Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Wagner.
Hi Nick, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am a Jacksonville native. Born in Riverside at St. Vincent’s hospital in 1973,
I’ve spent nearly my whole childhood in the same neighborhood that I was born, and my memory is of a poorer but edgy and artsy neighborhood populated being by every kind of person I could imagine, with some hippies, and even a few bikers for flavor.
I drew steadily from the age of three, but really started on my artistic journey in earnest when I was given a copy of Fantastic Four #260 in the fifth grade.
I continued from there drawing a lot and painting a little all through high school only getting side tracked by girls and playing guitar in local metal bands.
I began getting tattooed at Westside Tattoo on Roosevelt Blvd in 1993, and once I realized I could possibly make a living drawing, I aggressively pursued that by getting tattooed, asking a lot of questions, and helping out around the shop.
While I was trying to “get in” I worked at a comic shop and attended a few conventions with my artist at the time, Jason Harms, currently of Livewire tattoo in Jacksonville beach.
While working at the comic shop, Jason saw me painting life sized murals of superheroes on the walls. When he realized I was actually drawing them on rather than projecting them and tracing, he finally offered to apprentice me.
Everything after that initial opportunity was just plain old hard work.
Westside Tattoo expanded into Orange Park where I worked as a manager and after a few years it was bought and absorbed into Inksmith&Rogers as a new location in 1999.
I was kept on as manager and continued to work there for almost 8 years, did a brief stint in a private shop, and finally opened Black Hive Tattoo for business in November of 2008.
That’s when I REALLY found out what hard work was.
Since then I have had a great group of artists come and go while I continued to focus on projects with themes that revolve around Asian motifs (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Balinese, etc, etc), Lovecratian horrors, various mythological characters, sci-fi, comic books, and monsters.
While I’m generally known for a strong illustrative style known for big bold fields of color and lots of detail, I amm equally comfortable with executing designs in “black and gray”
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Absolutely NOT smooth! Hahaha!
But as it tends to happen, some of the “worst” things to happen have ended up being blessings in disguise. I won’t say specifically what they all were because that would take WAY too long, but those challenges and even disappointments invariably guided me to where I really needed to be.
After all, while I have always had a base inclination and some meager talent artistically, talent will only get you so far.
What really got me most of my opportunities and my long term client base has been hard work.
Anyone can draw, but not everyone is willing to break themselves to become a better version of what they were before.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Since covid and Amazon, tattoo supplies have become far to easy to get. I think that a lot of people that were here for the last 5 years of the times of unprecedented “plenty” will quit because they’ve never been through a hard time like the 2008-2010 economic downturn.
Artists that want to hang on will have to drop the “too cool” for waht you want to attitude.
Ity’s one thing to turn down work because you are simply booked out to far, or you aren’t very accomplished at a particular style, but artists that specialize in one or two things are going to find it very hard to make a living when whatever the current “trend” is dies and they’re left with no other skills professionaly, technically, or artistically.
As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be faster than the bear you’re running from (the bear being the lean times) you just have to be faster (or in this case more consistent and adaptable) than the person your running with from the bear.
Pricing:
- $220 an hour for full custom designs
- $160 an hour for flash
- flat pricing special events
- $160 is our shop minimum
Contact Info:
- Website: https://blackhivetattoo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackhivetattoo/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackhivetattoo
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/black-hive-tattoo-jacksonville
- Other: https://www.blackhivetattoo.com/appointments/
