Listen to David's recording

"The first thing you do in the morning is open everything up. Clean the place, the ink does tend to get everywhere, so you have to clean the floor and the work surfaces. The needles we make up, use once and dispose, so they have to be made up in the morning and that involves soldering different types of needles together in different configurations, then soldering them onto needle bars, running them through the ultrasonic which cleans them, then put them into the autoclave oven along with all your tubes and your tips so everything's sterilised for the day's work.

To do a tattoo properly you've only got to break the surface of the skin. It doesn't actually go in that deep and all you're doing is moving the needle to a little pot of ink and then putting it on the skin. You do a line one to two inches long, wipe it down with some antiseptic or just a cloth, a wet cloth, put some more ink in the machine and carry on.

It's not like drawing, that's the difference. People will say "I want to do this I'm a good drawer". So what? It's not like drawing. It's a completely different form of drawing.
You have to work in stages of an inch or so at a time. Working usually backwards from where you'd rather. If I was to draw a face on a piece of paper I would start perhaps around by the eyes, whereas if I was to tattoo a portrait of a face on your arm, I'd probably start around the bottom of the neck working up towards the chin. The process is completely different.

When I've finished a tattoo I break the needles off, throw them away. I also throw the caps away.

I put the needle bars and the grips and the tips into the ultrasonic for fifteen minutes. As I'm doing people I build up stuff in the ultrasonic jet throughout the day and then halfway through the day, or at the end of the day, depending how busy you've been I put it into the autoclave which runs for about thirty minutes and that goes up to something like two hundred and sixty degrees centigrade and there's no virus can survive that.

People think it's a dark, seedy world and it's not - we're just normal people. Just doing a job, you know, it's just a job, it's what I do.

It's nice as the years go on and I get more into it and get a little bit more philosophical about it. I mean, you are touching people's lives, you're doing something that's with them forever and it's only the last few years that it's really occurred to me that these forty-odd thousand people that I've tattooed, there's a bit of me in them forever.

I take it very, very seriously, there's not enough people in this business that do take it seriously. I do my absolute best, whether it's a little devil on someone's bum or it's this picture. I'm tired of doing devils, I've done about ten thousand of them, but I try and do my absolute best every single time and that's what it's about."