Jimbo Redden
Jimbo has been tattooing for 14 years. He has always been interested in art and after being tattooed, he decided to seek an apprenticeship. He started with American Traditional style tattooing and does “a little bit of everything now.” He wanted to try different styles. Jimbo enjoys every aspect of his career in drawing and tattooing.
A lot of young children and teens have expressed their interest in tattooing to Jimbo and he continues to tell them to keep drawing and to work hard. Jimbo, my dad, introduced me to the tattoo community during his apprenticeship. He felt the biggest influence as a tattoo artist he’s had was when I tattooed him at age ten.
“I try to help other new artists that come into the shop with things that I think they need to work on, so I guess I influence them to be better artists.”
As of April 2022, I have 15 tattoos. 14 of those have been done by my dad. My friends always think it’s so cool that my dad is a tattoo artist. “You can get free tattoos whenever you want!” Although I do get free tattoos, it’s not that simple. I’ve gotten the majority of my tattoos around birthdays, christmases, or graduation. I’ve either picked or drawn all the designs myself or helped in their creation. My dad isn’t always on board with my design choices, so there are times I get some resistance. There are times that he doesn’t like my ideas behind my tattoo and it makes it twenty times harder to convince him to do my tattoos. I’ve done fourteen tattoos in seven different sessions. Each session was at least two hours long. You would think me being his daughter, he’d go a little easier when tattooing me. Wrong. He does not hold back. He always makes the lighthearted joke that he’s giving me back what I put him through when I was growing up. We sat for a five hour session to do my left forearm half sleeve. That was the first time me and him got into an argument while he was tattooing me. For anyone who does or doesn’t have tattoos, the elbow is one of the worst places for getting a tattoo. It’s basically directly on bone. We were three and a half to four hours into the session and I was getting very irritated because I was in pain which caused the argument between me and my dad. He told me that I was the one that chose to do all these tattoos at once and to stop complaining. I got through it, but the filler dots were probably the most painful tattoo I’ve gotten and that’s saying something considering I have a huge tattoo on my ribs. It felt like I was being electrocuted. We had to stop and he didn’t finish the dots. Basically what I’m getting at is having a tattoo artist for a dad is cool and all, but he’s always gonna be your dad first. You’re not his client, he’s gonna treat you and hold you to a higher standard because you’re his kid. He’d never let me complain when getting tattooed because he knew I could handle it. Even though he was hard on me in those situations, I wouldn’t trade my experiences for the world.
