Small steps create big shifts

Five years ago we opened the doors to Old Hallows Tattoo. Before that, six months of dust and demolition, reimagining what the old barber shop could become. Shaping every part of it from the art that fills the walls to the feeling you get when stepping inside because I’d learned the hard way that the space you work in is the life you build. There’s days where I walk through the door and a part of me still can’t believe it.

Because this life was not supposed to be mine.

I was born in Shawano, Wisconsin, on the edge of the Wolf River to a Menominee/Stockbridge mother and a Oneida/Stockbridge father. My parents were young and unmarried — my mother nineteen, my father twenty-four — and they split early on. For the first seven years of my life, he simply wasn't there or at least I couldn’t form a memory of him. My mother raised us, eventually with two more children, my brother and my sister, and for a long stretch she did it on her own.

We were poor. Not the kind of poor you perform for sympathy — the kind that lives in the background of every decision. We moved constantly because rent was always a negotiation we were losing. I remember donation centers, the particular smell of thrift-store clothing, the slow shame of eviction. I remember cockroaches. I remember my mother not having a driver's license or having the means to own and maintain a vehicle, and so we walked — to the laundromat, to the grocery store, basically everywhere. We’d use bikes when we had them or got rides when someone offered.

The adults in our world drank, and when they drank, the children became afterthoughts. There were gatherings that stretched into days, and the eldest among us were left to mind the rest. I learned early that children were subsidiaries to grown-ups — present, useful, but secondary. You learned to be quiet. You learned to read a room. You learned, above all, to want only what you needed, because anything beyond that was a blessing to be grateful for.

I remember one apartment in particular — a single room above a bar. We were small, my brother and sister and I, tucked into that one room while the noise of the bar bled up through the floorboards. And one evening, the pounding started. Someone at the door, insistent. My mother pressed a finger to her lips and told us to be quiet. We sat in the dark and listened.

Eventually she opened it. And standing there, for the first time I can remember, was my father.

He'd been gone a long while. When he came back into my life, he became involved, and the course of my life bent toward him like a plant toward light. For the first time I had something close to stability. I stopped changing schools every few months. He married a woman who taught art, and she became one of the most important people I would come to know.

She saw something in me, or maybe she just made room for it. Either way, she gave me the thing I'd been quietly starving for: permission. I'd always drawn — it was the one place I could go where the world was quiet, where the chaos of home couldn't reach me. Now I had a teacher. She let me sit in her classroom through the summers, drawing and painting while the hours dissolved. She gave me materials, real ones, every medium I wanted to try, an endless supply. She sat with me over my schoolwork. She was college-educated, which might not sound remarkable except that, up to that point, most of the adults around me hadn't finished high school.

One memory stays with me. She took a group of high schoolers to the Art Institute of Chicago, and I tagged along. I remember the bus ride, the first time Chicago opened up in front of me — the cityscape, the size of it, a kid from small Wisconsin towns who'd never seen anything like it. And then the museum. The walls were massive. The art hanging on them was massive. I stood under paintings that were taller than I was, and for the first time I understood that art could be a thing that took up real space in the real world. That it could outlast a person.

It was a glimpse of a life I didn't yet know how to want.

I wish I could say I held onto that glimpse. I didn't.

As I got older, the ground shifted again. My father was gone a lot, working, and the marriage frayed and finally ended. Without that anchor, something in me came loose. I found confidence in the wrong friendships, and that confidence turned into a rebellious streak I couldn't steer. I stopped respecting authority and I fell in with the streets.

I won't dress it up and I won't drag you through it. I made money in ways I shouldn't have. I ran with people who had no future and didn't seem to want one. There was a period where I was allowed to come and go as I pleased, and I used that freedom to wreck myself. Trouble found me, and then I found trouble, and then I was in it.

I was a teenager when it caught up to me — legal trouble that should have been my wake-up call and wasn't. I was placed on probation, and I didn't take it seriously, because I wasn't yet serious about anything.

