Great Scott! An Interview with tattoo artist Scott Campbell

Scott Campbell is literally covered from his neck to his ankles in inks of all colours. Believe it or not, the Louisiana-born artist waited until his mother died before getting his first tattoo.

“My mom was very anti-tattoo,” the softly spoken 39-year-old recalls. “I waited until she passed away to get my first one. I have to believe now that she would be proud of what my life has become. She grew up in a lower class family and married my father, who is a little more uptown. I think she always connected tattoos with being trashy. She tried her best to insulate my sister and I from her lower class upbringing. If I ever came home with a tattoo, she would really feel like she failed as a parent.”

Sadly, his mother passed away when Scott was just 15. Soon afterwards, he got his very first tattoo in a Texan parlour. “It was a little skull on my leg,” he says. “I had $25 to my name and a fake ID, and I walked into this tattoo shop. The guy was smoking a cigarette, and I said, ‘I’ve got $25. What can I get?’ He pointed and said, ‘You can get this skull, or you can get this butterfly’. If I had picked the butterfly, I felt like he would have beaten me up. It was that kind of environment.

“It was at that time in every kid’s life where you try to figure out who you are in the world. You’re trying to leave the nest and push against the things that surround you. I was excited about getting tattooed. I felt that I was making a decision, for myself, that would affect who I am for the rest of my life. That was really exciting because it helped me realise: I was the one controlling my life. I would get the skull on my leg – and, for the rest of my life, I would be a person who has a skull on my leg. That was a really powerful thought.”

TATTOOING COURTNEY

We’re sitting in the Sange Bleu tattoo parlour in Dalston, London, surrounded by bottles of Hennessy. The brand has a tradition of supporting avant-garde artists (including the likes of Ryan McGuinness and Shepard Fairey), and has commissioned Scott – who has famously tattooed celebrities like Courtney Love, Penelope Cruz and Marc Jacobs – to design a ‘Very Special’ limited-edition bottle for its cognac. Clearly, Scott has come along way since that first tentative exploration of the fascinating sub-culture of tattoo art.

It was a world that he embraced. Whatever the late Mrs. Campbell might have made of her son’s numerous tattoos, she’d undoubtedly have been happy with his extraordinary career trajectory.

“I could always draw,” he explains. “It was one of the few things that I was proficient in. I saw sciences as the truth. If I wanted to know what was true in the world, science – that was what was real. But then in college, I realised the life of a scientist is not the life that I wanted to live. And I realised that emotional truths are just as valid as scientific truths.”

The tattooing happened almost by accident.

“I had dropped out of school, and was running around with a bunch of punk rock kids,” he adds. “Because I was always drawing, I was the one who would be asked to draw on everyone’s jean jackets or paint their leather jackets. That turned into me carving pictures on their arms. Before long, more and more people came to my apartment, asking me to tattoo them. My landlord expected money every month, so I started charging money and called it my job.”

It still took Scott some time to become an artist. “Some of my early ones were terrible,” he smiles. “It’s fine. I love terrible tattoos. The tattoos that I do, I’m very precious about. The tattoos that I get – it’s more the experience and the ritual than the aesthetic. I think people assume that because I’ve achieved some amount of success in the tattoo world, that I frown upon crude tattoos, or that I would judge people with small, spontaneous tattoos. I love those just as much.

“If someone has a giant back-piece that’s beautiful and thought-out, great. But if some girl has a dolphin on her ankle from when she was 17 – you know, she went to the beach with her friends, got drunk, and got a tattoo – I don’t think it’s any less valid.”

Scott finally set up shop outside of his apartment. “My first few years of tattooing were in a really unsavoury environment,” he laughs. “It was a grimy biker shop where they were selling meth out of the back door. I also wasn’t actually very good. There were a couple of people who were unsatisfied with what I did on them. Although I suspect they were more unsatisfied with their lives, and they were blaming the tattoos!”

He developed his art – and a reputation as one of the kings of a newly glamorous demi-monde followed. “One of the things that attracted me most to tattooing was the freedom,” he explains. “All I needed was my hands and a minimal amount of equipment, and I could go work in Japan, or Paris or London. I travelled for most of my twenties. I got to reinvent myself in each place. I could feed myself along the way. I started doing more fine art stuff – it’s different in that the life of a tattoo is very finite. It’s just for that one person. Whereas, with other artworks, it has the power to resonate a lot further and connect with more people.”

