Awards and Public Recognition
These are the trophies, awards and published articles of Skeleton Crew Tattoo.

Blot,_Don’t_Wipe_David_Newman-Stump_Lives_the_Dream_By_Traci_Brink_Cumbay

.

Blot, Don’t Wipe
David Newman-Stump Lives the Dream
By Traci Brink Cumbay

Text taken from article published in 2/2005 issue of International Tattoo Art:

It’s been another 16-hour day busting his hump for his mentor, Bill Roberts. David Newman-Stump takes a breather and thinks. He’s set up and taken down workstations for dozens of tattoos over the past several months. He’s sterilized countless needles. He’s cleaned the floors, washed Bill’s car and hit the road to learn the trade. Now the clock has counted down, and he’s experiencing those few remaining minutes of excited dread. David Newman-Stump is about to pick up a tattoo machine and give his third tattoo. And he’s got an audience.
A ball of nerves, he takes in the advice of those watching him: “Watch your speed.” “Blot, don’t wipe!”

David nods, tries to focus. His tired eyes are held up only by adrenaline.

Whap! Jimmy the Saint smacks him on the head. “Blot! Don’t wipe!”
David feels his ears burn with embarrassment, but he keeps tattooing. Finally, at 7. a. m., after hours of blistering concentration and more advice than he could process, David finishes, to his own tremendous relief and the satisfaction of his customer. 

But his night – er, morning, - isn’t over yet.
“After that, we all went to the bar, went to sleep at around 9 a. m., and were back up and it again at 11,” David said. “Bill’s motto was, ‘You’ll sleep when you’re dead.’ But on that schedule, I’m no good on the second day, and the third day is even worse.”

David, his dues long paid, doesn’t have to keep those hours anymore. In January 2003, he and brother Tyler opened up Skeleton Crew Tattoo in Columbus, Indiana. The shop serves as their reward for the long days and hard work, and it’s the fulfillment of their longtime goal.
Tyler, four years older than David, had started getting tattooed while he was in high school, and it wasn’t long before he and a friend began dreaming of becoming tattoo artists themselves.

“They had vague dreams of someday doing an apprenticeship, but they were just vague dreams,” David said. “Still, my interest was sparked.”
David, who’d been an artist as long as he could remember, was surprised to find a new art form. “I grew up [next to a dairy farm] in [Portland], Indiana,” he said. “I hadn’t seen a lot of good tattoos, but my brother was getting amazing work done, and in the back of my mind, I thought, ‘That’s something I could do.’”

But the dream stayed vague while David went to Ball State University to study art. The tattoo [dream] didn’t start to actually take shape until he realized his dissatisfaction with the university art program. “I wasn’t happy with the way school was going, “ he said. “I learned more around the coffee table than I did in class.”

David was just two years into the art program and feeling frustrated when his brother moved to Johnson City, Tennessee. “After a lot of discussion,” David and his wife, Liz, followed.

“My brother and I have always been together, always,” David said. “Our plan was that we would do apprenticeships in Tennessee at the same time in the same shop and eventually live happily ever after with our own shop.”

David’s mother, who is also an artist, was none too happy about this turn of events. She’s had high hopes for her son’s art education and cried when he told he was leaving school to become a tattoo artist. Nonetheless, she and David’s father lent their support. “Without her and my dad’s constant encouragement to explore art my whole life,” David said, “I doubt I would have ever become what I am.”

Now that she’s had more exposure to the art form, David’s mom has had a change of heart about her sons’ tattooing. “She’s actually thinking about a tattoo of her own now,” he said.

After just two weeks in Tennessee, David found an apprenticeship at Bill Robert’s shop. “After the apprenticeship was squared away, I watched him doing a tattoo,” David said, “It was the third one I’d seen, including mine and my brother’s, and Bill asked, ‘Do you think you can do this?’”

David’s answer, of course, was, “Yes.”

