TATTOO MACHINE LITERACY ISSUE 1

Tattoo Machine Literacy 🧠 Issue 1 🧠

“A little printed field guide for tattooers who want to understand coil machines better.

For about six years now, I’ve talked about tattoo machines with builders, collectors, and tattooers almost every day. In 2023, I started doing a weekly Instagram quiz called Sunday School, where I asked machine questions and let people test what they knew.

It was fun, but it also made something pretty obvious: a lot of tattooers are using machines they don’t fully understand. Not because they don’t care but because the information can be scattered, overly technical, hard to find, or passed down in little pieces.

This zine is my attempt to give people a clearer place to start, ask better questions, and feel a little more confident when something feels off.

There are a lot of different opinions, methods, and ideals when it comes to coil machines, and this zine is not meant to be the final word. It’s just my version of what I’ve found to be true, to the best of my knowledge, through research, hands-on experience, conversations, mistakes, and paying attention. I’m still learning too, and I hope I always am.

This first issue covers machine basics, anatomy, the mechanical / magnetic / electrical systems, springs, capacitors, geometry basics, contact gaps, machine maintenance, troubleshooting, and a couple of nods to machine history.”

This is a small zine written and created by Jaimie of ROGERS MFG

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