“I was born and raised in Madison, WI, and in the fall of 1983 I got my first tattoo from Steve Gold at Steve’s Tattoo in Madison.

By the time three years had passed I had multiple tattoos, and was working at Steve’s cleaning and producing flash for the shop (all in an attempt to get more tattoos, rather than a paycheck).

At this same time I was also going to school for art, and in 1989 I graduated with a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

I left Madison and lived in Minneapolis for a couple of years, working as a guard at The Walker Art Center, until the fall of 1991 when I moved to Chicago to go to graduate school. Then in 1993 I finished school with an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University.

I started working as a tattoo artist 3 weeks later, again at Steve’s Tattoo in Madison!

By the fall of 1995 I had grown fed up with Madison, and decided to push out on my own and moved back to Minneapolis to open The Ink Lab – one of only a handful of tattoo shops in the city way back then.

It’s been a good number of years, with a lot of changes and a lot of hard work, but the shop and I are still going strong!”

– David