by Jeff Gogué
Each day as I get ready for work, whether I am drawing, cleaning the studio, or setting up my station, the same thought returns. I am in my twenty seven years of full time tattooing, and reflection nags at me. All the bodies I have worked on, all the stories I have heard, and all the tributes, names, dates, lyrics, family crests, portraits, and birth flowers.…
There is a point where the person with tattoos becomes the tattooed person.
A shift.
A fulcrum.
It happens when you stop designing your parts and start seeing yourself as a whole — the body as one work, or at least wanting to.
When desire fades and resolve emerges in place.
This resolve to feel whole is not the same as the desire to be finished.
One of my favorite words is decision.
Its root meaning is to cut off.
When you decide, you sever options.
A true decision leaves no escape route.
That’s what makes tattooing powerful — you live inside your choice.
For some of us, there was a moment — the fulcrum — when the choice shifted.
No longer to simply have tattoos, but to be tattooed.
Fewer still reach that point early in the process.
The difference is:
A tattoo is a mark.
Tattoos are accumulation.
Being tattooed is transformation.
That’s the shift. The becoming.
Where are you at?
Almost all of us begin the same way — wanting a tattoo.
Then we want tattoos.
And at some point, without meaning to, we realize we don’t just have them anymore — we are them.
Getting a tattoo carries weight.
What to get, where, who will see it, what it means.
Each question is part of the cut — the decision that severs all other possibilities.
Once needles meet skin, you’re changed. Permanently.
That act is fundamentally a rebellious one. Not often loud, but absolute.
A conscious choice to alter your body against the default of time.
Because time will mark you anyway.
Life leaves scars of its own — accidental, unintentional, inevitable.
Tattooing is the opposite: scars by choice.
The rush comes from that decision.
From the endorphins, yes, but more from the clarity of “I chose this.”
Then you do it again. And again.
Each time with its own rhythm: idea, design, artist, pain, healing, reflection.
Each time deepening the commitment — of time, money, discomfort, self.
Eventually, you stop asking why. The what tends to lessen in importance, and the where is a simple choice. Wherever there is open skin.
You simply know — this is what I do.
And it won’t stop until you do.
That’s resolve.
Resolve carries its own kind of regret.
The early designs, the impulsive moments, the short-sighted parts that didn’t see the whole.
Pieces that made sense once, now fragments of a larger form you’re still building.
But that’s part of it too.
The art isn’t perfect.
Neither are we.
And maybe that’s the point.
People outside of tattooing think it’s about artwork. They think it’s about style, ego, or pain tolerance.
But those who cross that fulcrum know — it’s about commitment. It’s about choosing who you are, over and over, even when it hurts. And not just the physical pain because most of what people get is realized in crisis, loss and in search for healing.
The goal isn’t to collect tattoos. It’s to build a life you can stand inside of.
People will ask, “How many tattoos do you have?”
The real question is — how far are you wanting to go?
