no intention of opening another. For Richard, the joy went out of it when his best friend Lee Christall died. Lee used to come to the studio nearly every Saturday, and they'd talk about the bands they'd seen perform, or the music and films they'd enjoyed, and clients would join in with the conversations. Sometimes Lee would bring his guitar with him, and clients would be treated to folk, rock, jazz and blues, and on several occasions, before Lee started showing signs of his illness, there'd be two or three guitar players enjoying impromptu jam sessions. When the work was done, the two friends would head round to The Ship and Mitre or The Swan to continue socialising. After Lee's death, Saturdays weighed heavily.
The interior of Richard's tattoo studio
Richard says he misses the banter in the studio, but certainly doesn't miss the hassles that self-employment brought. Hardly a year passed by without some big drama, most of which was hot air amounting to nothing of real consequence, but it was stressful all the same.
One time, a certain medical waste disposal company which I will not name tried to rip us off for a not-so-small fortune by falsifying their own forms. For example, if two bags of waste had been collected, a zero was later added to the carbon form so it read as if there had been twenty bags. As if one small tattoo studio could possibly produce twenty bags of medical waste in a month! We refused to pay, so they tried to sue for unpaid bills. Our top copies had the original number on them, of course, and so this case didn't even get to Court, but the company proceeded to uncover a fraud racket within its own organisation, and the Law played its part then.
Another time, a young woman tried to launch a personal injury claim. Her solicitor's letter contained photocopies of two badly-focussed photographs of an ear which had been tattooed with HIM's heartogram. Now, both images had been so tightly cropped that it was impossible to tell if the images were even of the same ear. The heartogram's colours differed, one being pink, the other red. Neither photo was dated, and therefore they were inadmissible as legal evidence. I also pointed out in my reply to her solicitor that one ear showed a prominent freckle while the other did not. Cue instant dismissal of that case!
And then there was the endless stream of idiots who flocked to the studio, such as the girl who wanted to be tattooed brown all over to save her the bother of using sunbeds. Honestly, I could go on but you'd only assume I was making up these tales, so outlandish and absurd were some peoples' requests.
Some of the merchandise which I designed for the studio.
There were plenty of sad stories, too, when clients came in for memorial pieces, wanting tattoos as aids to their grief process - lost loves, premature babies, beloved pets, a portrait of the music hero who'd meant so much to them, slogans of self-help, etc. Others wanted a tattoo to cover scars from surgery or those left by violence. Every person has a story to tell, if only you're willing to listen.
Looking up at the empty room, as pedestrians and traffic streamed around us, Evelyn, Richard and I wondered what would become of the building, if it will be demolished like so many of Liverpool's buildings which aren't old or interesting enough to be granted protected status and yet aren't modern enough to meet contemporary needs. It was like looking at the ghost of another life. One business on the ground floor still remains, Max Spielmann's photo printing shop, but the others are long gone, folded or retired, such as H. Coleman's tailoring business. It was Gerry Coleman who accepted Richard as a tenant right at the beginning, when Richard had nothing to offer but a dream and the raw ambition which just about enabled him to scrape together that first quarter's rent.
Lee Christall
passed away 8th May, 2013, aged 59.
A great friend, often remembered.
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