Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Rob Taylor. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Rob , thanks for joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My parents, like many inner-city parents had plenty of learning to do and growing themselves which led me to learn a lot of what NOT to do more so than the right way to do something. My mom was with this one guy off and on most of my childhood and he was a painter by trade. he wasn’t union and ran his own painting business. mom worked odd jobs and focused on her art. she did these really neat oil paintings like bob ross. so, on one hand I had a very artistically gifted mother. on the other hand, I had a strict hard working self-made father figure. with that came the preachings of each set of views on work and the world around making a living. naturally the combination instilled a love for creative arts and hard work alongside the idea that working for anyone else other than myself just means I’m selling them my time for a fraction of the price that my employer is selling it to the client. school was never the goal. i dropped out after my 9th grade and hit the street running. the best thing my parents did for me still to this day as a near 40-year-old man was teaching me the importance of learning how to do as many things with my own 2 hands as i possibly could, over the years I’ve learned many skills and trades with these hands where i will never go hungry as long as I live. I can always (and have many times) start over. I’ve owned many types of businesses that I still offer my services for hire to this day. i can go anywhere in the world with nothing and within a month i will be set up with a life i created based off of the principal that old man taught me. learn how to do as many things with your hands as you can, and you sell those skills as services and you will never go hungry and you’ll always have a roof over your head. out of all the mistakes they made as young parents, that lesson makes up for a lot.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

