Well, hello there.

This is season two of Books Closed.

This episode is sponsored by Mr. Flash Machine, a revival of production tattoo

flash offering a collection of 400 sheets and counting.

And Victoria's Fines, a one-stop shop Instagram page for antiques,

oddities, and collectibles. Well, well, it's nice to be back. And it's nice to see all of your

beautiful smiling faces, all of your loyal listeners back from season one, and all of the new faces

of people just discovering books close for the first time. Welcome. I'm Andrew Stortz,

and I will be your fearless leader through yet another season of episodes here where we talk about

tattooing, and I sit down each week with a different tattooer, and we really break it down for you.

And I'm not talking about what kind of needle do you use. Oh, what's your favorite kind of yellow ink?

We don't talk about that sort of thing because that's quite boring. What I find myself more

interested in on this show is talking about what it means to be a tattooer. How does it affect

our lives? What are our opinions on how the industry has changed or is changing? Things that we look forward to, things that we dread.

You know, shop talk, but not the technical stuff that will put you to sleep. I think every trade, every artist, every craftsman of any kind can seek a lot of parallel opinions and thinking

in a show like this. So I do hope that you enjoy. I think any discussion of modern tattooing

is incomplete unless you get into the topic of tattoo reality TV shows. A lot of people will point to

those as being the reason that the magic of tattooing is lost,

or that was the pivot point where everything changed and the big boom and popularity came.

And, you know, that has its positives and negatives with it.

But at this point, we've got shows like Inkmaster, which has to be the longest running

tattoo reality show that we've seen to date, which is a competition-based show.

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