Page 16 - Demo

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Josh “Eon” Johnson used to be a drug dealer. It's not something he's proud of, but two felony convictions are what pushed him to change his life and focus on becoming a professional tattoo artist.
Eon grew up on the mean streets of Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and being of mixed black and white ethnicity, he found it difficult to get a job at a traditional tattoo shop. His skills were self-taught, but his work was as good as many professional tattoo artists, and finally a friend who owned a local tattoo shop recognized his talents and gave him a break. Unfortunately, the friend was killed a few months later. During that time, Eon went to jail for his second drug conviction, and when he got out six months later, the shop was closed. It was then that Eon made the decision to take over the business and go legit--- it was an easy decision as Colorado has a three-strike law, and one more arrest would send him to prison for a lengthy period of time.
Finally, Eon was following his passion. It's somewhat ironic that owning a tattoo shop turned out to be an easy transition from selling drugs.
“I treated my tattoos like drugs,” he says. “If you have the best drugs then you can sell them easily; if you have shitty drugs they're not going to sell. That's why I tried to make my tattoos as good as I possibly could.”
For the first few years, Eon was a one-man show, and there were a lot of days when he was in the shop till late at night hoping that somebody would pay him to give them a tattoo.
You might assume that a guy who knows how to tattoo would have been popular in jail. But Eon never inked any of the inmates while he was incarcerated. “I told them I wasn't going to 'hand poke' because I was a real artist,” he says. “They would pay me for drawings instead of tattoos, and I actually tattooed them later on people who'd I met in jail.”
It wasn't long before Mr. Tank's, named Mr. Tank's - after the former owner's dog, attracted other black artists who were looking for an opportunity to show off their talents in a professional environment. “In the black community, art isn't looked at as a positive outlet or a way to make a living,” Eon says.
The customer demographic for the shop was predominantly black. Not simply because of it's location, but as Eon explains, black tattoo artists have a better understanding of how to work with their own skin type.
continued on page 22