At some point in life we all need to make a decision as to what career path we’re going to follow. For some, the decision is easy, for others it’s a little more difficult and for others still, it’s all a very unexpected and pleasant challenge. Tattooist Aaron Bell falls into the latter category. After following his passion for punk rock for years and playing around in various hardcore punk bands, Bell began to discover tattoo. As he worked on both his music and his tattooing, the time came to make a decision as to which career path he’d take. Fortunately for the tattoo world, he chose tattoo, though he had never expected to become a tattooist.
Regardless, as a tattooist, Bell found that he was still able to get all the benefits that he had found in punk rock: the ability to travel from place to place and meet different people who all shared in his passion for this method of self-expression. Not only that, but with a background as steeped in punk rock as Bell’s was, the raw attitude of the music managed to find its way into his art.
Taught to tattoo by a former San Quentin inmate who himself had learned to tattoo in prison, Bell began tattooing out of his Anaheim, California home in 1984. After making his decision to take on the tattooing world full time, Bell moved north to Seattle. Through a series of fortunate incidents, Bell found himself the new owner of a tattoo shop for next to nothing, which he renamed Slave to the Needle. At the time, Slave to the Needle was in a pretty dodgy area of Seattle, at 508 West 65th street. Today the area has undergone the same type of gentrification that is currently found aplenty in my own city north of Seattle and across the border – Vancouver. But I digress.
Now the owner of two different Slave to the Needle locations in Seattle, Bell continues to tattoo with a great old school flourish. He may not play punk rock anymore and the Seattle neighbourhood he once knew might now be filled with yuppie cafes and gastropubs, but thankfully, that old school edge and flavour can still regularly be found in Aaron Bell’s quality work.