Ep. 5.1A | Walking Through the Neon Heart — Finding Your First Mentor: The Function of Traditional Tattoo Apprenticeships

Episode Show Notes:

In this episode of Tattoo Rants, Raves & Rituals, Series A: Traditional Apprenticeship Culture, we sit down at the table to talk about first steps, courage, and the moments that change your path in tattooing.

This episode reminds us that the first step toward apprenticeship is often the hardest—but it’s also where love for the craft begins, and where lineage starts to flow.

Tattoo Rants Raves & Rituals, Season 1: A Seat at the Table

Season One invites listeners into an intimate series of culture conversations where Black tattooists and cultural workers gather to critique and reclaim voice and visibility at the intersections of art, history, and tattoo. Each conversation is a seat at the table—where community comes to reckon with the truths of tattooing as inheritance and liberation.

* Series A: Traditional Apprenticeship Culture explores apprenticeship as lineage, not labor—naming the discipline, humility, and spiritual presence required to carry this ancestral craft forward.

about: Black Tattoo Anthology®

An artist fellowship, living archive and digital campus dedicated to reclaiming, preserving, and reimagining Black tattoo culture across the diaspora. Founded and stewarded by Master Tattoo Artist and author Imani K. Brown®, the BTA documents our stories through scholarship, artistry, and community.

At the heart of our work is a commitment to cultural stewardship: honoring ancestral tattoo traditions, amplifying Black tattoo artists, and creating spaces where our creativity is remembered as inheritance, not erased as trend. From the Collective of participating artists, to our Podcast where culture bearers speak their truths, the Anthology is both a record and a ritual—an invitation to witness how ink carries memory, identity, and liberation.

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