Today we’d like to introduce you to Rob McDowell.
Hi Rob, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
On the morning of April 2nd, 2020 I was called onto a companywide zoom meeting where they announced that they, like so many other companies around the world, would have to make layoffs. The covid pandemic was just getting into full swing and as it would for so many others, it was about to change my life completely. I was one of two mechanical engineers for a communications tech company, and to be honest, as the more experienced engineer of the two I felt that my job was safe. I didn’t account for the fact that I cost the company a little more than the other guy. At the end of the day, a severance email arrived in my inbox. For the first time since arriving in America from my homeland of Ireland 5 years before, I found myself unemployed with no prospect of work. Over the next few weeks, I spiraled in and out of depression and panic, and admittedly some relief at being involuntarily freed from a job that brought me very little happiness or fulfillment. I considered selling all my belongings and moving home, though job prospects were just as bleak across the Atlantic as they were here in the US. Then the silver lining came, I was eligible for some months of unemployment income. I may have shed a tear or ten in relief… At the time I was living in Big Bear CA where rents and the general cost of living were still relatively low compared to other Southern California towns and cities and I have no wife or kids so I was grand, at least for a few months.
I had nothing but time on my hands then and had always wanted to do something “artistic” for a living, whether it be music or drawing. Growing up as the oldest son to a Korean mother (I’m half Irish, half Korean), my career aspirations were pretty much limited to doctor, lawyer, or engineer with all other options leading to homelessness and an early death according to mom. But here I was, 29 and unemployed and given an opportunity to change my life, so I had to try.
A few years before this, back in my engineering days, I had gone through one of those earth-shattering breakups that hopefully only come once or never in a lifetime. The kind that makes people dye their hair and take up salsa lessons or become a monk in an effort to “find themselves”. I tried all of these things and many more. One of the things was tattooing. I was accepted into an apprenticeship in a small shop in San Diego. That’s a whole story in itself and probably too long to get into here, but I’ll just say it went poorly. I was eventually fired from the shop for personal and stylistic differences with the latter being an important one. The guys in the shop had a more “traditional” background and wanted me to develop the same style. Traditional work, especially American traditional is characterized by thick lines, bold colors,s or darker shades of black and grey and has a very specific aesthetic, which is dope, don’t get me wrong. A person covered in well-done American trad tattoos is a pretty sick sight. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do, and I’ll be honest, I was definitely a little headstrong about that.
I wanted to do FineLine work. A more detail-oriented approach to tattooing, utilizing much thinner lines and softer shading to create a more delicate-looking tattoo. Anyway, I was asked to leave the shop after doing my first 6 or 7 pieces due to those differences of opinion. I was pretty upset by the whole experience, had a serious chip on my shoulder, and was determined to make it on my own with my own style. For the next half a year I tried to keep on tattooing out of my house in Pacific Beach, but between sinking 40+ hours a week into the engineering office and having only a handful of clients, I really didn’t get anywhere with it, and eventually gave up on the idea with some amount of bitterness.
Fast forward to April 2020. Up in Big Bear with no job and all the time in the world. I decided to give it another shot and really focus on learning how to do FineLine tattoos. As with many tattoo artists, my legs were the most available and willing canvas around, so I covered them with practice pieces. It was actually an amazing time in my life. The ski slopes in Big Bear were all closed down because of the pandemic but every morning, my roomy and one or two of my close friends that had come up to spend time at our cabin would hit McDonald’s, load up on McMuffins and coffee, strap our boards and skis to our backs and hike the mountain. Pretty much every day. We’d hang out at the top, ride the backcountry for a while, and cruise home in the afternoon. Light a fire in the cabin, stick on a pot of curry and I’d start tattooing myself while the lads played pool and got drunk and everyone tried to figure out what was going to happen with their lives. They were some really good times in my life, and I’m fully aware of how blessed I was to call 2020 a good year because I know for so many others it was excruciating and heartbreaking and my heart goes out to everyone that lost loved ones or found themselves in a truly difficult position or just plain alone during that year.
Anyway, I started posting my leg tats to my install, and over the course of April and May, I started getting hit up by some friends in San Diego. “Hey, dude, your work’s kind of not looking totally sh*t! Wanna come to give me a piece?” was the general gist of most messages. So, at the end of May, I stuffed all my gear into beat-up old BMW 3 series (a terrible car for a snowy mountain town, just a word of warning to anyone thinking about moving to one) for my first tattoo road trip. I drove down to Pacific Beach and spent the next week setting up a studio in bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, anywhere we could fit the gear. It was a pretty wild experience and I loved it, but it still didn’t really feel like this would be a sustainable career. At night I’d sleep on a friend’s couch and at the end of the week, I packed up and drove back to Big Bear to wait for the next batch of tattoos to come in. They came in a lot faster than I thought they would.
Within two weeks I was back down again for another batch of house calls. And then it all kind of exploded. I think it was a combination of a lot of things, but the single greatest contributor was how well connected and social everyone in San Diego is. Word of mouth was like wildfire for my business and as anyone who’s spent any time down here will tell you, San Diegans and almost everyone who calls this place home have a certain optimism and positivity that’s hard to find elsewhere. People I barely knew were so supportive it blew my mind. They would share my Instagram with all their friends, introduce me to strangers at parties and generally just hype up my very underwhelming tattoo business beyond belief. I couldn’t have done it without the support I received here…. In late summer I received so many requests that I came down and stayed for 4 weeks straight, and then did another 6-week marathon in the fall. During both of these, a good friend of mine with a nice, large, well-lit apartment in downtown SD let me set up a semi-permanent studio at his and let me crash there the entire duration of each trip. I worked almost every single day during both of those trips, and when I returned to Big Bear for winter, I knew that I could do this for a living, do it for life.