Two weeks after David’s apprenticeship began, tyler was apprenticing right alongside him. The brothers endured an old-school apprenticeship under Roberts, who gave them the benedit of his long experience, and no small amount of grief. Long before either got to wrap his fingers around a tattoo machine, David and Tyler served time as Roberts’ gophers.

Despite the drudgework, David’s apprenticeship paid off in a big way.
“Bill taught the whole thing, from laminating flash to wrapping coils,” he said. “I grew quite a bit in my apprenticeship, learning the business end, dealing with people. Working with Bill, I got a good chance to know how he ran the business.”

David eventually took over drawing for Roberts, and he started going on the road with for weeks at a time, taking trips to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and to biker rallies all year round.

“Much to my wife’s chagrin, we left for months,” David said. “I couldn’t have done it without her. She worked to support us that whole time.”
Even David wasn’t on the road, his schedule was pretty hectic.
“Bill and I worked in Gatlinburg,” he said. “He’s loan me out, pimp me out for a percentage of money to other shops in my second year of apprenticing. Gatlinburg is very high volume. The most tattoos I did there myself in one day was 14. I worked all day, all night. We’d do it for the whole weekend, and then head back and work all week.”

Another part of David’s baptism by fire was working bike runs.
“Bill turned us loose on the bikers in there,” David said. “We would be tattooing, and on the last day there was a dirt drag. We had to get all the tattooing done before the dust started flying.”

“That was rough tattooing,” he said. “It was all about paying your dues and going through it.”

Amid the sleep deprivation and dust, David developed a fine style of tattooing, but it didn’t come easily. “I’ve always been steeped in art,” he said. “I’ve tried all sorts of art forms – oil, watercolor, metalworking, sculpture, pastels, charcoal – but tattooing was the hardest art form for me to learn, hands down.”

It comes down, he said, to the variances: “Tattooing for me is all about consistency – in the movement of your hand, the machine, skin stretch. Getting down a set rubric is very difficult.”

As his skills developed, so did a unique style. “I started in realism when I was going through high school,” he said. “Then I moved more into a cartoonist style – some people say Disney-esque. Just recently, I’ve been trying to work toward mastery in black and white, and that has moved me back toward realism.

“Basically, I try to be pretty eclectic, “ David said. “I think my style stands out on its own. I do a lot of composition on skin. I just try to be imaginative but work with what each client wants.”
Although David calls his and Tyler’s apprenticeship one of the hardest things they’ve done, emotionally and physically, the experience gave them both the background they needed. “We’re probably the only two to successfully leave Bill without him wanting to kill us,” he laughed.
But, after a couple of years, they did leave. David and his brother headed back to Indiana. They got jobs in different studios this time, but both began having artistic differences with the shops’ owners.
“We as artists have a different mentality than the businessmen,” David said. Those differences of opinion led Tyler and David to branch off on their own, starting Skeleton Crew Tattoo in January of 2003.
The shop, David said, is “more custom art studio than street shop,” and it meets a need David and Tyler saw in the area.
“Columbus is a great community,” David said. “The downtown is very alive. The area cried for tattooists like us. There was nobody around who had gone through the type of apprenticeship that we had. Bloomington and Indy were booming, but Columbus was kind of void for tattoo artists of our variety.”

Running the business doesn’t leave David a lot of time for his fine art, but he does squeeze in pastel and charcoal drawing whenever he can, and that work feeds his tattooing style and expertise.

“In my outside work, I’m working more toward realism,” David said. “That helps my tattooing which is a synthesis of styles. Right now I’m really interested in combining old-school and renaissance elements. I’m trying to put my own spin on it.”

Although David refers to Skeleton Crew Tattoo as “fledgling”, running it has been a gratifying endeavor.

“Owning our own business has been a total joy,” he said. “It does have stresses that go with it, and we don’t make money hand over fist, but its not really about that. We’re living the dream.”

lns/3-05


“Blot, Don’t Wipe”, International Tattoo Art; February, 2005,
Maverty Media Group, Ontario, Canada.
 

Back to top of page