![]() I thought my apprenticeship was going to take a year and I felt I was not ready to tattoo paying clients. Three weeks later he told me I was ready to start tattooing clients. Unfortunately, the owner of the studio was only interested in making money and had me pick up my machines after a couple of weeks and start practicing. I was in the studio five days a week and on my days off I worked as an assistant manager for a restaurant, working 16 hours a day. They were Flatliners and came in their own coffins. My pride and joys were my Time Machine machines. “I saved like crazy so that when I started in the studio, I had a set of good inks and equipment. Nothing like a loved one to give your arse a kick in the right direction – hey we all need it sometime – but unfortunately, Chantale was about to find out that there is a darker side to the tattoo world. When I called my Mum to tell her, she cried and screamed down the phone as she had always wanted me to become a tattoo artist.” The next day I went to the local studio with my art portfolio and was offered an apprenticeship on the spot. It was like a flame inside me grew into a massive fire at the very thought. ![]() I was about to go on to my degree when Joel suggested I try getting an apprenticeship in tattooing again. I loved every second of my course and passed with distinctions. Once there, I decided to study fine arts with the ambition of becoming an art teacher. “A few years later I moved to Australia with my now husband, Joel, who is Australian. I kind of gave up on my dream for a while thinking I would never get an apprenticeship and not wanting to go down the ‘scratching up in my room’ route. “When I turned 20, I moved to Spain and managed to get an apprenticeship in a small studio, but unfortunately I had to move back to the UK as I had no money. I still give them shit about it now and they say it’s one of their biggest regrets.”Īnd so began a journey that would lead Chantale around the world, chasing that demon dragon of machines and ink. No matter how much I bugged them, they would not give me an apprenticeship. ![]() “I’m still great friends with the artists and I used to go into that studio almost every weekend from that point, begging them for an apprenticeship I would draw some flash for them and offer to be their general dogsbody, but they were having none of it. I was 14 and hooked! I knew then that this was what I wanted to do. That same night, I designed something to go on my stomach and went to the local studio the next day and got it tattooed. I always knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind, but it wasn’t until I remember looking in a magazine one day and seeing a girl in tight leather trousers stood by a motorbike with a tattoo going around her waist that it clicked. ![]() “Eversince I was little, I’ve sat on the sofa and drawn, even when everyone else was watching TV my Mum used to buy me plain wallpaper to draw on because I would go through so much paper all the time. And at other times, it’s her name popping up on competition winner lists at conventions around the globe that catches my eye.įinally getting around to finding out more about the person behind the tattoos, it becomes clear that in a world of continual flux, Chantale’s presence in tattoo seems to be one of the few constants. I’ve known Chantale Coady going on two years now and every time I’ve seen her she has either been bent over a stencil sheet coming up with a killer design or laying some ink down on a very happy client. ![]()
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