In short, yes, you should always strive to tip your tattoo artist. “Often, tattoo artists are renting a chair or space and give as much as 50% of their earnings to the shop owner,” Sinatra says.

The thing is, he wanted to be a tattoo artist. And he wasn’t giving up. Even facing the added difficulty of not finding a tattoo artist that wanted to take him as an apprentice, he did not gave up.

“My customers generally come to me for my style,” says Aly Sidgwick, a tattoo artist at Take Note in Edinburgh. “I do a lot of woodland creatures, like bats, badgers and birds, and also ...