Is it stressful to be a tattoo artist? Or, what is mandatory to know to be a tattoo artist?

Art is great however, I have a painting here by Kim Starr that is worth money and I cannot sell it. So many people are in Art and unless you have a grand hand, I would go more into something like, creative animation design school or 3d animation, or development of charaters for film. Great pay. A tatoo artist is not a well paying job, unless you have a shop on 5th ave in a downtown area that has many people and tourist around inking people. I say stay away from tats unless you do this as a hobby first and grown from there. Depending on how good the art is usually word of mouth will get you a customer base. Remember there is marketing, sanitation classes, equipment that is expensive. No student loans for tatoo art. I would really stick with a hobby for now. Then move forward. Do not quit the day job.

I used to work in a shop. Not as an actual tattoo artist that does the ink but as a graphics artist who would piece together designs for customers on the basis of what they were looking for specificaly. I do know that some shops like ours have began using digitial design in order to print images specific to each customer for stencilling. even if you are not the best at drawing, there are ways around that but there will be a need when it comes to shading. You would also have to know the safety regulations and business laws if you wanted to own your own shop. a personal suggestion would be to order a cheap machine from ebay and the fake skin pieces and see what you can do with it and see if you feel that this is really something you want to do. If you are more into the art side, you could possibly get a job like what I was doing using computer aided imaging and graphic design for imaging.