i dropped out of high school after my 9th grade at the age of 16 and immediately hit the streets. at first i wanted to be a cool kid and sell drugs and learned really quick that i was not gangster enough for that life. i found my way over to odd labor jobs like hanging drywall, framing porches and decks and then general contracting. when i got to around 20/21 a had a friend who drove a tow truck at night and did tattoos out of his kitchen during the day. the thing about it though was that he was a really good artist despite being a in home tattooer. he had all the right sanitation practices and professional equipment he just didn’t want to work for a shop and give them 50% of what he made. one day he was getting ready to go to work and i just asked him if I could set up and tattoo myself. the fire was lit, and I was obsessed. i started doing my own tattoos which lead to me doing BAD small tattoos on my friends for a free 6 pack of beer or something. as the years pass, I am growing in my construction field and painting full time with the father figure who taught me the importance of working for yourself. he taught me the ins and outs of not just the painting trade but of business as well. as the years went on i realized that if i want to make more money at the tattooing i had to get better and frankly manual labor was not fun. being a tattooer looked so cool. i started to take tattooing more seriously and eventually found a part time job at the crappiest tattoo shop around that would take me. learn what i could and then found the 2nd crappiest shop to go work at and started to just work my way up while still doing trade work to pay the bills. the tattooing progression was a slow burn for sure. i spent years getting better at the pace of a snail. i was raised in Illinois and at around 21 i moved to KY to meet my biological father and the family down here. i was doing labor work and eventually found a shop that would take me in as a piercer in Frankfort Kentucky. when i was around 24/25. i met my first wife and we had our oldest son. at this point i was tired of learning what NOT to do and was ready to find a shop to show me the RIGHT way to do things. i wanted to stop labor work and turn to a full time tattooer. i found a shop in Tampa Florida that said ” yeah, sure. if you ever find yourself in Tampa , come talk to us.” That was the closest thing to a yes I’ve ever gotten when it came to finding a decent apprenticeship. one thing i forgot to include was that I CAN NOT DRAW. anytime i went to a good shop to ask about an apprentice position the first question was always “can we see your drawing portfolio?” and when i told them i didn’t have one they would laugh me out of the room. bad shops i got jobs at didn’t care how good or bad i was because their work wasn’t much better than mine. so when i got that answer from Tampa i hopped on it. i immediately went to Tampa and showed up at their door like ” you said if i found myself in Tampa to come talk to you, well….peekaboo.” so i spent 9 months in Tampa making terrible life choices and learning black and grey tattooing. i came back to Kentucky and wanted to open my own shop but didn’t have the know how so i turned around and bought out the shop i was at before i went to Florida. that lasted about a year and i realized i was not ready for all of that, at this point i was decent enough to get a job at most shops and just kind of bounced around while running a painting and drywall business. i moved around , back to Illinois, back to Kentucky, and then around 2016 ish? i opened a private studio up in Indiana with a fellow artist. we did that for about a year and i always had the idea in the back of my head that a shop in the mall would make a killing, only problem was there was already a franchising studio in the malls in the area. they had 3 locations. after a bit i had the idea that if you cant beat them , join them . so i got hired at the mall shop , sold my half of the private studio to the buddy i started it with and went to work fulltime at the mall shop. at this point i was happy with where i was working. i was able to stop manual labor and tattoo fulltime. this was where i was working when i wanted to get into the convention circuit of tattooing. i had reached my goal of tattooing fulltime. now i wanted to go to a convention and get a feel for that side of the industry. my first convention i immediately seen an opportunity to make a lot of money. at this point in time, to take home 300-500 bucks a week at a walk in shop was good money. full time tattooer money. but my first convention i made a few thousand and that was due to my observation that a lot of clients came there with a pocket full of money just ready to be spent and most tattooers all looked and acted the same.. “my art should sell it self” not realizing the consumer mindset that there are too many options and everyone looks the same and none really stands out from one another. it gave me the idea to stand out. i was greeting people and hitting them with the sales pitch and it worked. so i started to think about how i could stand out in the crowd because my work at this point was good but it wasn’t award wining. i came up with the idea to stand out as a person instead of as an artist. so i took on the mentality of fake it till you make it. i wore custom 3 piece suits and made that image my brand. and started going to conventions regularly. my image made people believe that i was successful which must mean i was goo which lead to them hiring my services. it wasn’t long that i was making a lot more doing a convention weekend than what i was making sitting in the shop. with that i am making connections and learning things i never had the chance to learn. im in the same room as 200 of the country’s best tattooers every weekend, i was bound to learn and grow professionally and did. over time i started entering the competition side of things and actually winning. that lead to more opportunities and guest spots and sponsors , magazines, pro team spots. it all started to evolve. after a couple years of that i was ready to open my own mall shop and take on a large operation. i came to the owner and asked him to help me get in to a mall of my own and he offered to sell me that mall studio i was currently in. so that’s what i did, i bought them out. fired every one and launched the signature series tattoo company. during that time i launched my painting company again and was running both businesses. eventually the stress of it all got to me and i wasn’t happy so i sold off the businesses. closed the mall shop and launched a private studio for just me. at this point in time Instagram ads was a thing that was rolling out to certain pages.. i had the idea to take some money and put it into my Instagram to try and book clients. i ran 300 bucks over a week and booked out all my available slots with that week. i immediately knew i found something. from there Instagram was my storefront and that is how i treated it. this was around 2018/19. i was able to travel any where i wanted to go and book out as much work as i wanted. i did that for a while. traveling. tattooing. just being an independent artist. in 2020/2021 i got a divorce and life took a turn for the worse. it was a long mental struggle with depression and such. lost everything other than my little private one room studio. when covid happened it allowed me to take a step back from tattooing and find myself as an artist and my medium wasn’t tattooing. it was cinema. i went to film school and found my passion as a cinematographer and photographer. i even wanted to wait tattooing and just film fulltime. so i was getting filming gigs and tattooing and traveling. found a love for Arizona and spent 2021/22 doing a split residency between phoenix and Louisville. every two weeks i would drive back and forth. at the end of 2022 i felt lost. no purpose. just existing and not progressing in anything so i came home to Kentucky and decided to set roots and get my life back on track. spent a lot of 2023 cleaning up my messes and felt like i had learned a lot over the years so i decided to launch another full walk in shop and hire artists which is what i did. in December of 2023 i launched Black & Grey tattoo and piercing. i do documentary style film work for mma fighters and weddings. all of that is pretty run of the mill.. but i got into streaming once io launched this studio. i started on twitch just for ad revenue and it blew up. i mad affiliate in my first week. from there it sparked a whole new idea of how i approach that tattooing business. i learned quickly about monetizing platforms and all of that and was able to offer subscriptions to my followers. but i wasn’t a content creator so i was trying to come up with ideas for things i could sell a subscription for. that’s when i came up with the idea of becoming the worlds first subscriber only tattooer. my idea is to sell subscriptions for $3 a month and with that i give away a free full day of tattooing to one random subscriber each month along with giving away 1/3 of sub revenue to random subscribers as well. my goal is to get enough subs to offset the daily rate of tattooing so that i can become a strictly a subscriber only tattooer. my goal is 35k subs. with that i get to tattoo every day of the month on subscribers only. they pay 3 bucks and get a full day of tattooing every day of the month. along with money giveaways. so once i reach the goal of 35k subs. that’s 20 days of tattooing subs only at their cost of 3 bucks along with random subscriber winners of $30k. i make more than what i make now. the clients only pay 3 bucks and they also have a chance to win big life changing money. along with other perks like merch and discounts. i also used that income to launch a show in Instagram called tattoo underdogs. season 1 just finished. it is a show like ink masters but it was for an apprenticeship. the winner not only gets an apprenticeship but i will fully invest in their Carrer. equipment, conventions, my know how on booking clients off social media. all of it. my main goal now is to get to 35k subs so that i can do something the tattoo industry has never seen before. it takes the followers to get me there, i cant do it with out the subs therefor i have to make it worth their while and that’s why i offer big give aways. i cant do this with out them and for that i will take them all with me to the top.

How did you build your audience on social media?

offer something of absolute value. it doesn’t need to be content. it just needs to hold value to your audience. for me it was tattoos at a crazy cheap price. MARKETING IS KEY. run adds. collaborate with other creators. get creative. it wasn’t until i realized i had an audience and not just a customer base that things really started to pick up momentum on the social media monetization side of things. be authentic. be real with your audience. people see through the facade and wont want to support something that feels like a ruse. CARE ABOUT YOUR FOLLOWING.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

hands down it is the fact i get to make a living doing what i want when i want. i sell my time to the client at my price. i don’t sell it to a boss at a fraction of the price for them to turn around and sell my time for to that same client for double of what i just sold it to the boss for. if the client is willing to pay you $100 an hour why would you sell it to a boss for half of that for them to sell it to that client at full price? i know i dropped out of school early but that math just didn’t add up to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: blackandgrey.family
• Instagram: @rob_taylor_tattoos
• Facebook: rob taylor tattoos
• Youtube: robmadestuff

Image Credits
all photos were shot by me. tattoos done by me