I spent the winter between Big Bear and Utah and moved down to Little Italy San Diego in February 2021. It broke my heart to leave the mountains and a place that had facilitated such an insane life change, but all my clients were down here so it just made sense to be here. Not that I’m complaining, but Little Italy’s been an insane spot to live and call home for this last year and a half. Anyway, I set up a private studio in my home and got to work. It hasn’t been an easy year and a half. Working for yourself, and learning the craft of tattooing on your own is both incredible and downright terrifying in equal measures. I’ve had days where I feel such a joy that I get to do this for a living that all day long I’m smiling and laughing. And had just as many where I was so stressed out that I want to pack up my gear and burn it, never to tattoo again. But thanks to a steady stream of clients who – bless every single one of them – like my particular style, I’ve grown more confident, grown in my abilities and knowledge of the craft, and grown my business and enjoyment of what I get to do every day.
So, here I am, 2 years into it, and in a few months, I’ll be doing my first ever guest spot in a real studio. Two studios actually, in New York. It’s a huge milestone for me, and while I’m incredibly nervous about it, for me it feels like I’ve come full circle, it feels like acceptance by the tattoo community, where my journey really began with rejection from it when I was fired from that first shop. I’m incredibly grateful that I get to create art for a living and that people actually want and trust me to do it on their bodies. That probably sounds like a cliche tattooing acknowledgment but it’s true. It’s been such a wild ride, and while a bit of stability and steadiness are welcome after a crazy two years, I’m beyond excited to see what the future brings.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
As mentioned before, it has been anything but a smooth road. There’s been too many obstacles and struggles to list here, and many of them are related to the technical aspects of tattooing itself and not that interesting to read about. But one that might be relatable to a lot of people, and that was definitely my biggest challenge can be summed up neatly in two words. Imposter syndrome. During my first year in Little Italy (2021(as my work improved, I went through a pretty intense internal shift. In 2020 I was a beginner. And everyone knew that. I was tattooing friends and friends of friends. Everyone knew the story; it was my first year doing this. The expectations were low. That’s not to say I didn’t try my absolute hardest every time, but I was free to be a beginner and just enjoy the novelty of doing this wild new thing and seeing myself improve on a nearly daily basis.
Then it changed. In 2021 it was not a novelty, it was my job, my only source of income. My clients were no longer just friends but people who were finding my work online and reaching out there. It became very public in a sense. All of a sudden there was a bar, an expectation of quality that had to be maintained and continuously improved on. The designs became more complex, more difficult, and more varied. And I no longer had the luxury of being perceived as a beginner. I began to feel that I was a fraud. That I couldn’t continuously meet that bar, that my best pieces were flukes, shooting stars of inspiration and luck that would seldom repeat. A huge rift grew in me between what I felt I was expected to produce and what I felt I was actually capable of producing. And as anyone who is involved in any creative or artistic endeavor will tell you, we are our own worst critics. And putting a piece of art, you have created out into the world for public scrutiny (as you almost have to these days via Instagram to grow your business) can be incredibly anxiety-inducing. I fell into the trap of counting likes on a post and going from feeling elated over a piece that I thought was some of my best work to depressed and anxious in a matter of hours because it wasn’t getting as many likes as a previous piece I had posted. Was I getting worse? Am I actually just really bidding and deluding myself? Etc. Negative internal spirals of thought that just confirmed and strengthened my imposter syndrome.
Couple this with the fact that I was partying way too much at the time, and I brought myself to the verge of a mental breakdown near the end of summer 2021. Anyway, it was a gradual and careful climb out of this hole. I had to let go of the idea that the online reception of a piece was any indicator of its worth and focus instead on creating the best possible piece for the person it was going on because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter one ounce what anyone else thinks of the piece except for the person who will wear it forever. I also had to embrace and internalize the idea that I will always be learning, forever a student of art who will always have room to grow. This relieved a lot of the internal pressure I placed on myself. And I stopped partying as much and took better care of my mental health as a whole. Finally, I started accepting one simple fact, if people are coming to me, they like my work. It does it for them. And that’s enough. Things got better.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in FineLine realism and floral work. The florals would probably be my bread and butter. I do my flowers much looser, softer, and more sprawling than traditional designs. I love doing them too because I’ve gotten to the stage where I can draw most of my designs on the client with a sharpie marker on the day to create a rough design, then if they like that, we just go for it. I kind of create the design on the fly as we tattoo and it’s fun, it’s spontaneous, and lets me enter a real flow state and just get lost in the process of creation which is what art is all about right? The realism stuff definitely calls more to the engineer in me. If people want a portrait of an animal or landscape, etc., there’s a much more defined end goal. It either looks like the reference or doesn’t so it’s all about precision. My favorite pieces are ones that combine a bit of both, some realism element with floral decor surrounding it.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Unfortunately, I don’t have much advice here. My way wouldn’t be recommended by most tattoo artists out there as being self-taught inevitably leaves you with a bunch of bad habits or just sends you on a windy road where a straight one could have been taken if that makes sense. But I’ll say this, the internet is a wonderful resource. For those aspiring artists who can’t get an apprenticeship, don’t let it stop you. Do your research – there are plenty of online courses from world-class artists available now – and get to tattooing at home on fake skins. It’s a start, and after that, try again for an apprenticeship now that you have something more concrete to show. And if that fails again, well… there’s always your legs and your friends’ legs.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: Robmcd91