Then came the sentence that finally broke through. When the gavel came down, the scope of it exceeded anything I'd expected — real time, years of it, followed by extended supervision. In the courtroom, my attorney asked for earned release. And sitting there, I felt something shift inside me, something I can only describe as a last, clear thought: if I don't take this, if I don't let this change me, then I am choosing the rest of my life to be long and hard and small.

They granted the earned release. I'd already spent months in county lockup during the proceedings, and that time was counted, but the road out wasn't a door that simply opened. They sent me for intake and processing. The whole experience was demoralizing — you're warehoused alongside people carrying deep damage and long histories in the system, men for whom this was just the weather. I was held in a transitional building, waiting for the program that would decide whether I got out early.

It was called the Challenge Incarceration Program. Run by ex-military. A boot camp, in every sense that matters — the structure, the discipline, the daily programming designed to break you down and decide whether you could be rebuilt. And here's the thing no one tells you about a place like that: it strips away every excuse. There was no one coming. My father couldn't save me. My family couldn't save me. No lawyer, no favor, no friend was walking through those gates to carry me out. I was alone in a way I had never been alone in my life.

And in that aloneness, something useful finally took root. I showed up. Every day, I showed up and gave it everything I had. I led my squad. I earned a place in independent housing — out of the barracks, a private shower, a little free time, small dignities that mean everything when you've had none. I made the color guard. I got on work release. The program was supposed to run six months; it could be extended or restarted for anyone who stumbled, and I finished it in seven.

When I was released, they put an ankle monitor on me and gave me a curfew and sent me to transitional living. Free, technically. Free-ish.

Here's what nobody tells you about getting out: the world isn't waiting for you. I applied for jobs, and I was denied, over and over, because of my record. Six months of closed doors before a family friend's referral got me a job washing dishes. I couldn't afford to say no — extended supervision wanted to see progress, and I needed to feed myself. So I washed dishes, and I decided I was going to be the best dishwasher in that kitchen. That determination carried me into becoming a sous chef, a runner. There was a moment they offered me a serving position at an upscale Italian restaurant, and I turned it down — not because I didn't want it, but because I was still carrying the disgrace of where I'd been. I shrank from the world I thought I didn't deserve to stand in.

I was barely getting by, and barely getting by eventually lit a fire under me. I enrolled in technical college. The program didn't fit, and I walked away. But around that time, my brother said something that rerouted everything: why don't you learn to tattoo?

I'd never considered it. I'd never thought of tattooing as a path, let alone mine. But art had never left me — not in the chaos of my childhood, not in the county jail where I drew for commissary, not ever. My brother offered to let me practice on him, and I took some of my college grant money and bought a tattoo kit online. Three hundred dollars. It came with the bare essentials and a DVD.

There was almost no information out there then. I had that DVD, some books, a stack of tattoo magazines, and my brother's arm. For a year, I tattooed him, and his friends, and anyone in our orbit willing to trust me. Every dollar mattered. I was still washing dishes for minimum wage at part-time hours, still on probation, still under minimum supervision. But I was building something, one day at a time.

It was during that year that my brother introduced me to a woman who wanted a tattoo. I tattooed her. And somewhere in that, the two of us began a life together. She's my wife now.

I took some of the money I was scraping together from tattooing and spent it getting tattooed myself — at a real, professional shop. I wanted to learn by proximity, and it worked. I built a relationship with an artist there, and through him I got licensed and started my first real mentorship. For the first time since the courtroom, I felt purposeful. I could see a trajectory, and it was pointing somewhere I wanted to go. I went back to technical college and earned a business certificate. I was done drifting.

My wife's parents had landed out in Colorado, and on a visit out there, something shifted in both of us. We came home, and not long after, we found out we were having a child. Our son was born. Eleven months later, our daughter arrived. Two babies, tattooing part-time, and a winter layoff from a concrete company, I'd taken on for the hours and the pay — life was full and fragile all at once. My wife had just finished beauty school and was starting her own career. And right around then, I was finally released from extended supervision. For the first time in my adult life, I had freedom.

