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Apple Valley , California

Jamie Schene and Nikko Hurtado—Ignition Tattoo

By Bob Baxter with photographs by Bernard Clark

Back when I was in high school, my old friend Gary Moyer and I used to drive to Apple Valley to burn out the carbon in his dad’s 1955 Austin Healey Le Mans. The roads were relatively traffic free, back then, and one could push the little top-down, red-and-black, louvered-hood-with-brown-leather-straps sports car well over a hundred in that dry, desert air. Today, when we pulled into Apple Valley, we encountered some significant urban sprawl. Street after street of housing projects, strip malls and manufacturing sites have made this a vibrant community and an important home base for people with jobs within the greater San Bernardino County. As of 2006, the population was estimated to be 67,507. This bustling burg is ten miles east of neighboring Victorville, thirty-seven miles south of Barstow and forty-six miles north of San Bernardino through the Cajon Pass. In other words, it’s bustling but remote. When Jamie Schene moved away from nearby Victorville, some eighteen years ago, he swore he’d never come back.

“It’s changed a bit,” he says, “but back in the ’80s, it was not a very progressive place to live and grow up. I was into skateboarding and punk rock and art, and that kind of stuff wasn’t really happening in Apple Valley. And it gets hot here. This last year it got to one hundred twelve, one hundred fourteen degrees for a couple weeks. Initially, I moved to Los Angeles, worked at Von’s market and took a couple of art classes. The Von’s part really sucked. I had gone to L.A. mainly for a change, but I was interested in tattoos. In fact, I asked an artist who worked for Mike Pike’s father, J.R., if he would teach me to tattoo, when I was eighteen, and he said, no. He had just started tattooing himself and didn’t feel it was his place to teach me.

“I knew Mike, that was back in 1989. He tattooed me—he had long, blond hair at the time. He did my upper-right shoulder, but his dad inked my very first tattoo. It’s a skull. Me and my friend got tattoos: he got a skull with drumsticks and I got a skull with a skateboard. That was my introduction to tattooing. J.R. is a big reason that I’m a tattoo artist. Same with Mike. Back then, in the ’80s, tattooing was different than it is now. I was really nervous going into the shop. I mean, those guys were bikers. It was more of an outlaw vibe, but they were really cool people. J.R. had this way about him. He had a way of making you feel comfortable. It was inspiring to me, the artwork they were doing. It was a cool scene. It was mainly how they were. They may have looked scary, but, deep down, they were really nice people.

“When I moved to Los Angeles I just happen to be walking by Purple Panther and Cory Flatmo was outside smoking a cigarette. He said, ‘Hey, who did your work?’ and I started talking to him about the tattoo shop that J.R. owned up here called Tattoo Alley. Cory was just finishing his apprenticeship at that time, and I started getting tattooed by him. Then I started bringing in my own designs and he said, ‘Why don’t you look into possibly starting to tattoo?’ I was already interested in it, but I couldn’t find anybody to teach me and I had, essentially, put it on the back burner. I told him, I’d love to,’ but he said, ‘I can’t teach you, I just started tattooing myself,’ so it was kind of the same story all over again. Then he said, “But maybe you could get some equipment and I could at least steer you in the right direction.” And that’s what I did. I bought my very first machine from Clay Decker and a National power supply, but I was too afraid to do it. I didn’t want to screw anyone up. So, I just had this equipment laying around, and a mutual friend said that Mark Mahoney was opening up a new shop called Mayhem. He was partnering up with a guy named Charlie McDonald. I went in there with some of my artwork, talked to them and they said, yes, they were looking for an apprentice and I could start right away.

“I apprenticed for a little over a year and, in that time, they moved from Sherman Oaks in the Valley to Third Street in Hollywood. Soon after that, for some reason, Mark and Charlie decided to dissolve their partnership, and Mark went on to Tattoo Mania, when Gill Monte owned it. Charlie kept me on for awhile. Charlie had given me the shot at the shop, but Mark was the one that had apprenticed me, so I had ties to both of them. I felt funny, so I left after six months and went to work at Purple Panther on Sunset Boulevard.

