COLUMBUS — Alan Taylor opened his new tattoo business, Tatt2d Voodoo, at 115 13th St. S. on Valentine’s Day. His goal? To take a childhood passion for art and a lifelong dream and turn it into a thriving business.
Taylor said he decided to open the shop, not necessarily because he wanted to be a business owner, but because of a love for the art form, for which he has always held a soft spot.
“Owning my own business is just a perk of it,” Taylor said. “The dream is just tattooing. That’s my love. That’s my passion.”
With that love of tattooing, Taylor has turned a job he once held as an employee and created a thriving business that is booked through mid-May.
But the journey from working in tattoo parlors to owning his shop just isn’t the whole picture, Taylor said.
Taylor said he would watch his mother draw and paint when he was growing up. He later pursued that passion after graduating high school in 2004. He said the colorful nature of his mother’s art and the cartoons he watched as a kid laid the foundations of his colorful neo-classic style of tattooing, complete with dark outlines and colorful shading techniques.
“She would come in the mornings when I was getting ready for school, and she had these little flowers that she would sit and draw,” Taylor said. “She also did like sculpting clay figurines, and she would paint. I spent so much of my late elementary and middle school years watching her draw and everything.”
Taylor at first struggled to find a place to take him as an apprentice, which is legally required to be a professional tattoo artist in Mississippi. Without the apprenticeship, he began tattooing illegally out of his home to make money.
In the tattoo industry, completing an apprenticeship takes at least nine months and can be costly. For an artist to be taken under a shop’s wing, a prospect must be well-known, or the student can pay for the education and equipment through the shop. Taylor first tried in Tupelo but was quickly turned off by the price tag.
“They wanted $5,000 upfront, and I had to buy all my needles, machines, inks and everything,” he said. “I was 18, fresh out of high school. Where do you get $5,000 at that point? I couldn’t afford it.”
Taylor stopped tattooing in 2007, after realizing how dangerous it was to be an artist without a license, which he said undercut the hard work of others who put in the time and effort to tattoo legally.
“I wanted to do it the right way,” he said. “It really was thrown back in my face, just how wrong that was, and how dangerous something like that can be. It was enough that I didn’t want to feel that way anymore.”
Taylor wait 13 years before picking up a tattoo gun again. In 2020, he connected with artists at Dark Water Tattoo in downtown Columbus and finally had the means to start this apprenticeship, which he completed later that year.
“All those years later, I got the opportunity to do it the right way,” he said. “Having a mentor was huge for me in building that foundation.”
Taylor worked at Dark Water for two years. In that time, he built up his skills with neo-classical tattoo styles, combining the classic rich, dark, pronounced lines of the American traditional tattoo technique with colorful reds, blues, greens and purple shadings of a more modern style.
Last fall, though, he left the chair in Columbus to join a team of artists at Pale Horse Tattoo in Pontotoc, learning the business side of his profession and developing his shop ideas.
Taylor returned to Columbus in February when he opened Tatt2d Voodoo near the Mississippi University for Women.
“There is nothing better than owning your own shop,” he said. “There is a lot of responsibility, and you don’t have managers to come in and fix things for you. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with it, but there’s so much more freedom in owning your own business than there is trying to work for somebody else.”
With his tattoo shop firmly cemented in Columbus, Taylor said he is looking to expand his operation by adding a few artists and is even training his wife, Amy, as an apprentice.
“I’m going take it as far as I can go with it,” he said. “It’s humble beginnings, but you got to start somewhere. I think for our five-year plan, I see adding maybe two or three artists, and we are looking at how to break up the studio. That way, we can have something more private for the clients.”
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