By DENISE ELAM
Features Editor

(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — David Montoya went to The Zone Tattoo and Body Piercing in Warrensburg to get a tattoo and came out with a job idea.

“I got my tattoo done by Scott…and when we were actually doing the tattoo the day of the appointment he had asked if I had ever thought about tattooing,” Montoya said.

Montoya said Scott Nusbaum, a tattoo artist at The Zone, liked the drawing he brought in and asked him to come back with a portfolio.

“I brought some more work in and they liked what they saw and I sat down and basically wrote up a contract and I’ve been there ever since,” Montoya said.

Montoya, a recent alumnus of UCM, studied graphic design and illustration and said it made things easier for him as a tattoo artist, but starting out was very hard. Montoya said he was 19 or 20 when he started.

“There was a huge learning curve, especially when it comes to the machines and just learning how the skin works,” Montoya said. “With tattooing, everybody’s skin is a little bit different, so learning how to do it properly for each individual person it takes a long time. And I’m still learning.”

Montoya said he practiced drawing and tracing for hours each day for several months until he was allowed to move up to tattooing on practice skin.

“It’s like a flat rubber sheet, and I would do it just like I would if I were doing a real tattoo,” he said. “I started off really, really small with really simple stuff and then kind of worked my way up to bigger pieces on that.”

Montoya said when they thought he was ready to tattoo actual skin, they had him tattoo his own leg.

“They told me that if I didn’t trust myself to tattoo me, how would I expect anyone else to trust me to tattoo them? So I tattooed myself a couple times and eventually I started tattooing all the guys in the shop little by little,” Montoya said. “Then I moved up to friends and family.”

Montoya said he didn’t tattoo anyone until undergoing about a year of apprenticeship.

“That was probably a little soon, but I had the art background so that’s the difference,” he said. “Generally most people have to wait a couple years before they can even touch a machine, let alone tattoo. I just got lucky because I have the art background and then really the only thing I needed to learn was the machines and then the skin.”

Montoya has worked at the Zone for three years now and said he plans on being a tattoo artist for some time.

“I definitely plan on tattooing for the time being and just kind of seeing where it takes me,” Montoya said.  “It’s a great field, it really is. It’s a very stressful field as well, so I think for me the greatest thing about doing tattoos and having a double major is that I just have a wide variety of options to choose from now and I don’t just have to do one. I can do graphic design if I want or it may be I do the graphic design full time and do tattooing on the side or vice versa.”

Montoya said the great thing about his tattoo and graphic design and illustration experience is that he can go anywhere in the world to work.

“There’s really no limit to that, especially with graphic design and illustration – that’s mostly digital most of the time, so I can be in this area doing work for people in California or Japan or if I wanted to take a trip to China I could go and tattoo there and do a guest spot at a shop out there and still do my graphic design (and) illustration work in the U.S.,” Montoya said. “So there’s just a lot of options. That’s the best thing I could ask for.”

Montoya said his majors and tattoo experience all correlate.

“There’s bits and pieces about the style of tattooing that I can bring over into my graphic design and illustration work and vice versa, so it all kind of plays together, given it’s very different but really on paper it’s not.”

Montoya said everybody who comes in the shop has a different story.

“You get to know them and share that as well the tattoo – obviously it doesn’t go away, so they’ll always remember that tattoo and that moment, which is great.”