“There was an amazing collection of artists there at the time. You had Shannon O’Sullivan, Cory Flatmo, Bob Vessels, Greg Rojas, even Joe Schmoe worked there for a time. Everyone was really excited about tattooing and really excited about working with each other. For me, just coming in after tattooing only six months, I was like a kid in a candy store. I worked there for about a year and then Vessels opened Funny Farm on Los Feliz near Vermont and I worked there for three years. Then my wife and I got tired of Los Angeles, so we moved up to Arcata in Northern California. We didn’t want to be in a big city anymore. But I missed the sunlight, so we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was 1999. I had saved up a little money, so we were there to basically snowboard and hang out. I tried to get into a shop with Dawn Parnell and a guy named Pecos Bill, I think it was. He had learned from Ed Hardy. The shop had a good thing going and I wanted to work there, but they were in transition, so I opened my own shop. It was called Aware (pronounced a-whar-ay), which is spelled like the English word ‘aware,’ but it’s actually a Japanese word meaning to see the ephemeral beauty in life. I was there for four years. It was a cool shop.

“My wife and I were expecting a baby, prices in Los Angeles were terribly inflated and we just couldn’t afford to buy a house, so we decided to return to Apple Valley, where prices were more reasonable and I could be back again with my old friends Mike and Jojo. Those guys are really inspiring, They have the right idea. They live out here in the Mojave where it’s cheap to live, they have a huge clientele and everybody loves their tattoos. That’s why I’ve been here for six years and the shop for five, and it’s cool the way I have it set up. No one actually works for me. I just rent them spaces—Nikko Hurtado, Ronnie Sanchez and Howard Eakin. I worked here completely on my own for two years. I had some clients from San Diego and Los Angeles drive up, but it took a couple of years to build up a client base. Business is good and I’d say that, currently, we tattoo sixty to seventy percent locals and the rest are out-of-towners. I really like the way everything has worked out and I couldn’t be happier.”

NIKKO HURTADO

The first tattoo Nikko Hurtado ever saw was on his grandfather. “He had a cross on his finger and my grandmother’s name across his knuckles,” says Nikko. “I thought it was cool, but he didn’t like them. He grew up in gangs and things like that, and, when he got older, he thought there was a stigma to it and people looked at him differently. That was in the San Fernando Valley in California. That’s where I grew up until I was twelve, and then we moved up to the high desert. My parents got divorced, so my dad stayed down there and I came up here. I would go back and forth every other weekend, from down there to up here, until I was about sixteen.

“I always drew. I remember my first drawings were like Bart Simpson and comic books, stuff like X-Men and the graffiti from around where I lived. When I was really young—this is going to sound funny—like in kindergarten, my teacher thought I was like some special kid or something. I think it was because I could draw, which she associated with smarts, which had nothing to do with it. So they sent me to a magnet school in Los Angeles and, man, it was so hard. I stopped going there and went back to regular school. I didn’t graduate or anything. I would make deals with my teachers that, if I didn't talk to the students and take them away from their work, I could do whatever I wanted, so I would draw all period. If my friend and his girlfriend were in the same class, I’d draw them doing crazy things, like making it or something funny, comic-book style.

“I took art classes in high school. That was my goal, to become an artist. But I had a lot of trouble. I went through school but I didn't finish it. I took classes at Pasadena Art Center up until then, I didn’t graduate so I couldn’t take them anymore. I gave it up and worked construction for about three years. I didn’t draw at all. I gave it up completely. I figured, if I wasn’t going to do art, I might as well concentrate on trying to make a living. The turn around came when a friend of mine, Mike DiMattia—we had been friends for fourteen years or so and went to Pasadena Art Center together—told me, ‘You ought to come and tattoo.’ He was working at Art Junkies in Hesperia, California at the time, and gave me an apprenticeship. I did the groundwork, man. I painted the walls, I scrubbed the tubes, anything I was told to do. If they told me to wash their cars, I’d wash their cars. Even if it didn’t have anything to do with tattooing, anything they wanted I did. It was a full-on apprenticeship. It was six months, seven days a week. Working construction I did all right and I had put money away. I had enough money to live, not great, but I lived with my grandmother. During that time I was able to concentrate on tattooing. Seven days a week, ten hour days. As long as they were there, I was there.

