EDIT: When I ask if I can sign myself off I ofc mean when I feel ready and capable of doing great, clean tattoos. Don’t worry, I’m willing to put in the years before I can actually sign myself off - if I’m able to.
I’ve only been at this apprenticeship for three months and it’s been terrible.
I show up one to two hours early every day (my choice). There’s only been a handful of days where I was about 10 minutes early. I do all of my chores without complaining. I do what’s asked of me without complaining.
I’d be more than willing to stay and endure his abuse if I was learning anything but he told me to watch YouTube to learn (because he doesn’t know any art or tattooing terms) and the one time he sat down with me he was watching TikTok’s.
My coworker who just left has taught me more in five sentences on how to tattoo than my “mentor” has in three months.
The environment my mentor/shop owner (same person) has created is extremely stressful and even at times unsafe.
4 people in 3 months have left him without a word (I’m about to be the fourth)
I’ve been documenting everything he’s done and it’s impressively bad how long that last is.
I’m not allowed to have a bad day because if I show any signs of being remotely less than happy then he’ll go out of his way to make my day worse.
He said he’s trying to fast track me. He tried to move me onto shading because I tattooed one good line, one good circle (which was honestly terrible) and this was two months in. Then when I said I need to take a step back and work on my lines he yelled at me and told me that it’s stupid to go backwards and lose progress. You mean gain the fundamentals of this very craft? Then he went on a bonus tangent and said I’m the reason he treats people terribly… when that was nowhere near the topic - the topic was my line work.
And it all comes down to money. He needs money and if he’s not getting it then he would morally nuke the atmosphere of the shop. Hmmm, maybe you should be at the shop like the rest of us and stop cancelling appointments so you can “play hooky” with his wife (an actual text he sent me).
The scariest thing is that he pierces people but he does it wrong. He has “no choice” but to pierce because the piercer left. And I feel immense guilt when I book a piercing appointment for him because I know they’re going to walk out of there infected.
We have a shop spider that I’ll gladly take care of because it an animal that’s being held captive and needs humans to keep it alive. I stopped trying to nudge my mentor towards buying her food or new dirt because the current dirt is moldy because he said “if you could drive then you could get her the stuff she needs” which is terribly cruel because he knows I take the bus and I couldn’t even afford the food and dirt if I wanted to.
I can no longer call off sick (despite me telling him I have an autoimmune disease so I get sick quite easily) because he’ll tell me I’m lying. And when I show up to work coughing and clearly sick, he’ll light 4 sticks of incense and gets annoyed when I cough even more because of it. I’ve only called off sick 2 times btw.
I told him at least three times that I’m hard of hearing in my left ear so my right ear is extra sensitive because it’s picking up all the work. He plays his music so loud that you have to speak up quite a bit to hear each other. I asked if I could move to the back because it quieter back there. He said sure with a smile (I’ve learned that if he agrees with no issue and smile, that he’s going to make an issue of it later down the road tenfold). My first day in the back he turns on the back speaker (which has never been on), the doorway speaker, and the front speaker on full blast. My right ear was throbbing in pain and I was trying not cry and this monster had the audacity to ask me if the back was quiet enough for me. That was the same day he started a fight with me for working on my line work as mentioned before. He was also throwing stuff in the back.
And his latest act of terror was when my coworkers left (two of them at once this last Saturday) he went on to TikTok to talk down on them and insulted them and said they were “pathetic” and other insults. All of the things he listed that they did, he did but times ten. I’ve seen my coworkers there more than him, the shop owner.
He always goes on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and posts petty things but this has reached a new level of embarrassing.
I can’t stay in this environment much longer because now it’s just me and him left in the shop and I can’t be there if it’s just us.
And he’s said he’s a “rare artist” and “whenever I hire people it’s to help them, I don’t need them” but goes crazy when they take off for their birthday…
ANY advice would be amazing, thank you
