Out of the dark into the blacklight

Kori Kim / Roundup

He woke up the next morning, guilt-ridden with the thought of what happened the night before.

 Back then, he stood at 6 feet 2 inches with a build of a baseball catcher. John Corell, owner of Why Not Ink Tattoo, in Chatsworth, Calif., towered above his friend. “And I’m a big guy,” he says, “so I hurt the guy pretty bad.”

 He couldn’t believe he had the capability to physically attack someone, let alone his friend—all of this over some silly horseplay gone over-the-edge. He just kept punching his friend over and over again.

“The morning after– that’s when I knew that I was done with all of this [drug use],” John says. “I was so fucked up on pot and alcohol, and I just lost it.”

He remembered seeing his friend the next day. His chest was covered in softball-sized bruises the size of John’s fists.  He had hit him about 30 times. “I can’t believe I physically hurt a friend,” the soft-spoken Granada Hills native says.

Thirteen years later, John at age 30, is scurrying around his tattoo shop asking himself, “Where did I put that drawing?” as he anxiously looks for a picture of a tiger he completed for a later session.

Art has had a heavy influence for John since he was 8 years old.  As a child, he would study images from coloring books such as Roger Rabbit, and replicate the images on paper.  At age 10, and with the influence of his uncle, John’s creative outlet was expressed through graffiti art.

John and his uncle, who was ten years his elder, had a very close relationship.  His uncle committed suicide that year. “I took his death pretty hard,” John says, as he searches through his workstation for the picture. “I just stopped drawing and I got heavy into drugs a couple years after that.”

He recalls an incident in Laughlin, Nevada when he was in his teen years.  He and his crew rented a room at the Pioneer hotel and made way there with two “teeners” of Methamphetamines. “And two teeners of Meth is a lot of meth,” says John.

While he and his friends were partying in the hotel room, John didn’t realize that the police was called to the hotel.  Moments later, the SWAT team showed up to the Pioneer.  “I thought to myself, Oh Shit!, when I looked out the window and saw what I saw,” he says, “We quickly rounded up all our shit and got the hell out of dodge.”

He then explained that the SWAT team was called to the hotel for another drug-related incident in another room at the Pioneer.

“Even with a scare that big, I never had any awareness of the consequences of my actions,” says John.  “I’ve been arrested twice for possession before; I’ve had guns pulled on my head a couple times.  And I still didn’t learn my lesson until the night I attacked my friend.”   

He continued to explain a time when he and his friends, under the influence, were speeding down Woodley Ave in a friend’s car.  The car lost control and crashed.  Though everyone in the car survived, he was surprised that they came out of it alive.

Finally, 15 minutes after a long and frantic search, John realizes the tiger drawing was stuck behind the drawers of his Craftsman toolbox the entire time. That’s where he keeps all of his tattooing equipment.

“I’ve been clean ever since [the fight],” he says, as he finally begins preparations for a client who is receiving an ultraviolet blacklight ink tattoo.   

With the help and support from his investors, John opened the doors to Why Not Ink in May of 2010 with a focus to make it a drug-free environment, typically a hard to find in a tattoo shop. “I firmly believe in making the tattooing experience enjoyable for everyone,” he says. “If the clients are comfortable here, that means we’re doing something right.”

Soon after he attacked his friend, he put himself through drug rehabilitation. He started volunteering at substance abuse treatment programs as a counselor.  

“I knew this [counseling] was my calling after an experience I had with a girl who was in treatment. No one could get through to her but me,” he says, as he pulls out two bottles of Chameleon UV Blacklight ink, one in white and the other in neon orange. “She told me that if it weren’t for me, she would have ended up dead or on the street.”

After talking to a fellow employee at the treatment center, he found out that people actually got paid for doing what he was doing.  At age 20, he went to school, received a certificate in Addiction Studies at Mission College in Calif. He later became the director of treatment programs at Action Rehab Center in Simi Valley, Calif. at the age of 25.

Soon after, he moved to the Wonderland Center, Hollywood Hills, where he worked as a clinician at the rehab facility.  In November of last year, Wonderland closed their doors, and with the advice and support of his investors through the tough economy, John pursued his goal and opened his own full-service tattoo shop.  

