I was surprised this week on my professional tattoo account to be presented with a potential client telling me they would steal my work, and laughing about doing so.
I immediately posted the exchange as an Instagram story, and received a tremendous amount of support from both followers and fans of my work, and also from other tattoo artists about this.
I decided this would be an excellent example of the type of theft of intellectual property which I want to address, alongside a demonstration within the echo chamber of Instagram of some opinions of this type of behaviour.
Here is the entire exchange between myself and the client. I have blanked their name out, and did so also in the Instagram story, despite many people suggesting I should “name and shame them”
In total 51 tattoo artists and followers responded within 1 hour, and I spent some time responding to the messages of support received. Below are examples of a few of these.
Following these responses, my classmate Lidia Huerte reached out to me with a direct message suggesting we conduct a video interview to capture my reactions and emotions related to this experience. Below is the direct message, and the video.
The consensus of opinion based on engagement with the Instagram story I posted is that the theft of work in this form was fundamentally wrong and entirely unacceptable. It is important to recognize that the environment of Instagram and responses on there are not rigorous in their ability to represent opinion, however, it is an interesting experiment “in the wild” showing a genuine example of theft of work with it having happened to me personally.
Also, this gives me an opportunity to demonstrate in a very real way why the focus of my major project theme matters to me and other tattoo artists.