ARTIST CONNOR GARRITY

I started tattooing in the winter of 1996, fresh out of high school at the ripe age of 19. A friend showed me the fine craft of homemade tattooing: a spoon, ac adapter, a boom box motor, a little electrical tape, some beer caps, and a couple loyal friends. “I was a tattoo artist”... so I thought.

After a year of going to local metal shows and house parties, my folks helped me out financially for an apprenticeship at Raptor Tattoo in Edmonton, AB Canada under the instruction of Glen Warwa. The summer of 1997 thus marks my lifelong commitment to art, travel, and tattoo.

After spending two years at Raptor, I packed up and moved to Vancouver, B.C., where I began working at Liquid Silver Tattoo with Ed Holmes. I gained crucial experience there--learning about machine building, color, the proper way to solder needles, and sterilization techniques.

By 2000 I was still eager to expand my knowledge, so I headed south to California to fulfill a dream of living in Hollywood and diving deep into the tattoo scene there. I got my start at Atomic Tattoo on Hollywood Blvd., in the heart of all the action. Next I moved to Silverlake to experience another side of Los Angeles, where Mike Ferguson's First Amendment Tattoo became my home for a short time.

After First Amendment I moved on to Broken Art Tattoo to work next to the extremely talented, Jeremy Swan. There I picked up on a whole other side of tattooing, motivated solely by the desire to create art. Hence, I truly started to become a better artist at that point. Jeremy pushed me to draw and show my customers that I was an artist and designer, alongside being a tattooist. He always told me "Your art is worth more than that", so I started to make the transition from charging less and rushing through a piece, to charging more and taking my time to create both a unique experience and an amazing piece of art. To this day it hasn't chased my clients away.

For one reason or another I left Broken Art and moved on to Studio City Tattoo--one of the busiest shops I’ve ever worked in. I got to work alongside some great artists and the constant flow of work coming in helped me to push my skills further, but like so many times before, the time had come to move on.

This time it was more of a revelation of what I wanted to become and what the future had in store for me and my craft. With that in mind, it was time to do what I always strived for; open my own shop.