“The first day I went in to actually tattoo, they said I would be able to do a client off the street. I had been tattooing a little already, and somebody walked in and they made the person wait until I got there. They told him that ’the artist will be here soon.’ So, when I arrived, I got to do a small, sixty-dollar tattoo. It was like some numbers and a little scorpion. It was really cool. I was there three years.

“Photorealistic tattoos were a natural progression from doing pinups. The artists at the shop, Mike and Ronnie, would all look at pictures differently and give each other ideas. It came about from looking at more realistic pictures and trying to tattoo them. No one was really doing photorealistic at that time. People like Deano Cook and all the black-and-gray artists in Southern California, but nobody at the shop where I worked.

“When I left Art Junkies, I worked out of my house for four months. That’s when I did the Cat Woman, a tattoo that most people who know my work are familiar with. It’s one of the first realistic tattoos I did that looks like a photo. Then a customer of mine was getting tattooed by Jamie, and he said Jamie wanted to meet me, so I went and hung out at Ignition. After that, we became friends and I decided it was the right choice to work with him. I’ve been here almost four years.

“Full-color photorealistic is about all I do now. Traditional style is hard for me. Lettering, I can do it, but it takes a lot of preparation. I think it’s harder for my mind to work that way. You know, when people ask me for lettering, I send them to an artist who does it really well. It might take me twice as long as someone else. But if someone asks me to do a Japanese piece, I explain to them that, okay, but I want to do it the way I want to do it. If they like it, then I’ll do it. If not, I’ll send them to someone who can. But I'll do anything. I’m always up for the challenge. If it puts a fire into me, then I'll take it on.

“Right now, that’s what I’m doing more of, trying to figure out where I’m going to go with my art. Portraits are fun and I love them, but I want to have the artistic freedom to do different things. So now, I’m trying to take what I do with the realistic stuff and apply it to my drawings. I’ve been painting a lot, trying to learn how to create more, rather than repeating what I’ve done before.

“I used to take a real long time to complete a portrait. I used to render every single piece from the photo. If there was a stitch in the clothing, I used to put the stitch in, I did every single, little tooth on the zipper. I would do everything, every wrinkle exactly the same. But now I not trying to do an exact copy. What I’m trying to do is capture the emotion of the people. Sometimes, for example, something might be a little too green if, for example, they’re next to a green wall. It’s going to come out greener on the skin. I used to do an exact copy of that, and then, when it would heal a month or a year later, it would turn a little more green, a little darker, and it just wouldn’t look right. So now, I make certain choices to make it look like the person and make a better tattoo.

“I learned with standard coils. I love them. Nothing better than that. I used a Neuma for eight months and it’s a great machine. It runs really well, but I’m slow and it was slowing me down even more. Where it used to take me twelve hours, I got it down to where it would take me six or seven hours with a coil machine. It was eight or nine hours with the Neuma. The color builds up slower. Like when I wanted to make choices, it didn’t respond fast enough for me. But if it weren’t for the Neuma I never would have used a rotary machine. And now I used a rotary machine for detail, eyes, noses and lips. The Neuma runs on air, but I use an electric rotary now and just run it really soft.”

Humble beginnings, for sure, but now Nikko and Jamie are known worldwide; yet another example of major tattoo artists living and doing well in small, out-of-the-way communities. Larry Brogan, for example, is in twenty-two-thousand-population Lockport, Illinois. Jeff Gogué is in a blip on the map called Grants Pass, Oregon. Guy Aitchison’s studio is five and a half hours south of Chicago in Creal Springs, a town of barely seven hundred people.

To paraphrase what my dear, departed grandfather used to say: an artist may be worth seeing, but is he worth going to see? It’s clear, when it comes to Schene and Hurtado, if you’re at their level of talent, people will come to you.

JAMIE SCHENE AND NIKKO HURTADO
IGNITION TATTOO
21065 Bear Valley Road
Apple Valley, California 92308
Phone: (760) 240-1714