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Tattoo artist reveals biggest spelling mistake she’s made on the job
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A tattoo artist has revealed all on some of the blunders she made in the early stages of her career.
Sydney Mulvaney is a tattooer based in Saginaw, Michigan, with 12 years of experience under her belt, but like many of us before, she was an apprentice learning the ropes in her industry.
The 31-year-old has built up a following on her TikTok page, @sydneytattoos, after sharing her experiences as an artist, in addition to the honest admissions she's made about mistakes in the past.
No doubt being a tattoo artist comes with huge pressure, but the experienced professional admitted in an exclusive interview with VT that she's made her fair share of mistakes when starting out.
The artist has revealed some of the tattoos that she refuses to ink on clients, but she also told us some lessons she learned early on in her career.
Misspelling tattoos as an apprentice
Over a decade on from venturing into the industry as an apprentice, Sydney has looked back and admitted that there were a number of learning curves.
She explained: "We've all had those when it comes to misspelling a tattoo, or getting the time wrong on a clock, which I have done before, and it feels like your gut is going to fall out of your body - it is the worst feeling ever when you mess up a tattoo."
Sydney accepted that being a tattoo artist is a "huge responsibility," as while they may be spending a few hours on the ink, that person will "have that tattoo forever."
Opening up on an incident which took place in her early days, the tattooer recalled: "A woman came in, and she wanted the word Smurf on her wrist, so I told her to write it down for me because I was new to tattooing at that time, and I'd already misspelled one or two things, so I wanted to be sure."
After the customer wrote it down, Sydney gave her a selection of fonts, and remembered what she saw: "I saw her paper, and it looked like she wrote 'S M I R F' instead of 'S M U R F', so I showed her six different fonts with the word Smurf spelled S M I R F, and she didn't notice it until she picked a font, and I was almost done tattooing her.
"I dot the I, and she goes, 'Why did you dot the U?' and I was like, 'that is an I', and she said, 'Smurf is spelled with a U', but the stencil had an I on it too - that was so awful," she admitted.
A tramp stamp with a twist
But Sydney wasn't done there, as she said: "I also misspelled the word separate, which is a hard word!
"It was huge - it was a tramp stamp that said 'Separate thyself from the pack', it's massive, it's her whole lower back, and we were friends at the time when she came to get it.
"I think it was a free tattoo, because I was an apprentice; if not, she paid maybe $50 for it," Sydney reflected.
But once it was done, her team thought it was really cool and posted snaps of the finished product on Facebook before disaster struck.
Sydney revealed: "Then, everybody in the comments is like, 'separate is spelled wrong', oh my god, so she came back in and because I spelled it 's e p E r a t e', instead of 's e p A r a t e', we ended up turning the e into an a, but it never looks as it would if you just did it right the first time."
She said that early on in your tattoo career, you don't think about spelling until you realize it's going to be on someone forever.
"That goes back to it being a huge responsibility to be a tattoo artist, because you have to remember that these people have lives, and they'll live with that tattoo for the rest of their life, and they'll think of you every time they look at it, especially if it's f**ked up," the 31-year-old said.
Luckily, she has learned from her past errors, as the designer explained that she "makes clients check the spelling," more than once.
"When I show them the design, I say double check the spelling, and then when I put on the stencil, I say no, double check that spelling again, because I draw pictures for a living, okay, I'm not a rocket scientist."