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The hills are alive…with Han Cholo. For your viewing pleasure, the long-awaited video lookbook for the Fall 2010 collection:
Read MorePeople ask me about my ink all the time, they want to know what it means or what it symbolizes, which is a fair question I guess… unless of course it’s to commemorate something horrible that happened to you in your life, in which case it is most certainly not a fair question rather a rude and fucking painful question. That being said, assuming it’s not a emotionally painful tattoo, I don’t always have a good answer. Is that horrible? Tattoos can mean so many things, a right of passage, royalty, criminal, sexy, disgusting, hipster, sailor, prisoner, to name a few.
To me a tattoo is something different, like me, it is impulsive, it is a powerful thought or an emotion that I can eternalize on my skin, to help me remember that moment be it a positive or negative thing. I can’t sit here and justify every tattoo I have on my body, like the fucked up sparrow on my right ankle that I got from my buddy who delivered pizzas at the pizza shop I worked at in Topanga Canyon while sitting behind the counter bored on a weeknight (It was his first tattoo, almost entirely free-hand… epic). But I can tell you that it’s there for a reason, only that reason belongs to me, it’s not there for you to fucking decided whether or not it was a good idea, it’s not there for my grandmother to love it or hate.
I believe a tattoo should be whatever the fuck you want it to be, whether it’s to impress girls or to impress yourself. There is a story behind every piece of ink on me sure, and there will be stories for the many to come, but they aren’t there for that, they are there to cryogenically freeze a moment in time and engrave it on my flesh, just in case I grow up and forget where and who I came from, or even worse if I go all memento and wake up without knowing which way is up, I’ll at least know my mothers name, and my dead friends name, and that I have a fondness for Japanese art.
It’s not that deep, at least not for me, but it can be for you, that’s fine, just don’t judge anybody based on the criteria you’ve created for yourself to justify your own actions.
My favorite tattoos, and what inspired me to get all my work are the following:
Russian Gang Tats
Japanese Art
Sailors & Pirates
The Gangbangers in my old neighborhood
The OG Rene who used to run a shop out of his garage off of la mirada in east hollywood (who gave my my first 3)
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I spent the better half of my adolescence obsessed with collecting stories. Not just any stories, funny stories, raunchy stories, adventurous ones too, but mostly dangerous. It actually got to a point to where now even thinking about some of the shit I got myself into gives me the chills because I’m such a square in my old age (26). The homie Mike Live constantly clowns me on being a softy now, but respects the perspective, and appreciates that I got it all out of my system at a young age. The most important thing is that I was able to harness the essence of those days, and am currently in the process of translating that into something… fuck if I know exactly what that is. All I know is that it’s burning inside me, and my faith doesn’t lay as much in religion as it does in the fact that I know every day, every step, every decision I make I get that much closer to being enlightened. So, I move forward, stay positive, and remember that in order to make good decisions you must sometimes make bad ones, when unavoidable fuck what the world says and trust your gut. In the end you have nobody else to report to, and nobody else will ever truly know exactly what you know about yourself, therefore rendering them incapable of judging you accurately enough for you to give two shits. Do you, Period.
Stay thirsty my friends.
- Epok
