Interview with Award Winning Tattoo Artist Chuck Atkins

It is my pleasure to be interviewing Chuck Atkins who is an award winning tattoo artist and co-owner of Bloodlines Ink. Bloodlines Ink is a tattoo and body piercing studio that is located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Chuck Atkins and his brother Eric Moffat opened Bloodlines Ink in November of 2007.

Q: How long have you been tattooing?

Chuck: I've been a tattooist for the past six years in a professional capacity. I wanted to be at a certain level or have a higher skill set before I took on the reasonability of tattooing my own cliental.

Q: What did you do before you started tattooing?

Chuck: Before I started tattooing full time I pierced for a few years and focused on developing my own style of art and how I could apply my graphic art's background to the body art medium. I took a lot of seminars from people in the business I really had a lot of respect for.

Q: Did you enjoy doing body piercing?

Chuck: I enjoyed piercing a lot and I really like the growth the industry was undergoing at the time. I was fascinated by the spiritual impressions some of the more extreme body modifications could touch upon. Suspensions and its roots with the Sundance Indians stands out the most in my mind, namely because of Fakir Mustafa's movement to adopt it for the modern primitives. I think the average person these days have a need to personalize the experiences they have and adopt aspects of other cultures into their own belief systems.

Q: Do you still do any body piercing or do you just tattoo?

Chuck: I haven't pierced in a long time but I still keep up with that aspect of the industry. I like to see who's doing what and I am constantly surprised to see how different a procedure is performed from one artist to the next.

Q: What made you want to become a tattoo artist?

Chuck: I was always into tattoos and I had seen the work get better and more realistic in the 90's. I really liked the tattoo's I was seeing in the media like on rock star's and characters in movie's sporting elaborate back pieces or full sleeve's of tribal. I was drawing comics for a small company and I thought that it would be cool to work on a permanent canvas and give my work more meaning.