Product Description

A Tattooed Life: A Brief History on Golden Iron.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love; you have to find the courage to live it.

At Golden Iron Tattoo Studio our way of life is a tattooed life. Like all passionate artists, we spend most

of our waking hours honing our skills, bettering our craft, and making ourselves into the best artists we can be,

for ourselves and our clients.

We eat, breathe, and sleep tattoos.

Golden Iron has lived this way since its birth, and although stronger, bigger, and better for doing so,

it has not been an easy climb.

There are 5 basic necessities to survival in the wild:

find shelter, keep warm, stay hydrated, navigate wisely, and calm down.

Being an artist is no different.

In the beginning the shop was a meager store front, part of a line of windows and restaurants along

the ever bustling main drag of Toronto’s Spadina Avenue China town. A new country, a new business,

and a hunger to succeed driven by passion and love for tattoo. With no client base and an artist

roster of one, in a city full of competition and established studios, it was here that the roots of

Golden Iron were planted. This was a real life make it or break it situation. Survival based purely

on artistic merit, skill, and maybe, a little luck. Days were long and tedious then; working with

apprentices, getting the name out, staying open late with hopes of catching one or two walkins from

the street traffic, praying to keep heads above water. As time passed, and the client base grew, so did

the roster of artists, within two years Golden Iron grew from one to a solid team with varying styles.

In an attempt to grow the shops audience and move towards a more fruitful future the artists started

to work towards competing in the Canadian tattoo convention circuit. This resulted in our artists

working full days at the shop to maintain incomes and shop expenses, and working through after

hours, and off days in order to have showpiece tattoos ready to showcase at the conventions.

12- 16 hour days at the shop became a norm for the team, working alongside one another,

critiquing each other, and teaching one another, in the hopes of attaining some public stature, and acclaim.

Life outside of the studio became nonexistent. Eat. Breathe. Sleep. Tattoo.