Myles Karr is an artist extraordinare: from illustration to body modification.  You can find him hard at work in Williamsburg, tattooing odd two-headed creatures on Brooklynites.

CHIEF Magazine: So, just to get it out of the way, what is your full name?

Myles Karr: Myles Crane Karr.

And how long, exactly, have you been tattooing for?

A little over three years.

And what is the company that you work for?

I work at Saved tattoo.

So, is it painful on the forearm?

It’s not bad.  I mean, the inside of the forearm is going to hurt a little more than the outside.

How does your mom feel about you being a tattoo artist?

My mom is actually extremely cool about it, but it was a bit of a point of contention when I started because I asked her for money to buy all the supplies and stuff, but she wouldn’t give it to me because I didn’t have a license.  So I basically was on my own like teaching myself and buying everything, but she came around really quick and actually I have tattooed her.  And I’ve tattooed my dad as well.

What did you tattoo on them?

I tattooed an owl on my mom, and a weird gnome like climbing out from under my dad’s foot.  It’s one of the weirder tattoos I’ve done.

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[Laughing] Really?

Since I left Bowery I’ve gotten a lot busier so I do a lot of consultations like before I do the tattoo. Then, usually, I don’t go into it like not knowing what I’m doing so this actually a lot of fun today.
I hear that you’re pretty popular around these parts.  Seems like everybody either knows you or has one of you’re tattoos.

How’d you get so big?

I really don’t know.  I haven’t been tattooing for that long either.  At first it was because I was in a band so I knew a lot of people through that, and then the band stopped and I just kept tattooing but I don’t know. I don’t really know how it happened.

Is that how you first started getting into tattooing, through the band?

No I just started working at a tattoo shop. Like uh, I didn’t have a formal apprenticeship. I worked at Bowery as the floor guy, cleaning, taking money, talking to customers and that kind of stuff, and then at the end of the night I would kind of like go home and practice on my roommates the things that I kind of picked up over people’s shoulders all day.  And then eventually, my friend was the manager and she knew I had been tattooing at home.  Somebody left, and instead of hiring somebody else, they just let me start tattooing.

Cool.

Which is kind of nuts because there’s no way I should have been tattooing when I first started.

Did you ever screw up anybody’s tattoo really bad?

Not really bad but, you know, I’ve definitely done stuff that, in retrospect, I wouldn’t have done now.

How do you go about practicing, like if you’ve never done it before?  Do you just go and tattoo somebody?

Um, I started out tattooing myself.  Like, I’ve tattooed my legs, like all my upper thighs, the inside of my knees.

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What was the first tattoo?

I have a weird little skull right here, [pointing to his thigh] and like all these black stars. Just real basic stuff

Awesome.  What was the first tattoo that you did on somebody else?

The first tattoo, I guess, was a five pointed star on my roommate’s foot and, he had been tattooed a bunch of times before, and it was in the kitchen of my old apartment. And pretty much through out the whole tattoo he was telling me what I was doing wrong as I was doing it, and a tattoo that would now take my like five minutes took about an hour and fifteen minutes or so.