The apprenticeship year

Nobody explains the first year of an apprenticeship, because the first year cannot be explained — only absorbed. You arrive with a portfolio and a hope, and you leave every night with ink-stained hands and no new lines on your own skin. The work is not glamorous. You learn how a shop runs: the booking system, the sterilisation cycles, the way artists protect their time. You stretch stencils until your shoulders ache. You watch. That is the curriculum. “Nobody teaches you the apprenticeship. The apprenticeship teaches you,” says the shop owner, who has taken on seven apprentices in twenty years and finished with four. Most people who start do not finish. The ones who do tend to say the same thing: the year was not about learning to tattoo. It was about learning to stay.