Meet Jason Anthony

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Anthony.

Hi Jason, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I got to Arizona in late 1999. I already wanted to be a tattooer and had quit a floundering apprenticeship in South Carolina. I met a few guys and started a punk band.

One of the guys in the band, Taylor Ryan, was learning to tattoo at the time and said he’d teach me after a few years if I hadn’t lined anything up in the meantime. Taylor ended up moving to Syracuse after his apprenticeship was done, so my sure thing for an apprenticeship had fallen through and we had to replace a guitar player in the band.

I did try to get an apprenticeship going with other shops with varying levels of failure. Taylor moved back to Phoenix after a year or so of being gone and we picked up where we left off. He started teaching me to tattoo in early 2003. By 2004 he was done teaching me and released me into the world with just enough information to be dangerous. That first year or so was pretty shaky, but I eventually got my legs underneath me.

I worked my first year at a shop in Old Town Scottsdale called EZ Tattoo, it’s since moved locations. While on the road with the band I got word from my friend, Jeffrey ‘Jefe’ Bain, that Sage O’Connell was opening a new location of his shop, Urban Art, in Downtown Phoenix and needed to get staffed up. I was very interested in working for Sage. We’d met a couple of times and he was very cool and helpful with critiques of my portfolio. As soon as I got home from the tour I started working for Sage.

That didn’t last long. Sage pulled his backing from the shop and we had to come up with a new shop name. Jefe came up with Love and Hate Tattoo. It was catchy enough and no one had any better ideas so we went with it. A few months into working the shop we learned why Sage likely pulled out. Sage’s old partner in the shop and now the sole owner was wrapped up in drug abuse. He went missing for a few days, his wife came asking about him, and he missed payments on the shop.

It was pretty chaotic, but there was a piercer there who essentially just took over. Started handling the payments and switched everything over to his name. This guy was classic undiagnosed bipolar. Was really fun at times, but a complete tyrant other times. I learned quite a bit from that dude. A lot of hustle and a lot of how not to treat people. We traveled a considerable amount doing tattoo conventions while he owned the shop. It was equal parts a great learning experience and exploitation of my keen work ethic.

I won a couple of awards for tattoos I had done and was a sponge for anything anyone would teach me. There were good times to be had, but it was a very mentally and emotionally abusive time with plenty of lies, shady deals, gaslighting, and manipulation. After enough lying and tirades, I had enough and quit. I didn’t really have a plan. I reckoned I would take my portfolio and hit the bricks to see if someone wanted to hire me.

A friend mentioned that a local piercer and all-around great guy, Shane O’Cell, was looking for a tattooer to rent out a room at his piercing shop, Mastodon. Sounded promising, I went to chat with him about it, we agreed on terms and I started running Golden Rule Tattoo out of a private studio at Mastodon. The name was very intentional. After the last several years of working for someone who only cared about money and treated everyone around him as a tool to be used for that purpose, I wanted nothing to do with that kind of vibe.

I tried my best to make that 8’x16’ room a proper tattoo studio. Built in a little counter that separated the ‘lobby’ (two small chairs and a small table with a plastic IKEA plant on it) from the workstation. This was sometime in 2007/2008. I worked in that room for about a year or so when my old bandmate and friend, John O’Hagan, approached me with the idea of making Golden Rule an actual shop. He had been a piercer at Love and Hate and had consistently talked shit about how we could run a shop better than its (at the time) current owner.

John wanted to bring in an old friend of his, David Maxwell, who he claimed had a savvy mind for business and I agreed to meet with him. We kicked some ideas around about the general vibe and approach to tattooing and the culture that surrounds it. The one thing that we all agreed on was that we didn’t want to have that ‘cool guy’ shop where no one wants to help you or all the artists think that an idea is beneath them. We agreed that the 3 of us would do our best to nail down a location. I had my heart set on a spot on the burgeoning Roosevelt Row.

Lucky for us we found our first location right on 2nd St and Roosevelt next to Carly’s Bistro. 400 square feet, four workstations, a front desk, a drawing table, a clean room, and a bathroom. To say it was cramped was an understatement. We hit the ground running. It’s been a bit of a blur as far as dates go, but we went from 400 square feet to 800, taking on the unit next to us. Opened a second location at Camelback and Central. Moved out of the original spot to buy a house on 6th St and Roosevelt that we converted into a shop.

Then moved the Camelback shop down to 7th St into a building that we also recently purchased. John opted for a buy-out shortly after we moved the Camelback shop and we continue to be on good terms. He’s been working his real estate game for a while now and it’s going well, to say the least. So, David and I are now running two solid crews. I’m still learning new things about tattooing and running a kinder more inclusive shop.

David handles all the backend paperwork and legal angles and I hang out in a shop and get to tattoo next to my friends all day making sure everyone has a good time and has their needs met so they can just draw and tattoo with no other worries.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not even a little bit.

Any construction project we take on runs into just about every possible roadblock you can think of. Dealing with landlords that have different views on a lease is never fun. Purchasing property was literally never on a reasonable timeline. Shaking out toxic attitudes in the shop has sometimes led to a 50% turnover of a crew.

Learning how to communicate effectively with staff and contractors is a constant readjustment. Meeting the expectations of our artists and having them meet ours is not always easy, but we learn from every situation.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Coming up in street shops means you have to be moderately good at most styles of tattooing.

Whatever the client wants is what you have to pull off. This means that I got pretty ok at just about everything. Of course, the more you learn about different styles of tattooing, the more you realize how little you actually know about tattooing, but I’ve always been open to hearing what others have to say about it.

I don’t think I’m the best tattooer in the valley despite having several plaques saying so and the irony that I still struggle with imposter syndrome after 18 years of tattooing isn’t lost on me. I don’t specialize in any one particular style. There are things that I enjoy doing, but I’m mostly happy to have the client walk out of the shop proud to be wearing their new tattoo. There are plenty of times I send someone to a different tattooer knowing that they’ll end up with a better tattoo than what I can do for them.

I am a pretty big nerd when it comes to fantasy. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, video games, etc. This means I end up doing a lot of fandom-based pieces. These might be some of my favorite things to do. I think something that may set me apart from others is my lack of judgment about some of the designs that people bring in.

The trendy pieces, or the overdone ideas, the Pinterest tattoos. I’m not here to make you feel like an outcast or that you’re uncool for wanting something that you want. If it’s something that won’t work as a good tattoo I’ll explain why, but I’ll let you make your own decisions in the end.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
Growing up near the best water park in the world, The Schlitterbahn, located in New Braunfels, TX.

Contact Info:

• Email: tattooer.jasonanthony@gmail.com
• Website: https://goldenruletattoo.com/jason-anthony/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonanthonytattooer/

Image Credits:
Niba Delcastillo