I was born in Etobicoke in 1975, but I grew up in Kincardine, Ontario. I was interested in drawing and creating art since I was very young. All through public school, and into high school, I drew whenever I could. I was always “the kid in school who could draw”. I quickly learned it was a good social mechanism that helped me fit in and make friends, but more importantly it was an activity where my imagination could run wild, and I tried hard to bring my drawing skills to a level where they could express the ideas in my head.

I got tattooed at the age of 14, by my friend Jarkko, who now works alongside me. It was the beginning to a path that has been the focus of the rest of my life. By then, I was already pretty certain I wanted to find a way to make a living creatively, I just wasn’t sure how. I did a year of schooling at The Ontario College of Art, but in between first and second year, amidst some personal uncertainty about whether I wanted to continue my program or not, I was fortunate to be offered an apprenticeship at a shop I was getting tattooed at, and took the opportunity wholeheartedly.

I worked in Toronto from 1994-’98, first for Urban Primitive, the shop I started with, and then with Passage tattoo, a newly formed shop at the time. Some time in the spring of 1998 I moved briefly to NYC for about 8 months. Despite having lived in Toronto for 5 years at this point and feeling pretty comfortable in an urban setting, in retrospect I was completely unprepared for New York. After struggling to find my groove there for several months, I joined the crew of the shop on a trip to Berlin to attend the annual convention being held there, and returned to my hometown of Kincardine just before Christmas. I planned to return overseas to Sweden. I had the offer of work with a friend of mine who I had met during a convention trip some years before, and reconnected with in Berlin. I wanted to stay for Christmas with my family, and then maybe for the summer, thinking it might be nice to spend some time in Kincardine during the good weather. Plus, I needed to work, to put aside a small travel fund to help get me started on my way.

On Valentine’s Day of 1999 I established Sugar Shack Tattoo in the unused office space in the back of Kevin Bradley’s barbershop, Snip ’n’ Clip. Word quickly spread, and by the end of that summer, I had a small but busy private tattoo studio running, and I was booked about a month ahead. Curious to see whether I could keep the momentum growing, I opted not to leave at the end of that summer, but instead kept Kincardine as my home base, and began travelling two or three times a year on “educational” trips to Europe.

I would go for a few weeks at a time, combining guest spots and maybe a convention or two on the same trip, and a bit of sightseeing to round it all out. At the shows, I was routinely amazed and inspired by the calibre of tattooing and illustration I was seeing. I was working shoulder to shoulder with some of the best tattooers in the world, trying to absorb and study everything that I could. Then I would return to Kincardine for the next few months, and try to digest and assimilate these new lessons and ideas into my own work, all the while building a community and clientele both at home, and in a few select cities in Europe.

By 2002 I had outgrown the confines of the small office in the barbershop, and seized the chance to rent the retail space next door. From there I ran Sugar Shack Tattoo for the next 11 years, with Jarkko working along side me then, having just moved back from Toronto. A rotating cast of other characters came through the shop during that next decade. In 2006 I saw the birth of my first child, Robert, followed in 2008 by my daughter Maggie. I had stopped travelling to conventions almost entirely at this point, to focus on my family. Life with a couple of infants was incredibly busy, as it is for most people, and I split my time between working at a breakneck pace as much as I could, and trying to soak up every bit of time I could get with my kids at home.