Tattoo craft, tools, and process in public.
Fireside Tattoo Podcast follows tattooing from the inside: machines, healed work, conventions, digital tools, and hard-won process. Jake’s conversations move between shop-floor problem solving and bigger questions about standards, education, and what makes tattoo art last.
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Fireside Tattoo Podcast is a craft-focused tattoo show where conversations start casually and often end up deep inside process. It is not just about admiring finished tattoos. The show spends time on how work heals, why tools behave the way they do, and how artists make decisions before needle ever touches skin. Jake’s interview style is relaxed, self-aware, and conversational, with enough humor to keep long technical stretches from feeling sterile. The subject matter stays serious, though. Episodes return again and again to the difference between a strong image online and a tattoo that holds up in the body over time. Jesse Rix’s episode frames dimensional tattooing through flesh-toned geometry, atmospheric imagery, and the push to make skin appear to warp. Technique Talks with artists such as Cooper and Rich Wren move into workflow, saturation, touch-ups, drawing volume, critique, and the uncomfortable middle space where a tattooer is still finding a voice. The show also cares about the machinery of the trade. Carson Hill’s Neuma 5 conversation follows iteration, failed tests, dampening systems, and the pressure of building something new. BJ Johnson, also known as Soba, brings the coil-builder’s view into a field increasingly shaped by pen-style rotaries. Russ Abbott’s appearance connects tattooing to digital tools, TattooSmart, Procreate brushes, and the business of making resources for artists. Other episodes widen the frame. Alex DePasse’s International Tattoo Federation conversation raises questions about standards, competitions, education, and what recognition means when judged by major figures in the field. Greg "Craola" Simkins brings painting, graffiti history, underpainting, color strategy, and studio observation into the same orbit as tattoo culture. The show is best when it lets practitioners compare notes in public. It feels like a long table after a convention: loose, technical, opinionated, and useful.
Made for: Fireside Tattoo Podcast is for tattooers, apprentices, serious collectors, and visual artists who want more than surface-level portfolio talk. It especially suits listeners interested in technique, equipment, healed work, conventions, and the habits behind durable art.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its closeness to practice: conversations linger on machine behavior, touch-ups, drawing systems, saturation, judging, and artist process. It mixes shop-floor specificity with broader industry questions about education, standards, tools, and tattooing’s future.
Jake Meeks' mostly weekly tattoo podcast answering viewer questions, interviewing artists and waxing philosophical to promote better tattooing and more informed collectors. He is often joined by fellow tattooers, artists of other mediums, professionals in other fields and collectors. We hope you enjoy!Also, we offer courses from artists on the show at firesidetattoo.com if you are interested! Thanks for supporting our show!
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jake makes tattoo craft legible through detailed conversations about artistic decisions, technical limits and what finished work becomes on skin.
Fireside Tattoo Podcast treats tattooing as a working art, with Jake steering conversations toward the decisions behind an image and the realities of putting it on skin.
Skin, pigment, and painterly process become shop-floor detective work, so you can ask what actually heals well.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Jesse Ricks discusses how studying healed tattoos encouraged him to experiment.
Jesse Ricks is known for flesh-toned geometric shapes that seem to rise from the body, often framing softer, atmospheric artwork. Talking with Jake, he recalls seeing ambitious tattoos after they had healed and realizing that more was possible than he had been taught.
Alex DePasse talks tattoo gatherings, his art school and the peer voting behind Icons and Prodigies.
Jake's conversation with Alex DePasse moves between the tattoo gatherings Alex is building and the ones Jake remembers. Jake recalls attending the Venetian tattoo gathering at a palace in Venice.
A tattooer compares healed work with return visits to explain what a later touch-up can reveal.
In this Technique Talk, a tattooer looks at what happens after the work heals. Clients had come back with tattoos that looked lighter than they had at first, so he began photographing every piece he made, including ones he would not normally show.
Rich talks about finding an artistic voice through experimentation, repeated sketching and working with pencil and paper.
Rich describes finding an artistic voice by making things, trying materials and borrowing methods that appeal to him. He carried that habit into tattooing while working full time and attending college.
Art historian Tamar Avishai interviews critics, curators, and writers about single paintings and ideas.
Sound art from places, recordings, and memory.
Fireside Tattoo Podcast host Jake talks with Jesse Rix about the 3D flesh-tone hexagons that made his work recognizable and the 2014 first piece that started it.
Fireside Tattoo Podcast centers on Alex De Pase, Gabe Ripley, and Jake discussing the International Tattoo Federation, the Icons and Prodigies convention, and a new tattoo campus.
Cooper and the Fireside team use a Technique Talk to focus on color, layering, and the efficiency problems that appear when tattoos scale from small to large.
Greg Simkins explains how large canvases reveal new story elements absent from his tiny initial sketches.
Rich Wren says he was offered an apprenticeship for "$10,000," then was told to "tell you that you didn't do these."
Host Jake Meeks interviews tattoo artist and entrepreneur Russ Abbott about his online business TattooSmart, discussing tattoo technologies, brush sets, and the future of tattooing.
Jake Meeks interviews tattoo machine innovator Carson Hill about the new Pneuma 5 machine and the evolution of tattoo technology.
Host Jake Meeks interviews BJ Johnson (Soba), co-founder of Workhorse Irons, about the rotary vs.
Host Jake Meeks interviews tattoo artist Patrick Paul O'Neill about his large-scale illustrative Japanese and Chinese-inspired tattooing, discussing techniques and career insights.