The first major celebrity Scott tattooed was the late Heath Ledger.

“I tattooed Heath shortly after I opened a shop in New York,” he recalls. “I didn’t know he was an actor when I tattooed him. He was just an anxious Australian guy. He came in wanting to get a bird on his arm. I was busy and was like, ‘Look, I don’t have time now, but come back next week. Come back next Thursday, and I’ll do it’.

“And he was like, ‘Aw, mate, are you sure you can’t fit me in?’ And I was going, ‘I can’t. I’m slammed. Come back next week’. And he said, ‘Ahhh... Okay. Put me down for next Thursday’. So he left. I didn’t know him well, but once I knew him better – it was totally his character that he went over to St. Mark’s Place, and got somebody to do it. But they didn’t do a great job, so he ended up coming back for the original appointment, the next Thursday, and I fixed the tattoo he got instead of doing him an original one.

“Then the next day, I came to the studio, and there were all these photographers there. Everybody was asking me, ‘What tattoo did he get?’ And, ‘Can I see the drawing?’ And I was saying, ‘You guys need to hang out outside. I don’t know what’s going on here.’ I called him, and I was like, ‘Heath, man, what the hell is happening?’

“In my head, I thought he had done something terrible, like something bad had happened, and now everybody is like, ‘Wow, that guy was here’. And I called him and went, ‘Man, are you okay? What’s going on?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, sorry mate. I did this movie, Brokeback Mountain, and I guess there’s a lot of reporters’. And I was like, ‘Okay, I get it’. We became really good friends after that.”

Scott has also tattooed Courtney Love. “She’s great!” he enthuses. “I mean, she’s Courtney Love. I feel like she’s changed the meaning of the word ‘Courtney’, forever. I did some flowers on her, and some lettering. She doesn’t have a whole lot, just a couple of odds and ends here and there.”

Scott maintains that he doesn’t regret any of the numerous tattoos that adorn his own body.

“If you have a lot of tattoos, you’re forced to not take yourself too seriously,” he insists. “It’s a kind of acknowledgment that this body is not permanent. We are temporary. Tattoos – even though they are a powerful way of communication – they don’t actually define who I am. It’s just like, ‘My biography is written’. If you erased my tattoos today, and I started over tomorrow, would I get the same things? No. But that doesn’t mean that I regret them. I have to reconcile with who I’ve been in my life. They take away the luxury of denial. I think that’s a healthy thing.”

LOVE WITHOUT HESITATION

Since 2007, Scott’s recognition has stretched beyond the world of tattoo art into the global contemporary art scene. His sculptures, paintings and drawings are exhibited in major galleries across the USA, Mexico, Europe and Asia.

“I’m influenced by everything I take in,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s people, sometimes it’s paintings. I have a really hard time describing my style. I feel like I’m the only person who shouldn’t describe it, because, to me, everything I do, that’s just the way it should be done. It’s not that self-aware. I can’t see my style because I’m inside of it. You can ask lots of other people what my style is, and they’ll be better at answering it.”

Scott’s exclusive design for Hennessy is based on a pair of wings, a universal symbol of freedom and travel. Decorative elements include an intricate silver and black motif incorporating Hennessy Very Special’s three stars, an iconic signature of the brand. “It’s a conversation between me and everything that’s gone into Hennessy for hundreds of years,” he explains. “It was fun to explore Hennessy’s history, take cues from the brand’s visual identity and just project my world onto it, in a way that still respects its personality, and honours its traditions.”

On the back label, Scott has inscribed the quote “Love without Hesitation.”

“I did that because I believe that if someone can love without hesitation or judgement then they are invincible,” he says.

Speaking of love, he’s married to, and has a daughter with, the American actress Lake Bell (of Boston Legal and What Happens in Vegas fame). Has he tattooed her?

“She just got her first tattoo very recently,” he laughs. “She didn’t have any for a very long time. I’ve always had this little heart tattooed on my hand. After we got married, I did a little one on her in the same place. But that’s it. I kind of like that she doesn’t have tattoos. I’ll be the scumbag of the family!”
Hennessy Very Special Limited Edition by Scott Campbell is available in Ireland at O’Brien’s, Molloy’s, Next Door and selected independent off-licences for €36. For further information visit hennessy.com