We decided we wanted a fresh start. No external influence, no old gravity pulling us backward. We picked Colorado. We lined up jobs first, secured an apartment, and in 2015 we drove out. We weren't running. We were building.

In Colorado I went all in. Tattooing, full-time, one hundred percent. I landed in a shop two blocks from the university in Fort Collins — the biggest shop I'd ever worked in, seven artists and two piercers, people from all over the country. I learned more in that room than I had in years prior on my own. But I also brought my understanding of business with me, and after about six months I saw clearly what I couldn't unsee: the standards were loose, and the morals of the room didn't match mine. So I walked out and went to do the scariest, best thing I've ever done.

We signed a commercial lease for a location downtown, I had no idea what I was doing. But I'd rather reach for success and fail than spend the rest of my life not trying. That studio was the best thing I could have done for my career. I met artists there I now call friends, and clients I still tattoo to this day. Betting on myself has been the single best decision of my life.

While my career was taking shape, I kept investing in the craft itself. Along the way, I took an opportunity to travel to Las Vegas for a seminar, where I learned a practical approach to black and gray tattooing that changed how I worked. It gave structure to what I already loved about drawing — charcoal, graphite, shadow, value, and patience — and I've been refining it ever since. Black and gray became my specialty: tattooing that carries the feeling of charcoal drawings and graphite sketches onto skin. The kid who used to sit in a classroom with an endless supply of materials finally had a medium that felt like it was made for him.

But Colorado wasn't forever. After five years out there, my wife and I felt the pull of home — a slower pace, a life closer to the people and the place we came from. I was still bound to the shop, so for a stretch I flew back and forth, keeping the Colorado studio running while I rebuilt my career in Wisconsin. Eventually, after some turnover and the place starting to feel like it belonged to a different chapter of my life, I let it go. I offered the shop to an artist who worked for me, and we struck a deal that satisfied everyone. I walked away from the stress of running a business eleven hundred miles away and came home to focus on what was in front of me.

I worked for another shop during the transition. And then life did what it has a habit of doing to me: it broke me open right before it was ready to build me back up.

In 2021, before I'd opened Old Hallows Tattoo, I lost my sister to street violence. There is no clean way to write that sentence. The loss shook my family and forced me to look again at what I was building, what I was carrying, and what kind of man I wanted to be.

I couldn't undo it. I couldn't make sense of it. But I could decide what I would do with the pain. I used that trauma and the disruption around it as fuel to find myself again. I needed to build something on my own terms — something stable, something rooted, something that carried the weight of where I'd been without being trapped by it.

I no longer wanted to be located in a downtown, or a strip mall. What I wanted was a standalone building with its own parking on a main corridor of the city. We found the building. We bought it. We spent six months tearing it apart and putting it back together into something that was ours. And we opened Old Hallows Tattoo.

We recently celebrated five years. Some of that, I carry for her.

I am, without question, a different person than the kid quietly hiding in a corner of a room. I've found my way, and I intend to walk it for as long as I'm able. My life today is full in a way I once couldn't have imagined. Would I change some things? Sure. But I've come to trust that everything I've been confronted with was a lesson I needed to learn, and the hard work has defined the life I lead.

Tattooing has given my family and me something I don't take for granted: the chance to live our lives out fully. To travel, to have new experiences, to make memories that I believe will carry forward for generations. Art — that quiet place I used to escape to when I was small — turned out to be the engine of an entire life.

If there's one thing I want anyone reading this to take with them, it's what I learned the hard way, in the hardest place I've ever been: determination and self-belief can open up a world of possibilities. You don't have to be destined for anything. You just have to decide you're going to show up, give it everything, and bet on yourself.

Life is a demanding journey, full of obstacles and uncertainty, yet it is those very challenges that give it depth, meaning, and a quiet sense of fulfillment.