Since his sobriety in 1997, art made its way back into John’s life by the way of a new medium, a tattoo machine. “I was lucky to have the amount of support that I did from my family and friends,” he says. “With all their help, I was able to finally get tattooing equipment.  The first year I was tattooing, I offered everyone free tattoos in order to help build my portfolio.”

He reassured his clients by offering to pay for any mistakes made on any tattoo he created. “That put more pressure on me to do the best quality work that I can,” he says. “I never had to pay to get someone’s tattoo fixed.”

As John is checking the needle adjustments to his tattoo machine, Kari Herwig, 24, from La Crescenta walks through the doors of the shop. She beams with light on a cloudy Friday afternoon, with her curly short blonde hair and a smile as big as Cameron Diaz.  

Kari is receiving a touch-up session of blacklight tattoo on a piece that covers the lower nape of her neck: it is a Celtic-style inverted triangle, about three inches in length, done by a different artist. In the center is an outline of a shamrock.

“Yeah, it’s almost gone,” she says.  She lifts her hair so that they could all observe.

John turned on his blacklight bulb and waved it across her tattoo. “See, you can see little spots here, and over here,” he says, as he points to the outer circular beam that was once an aura of bright neon orange.  The knots in the triangle had speckles of white, dusting it like powdered sugar.

She sits backwards on a chair, and lowers her head.  John dips his needle in the orange ink with one hand, stretches her skin taut with the other and balances an 18-inch blacklight bulb on his knee.  He does all this with no effort.

The tattoo machine starts to buzz and he’s grazing Kari’s skin with the needle.  As the needle traces the outer circle, it leaves behind a trail of bright orange, like a neon tube embedded into the skin.  It glows vividly and soon starts to dim, only because little beads of blood emerge at the surface of the skin.

“I’ve had a lot of practice doing blacklight ink work,” John says, as he adds a conversation to his mix of current duties. “I practiced a lot on myself when I first got into it [tattooing]. I have [blacklight] ink on my shins, on the teeth and the scales of my dragon.”

He raises the left side of his shorts, mid-thigh. Just above his dragon tattoo, is a portrait of Mother Teresa—one of John’s personal heroes, that he tattooed on himself.  

A screaming dragon covers the entire span of his lower leg.  At first glance, all you see are scales, claws and teeth.  Waved under a blacklight, you can see the highlighted accents of the dragon’s eyeballs, fangs, and other under-shading.

 “If a person [with a blacklight tattoo] notices that their tattoo is fading, it’s a good chance only one pass has been gone over the skin with a needle,” John says.  “Also, blacklight ink has a watery consistency, so you have to make at least two passes over the same spot for the tattoo to stay permanent.”

He demonstrates by showing the inside of his index finger. It reads Love and Happiness, in cursive letters.  It glows vividly and the color was distributed evenly through the entire piece. “I’ve had this one for three years now,” he says.

John also shows another one he had done on his wrist, a symbol of circle with a triangle inside; it also looks sharp and bright under the light.  “One of my friends saw this one, and he asked me to do the exact same one on him, the exact same way,” he says.

An hour passes, and Kari’s tattoo is complete.  The overall tattoo is tinted pink from slight irritation.  He wipes off the residual ink left on her skin and waves the bulb around one more time. Tiny spots of blood darken the glow underneath. “It’s going to be fuzzy-looking through the healing process, but in a couple weeks or so, it should look pretty fresh,” John says.

He tears off a section of saran wrap and secures it with medical tape over Kari’s new blacklight tattoo.  Still smiling, Kari wanders off, socializing with the other tattoo artists.

He finally takes off his gloves and stands up to stretch his legs, getting himself ready for his next appointment waiting in the front of the shop.

 His shop manager and close friend, Chuck Whipple, who also worked as a drug/alcohol counselor years ago, sits at the front of the shop tracing an image for his next client. Pretty and petite tattoo artist Raychel Daza is smiling big, strutting around the shop, and bobbing her head to some old-school rap.  And everyone has a big smile on their face.

“I love my staff,” John says with a smile. “They are family to me and I trust and respect them very much.”

With a build of a defensive lineman, John Corell, 6 feet 2 inches, continues to stand very tall these days, and not just in height.