A body of work
by Daniel D'Angelo

Working more than 40 hours a week at minimum wage, reformed body-piercer Jeffry Betts loves every minute of his tattoo apprenticeship at Nemesis Studios.

The waiting room at Nemesis Studios, 104 S. Linn St., carries the same aura as a dentist’s office. Soft, black leather sofas sit on sea-foam green tile with matching walls. The air smells sterile, and a man behind the front desk talks on the phone, ordering supplies, dental bibs included. A soft metallic buzz permeates the background.

A stack of colorful magazines with titles such as CRAVE and Inked rest next to one of the sofas. The walls are adorned with a WANTED poster for a sex offender and a Japanese tapestry featuring a nude woman covered in a full-body tattoo of a flowery field. A 3-foot pile of fake skulls lurks in a corner. The man ordering dental bibs hangs up the phone and expels a strong belch.

Jeffry Betts emerges from a hallway leading to the tattoo rooms. A former body-piercer, Betts, 31, has been working with and around tattoo artists for more than a decade, but it wasn’t until two years ago that he decided to fully commit himself to becoming a tattoo artist.

“I would call my work indentured servitude,” he says with a tired-looking smile. His eyes look heavy behind brown-rimmed glasses, adding a scholarly essence to his composure. Betts is the self-proclaimed “shop gopher.” He goes out for coffee and food, scrubs floors, cleans equipment, sets up appointments, buys supplies, and runs the front desk. In addition to the dirty work, he spends countless hours studying and reading books about tattoo designs, famous artists, and techniques.

“Apprenticeship is a two- to three-year learning experience. It’s like a hazing period,” he says. “The other artists give me a hard time. I do the shittiest work, but I learn a lot.”

When speaking about the progress Betts has made as an apprentice, Nemesis owner Matt Cooper gives him a shower of praise. His determination is astounding, Cooper says. He hates making mistakes and he’s always trying to learn better techniques.

“He’s leaps and bounds above where I was when I was an apprentice,” Cooper says. “I didn’t get very much guidance. He’s come along very far, very quickly. It helps that he’s just so anal about his work.”

Coworker Scott Warren, a tattoo artist who has worked at Nemesis since 2001, says Betts’ role in the shop is just as important as everybody else’s.

“He’s learning to do everything we do, he’s always busy with something,” Warren says. “He’s even learning how to make his own needles, which almost nobody does.”

At the back of the shop is Betts’ cramped workroom. The walls are plastered with photos, posters, and knickknacks Betts has acquired over the years, everything from mint-condition action figures to a giant photo collage of zeppelins flying toward a burning schoolhouse.

There’s also a certificate from the Iowa Public Health Department that allows Betts to tattoo legally. The process for acquiring such a certificate in Iowa is not difficult. All one needs is $75 and the name of a tattoo shop, which implies somebody vouches for your ability. In some states, such as Nevada, aspiring tattoo artists take a standardized test, mostly over safety issues, to become certified. Other states, such as Washington, have no regulations on tattooing.

Betts is at the tail end of finishing up a tattoo of the first words from the Constitution, “We the People,” stretching from the left armpit down to the hip of UI political-science major Matt Heflin. Heflin is exhausted from lying motionless on his side for four hours, and Betts is tired from hunching his long back over the table.

Betts hums along to soft radio music as he works. He’s a tall, lanky man with slightly wrinkled skin and short tousled brown hair hidden beneath a maroon knit cap. He wears a stringy soul patch on his chin, which matches a pair of short sideburns. A vintage-looking sweater and a pair of well-worn jeans cover up his tattoo-covered arms and legs.

After completing the design, Betts spends nearly 30 minutes cleaning the tattoo and instructing Heflin on proper maintenance. He snaps a digital photo of it for his records and covers it with a bandage. Heflin pays him $280 cash and leaves the shop, beaming. Betts sprays down the entire area with cleaner and heads outside for a cigarette.
He gets paid the equivalent of minimum wage, and he puts in more than 40 hours of work each week. But to him, it’s worth it. He’s always wanted a job in the art world, and he says tattooing is the only way to really make money as an artist.

“It’s art that everybody can afford,” says Betts, with a slight scorn for what he calls “art coveted by the snooty.” “Van Gogh never made a penny while he lived. With tattooing, you get recognition now. The best part of tattooing is getting paid for what I love to do.”

His love for the art world surfaced during childhood. A Mason City, Iowa, native, his family moved to Iowa City in 1992. Betts spent a lot of his early childhood at his grandparents’ house. There, he spent countless hours perusing a massive bookcase filled with issues of National Geographic dating back to the ’20s. Betts specifically remembers first getting interested in body art while looking at and copying photographs of African tribes featuring people with elaborate piercings and neck rings.

After high school, Betts spent a few years training to become a body piercer at Moon Estique, a shop located in the Hall Mall. The shop closed in 1996, but he continued to pierce at various tattoo shops in Iowa City.

His career in body art almost ended in 1999, when a plate-glass window fell on his right forearm, severing tendons and muscles to the bone. For eight months, he couldn’t use his dominant hand, the right. Following the accident, Cooper wasn’t sure Betts would ever work in the tattoo and piercing business again. But after months of rehab, his hand made a near-complete recovery.

“I’d say he’s at about 92 percent capability,” Cooper says.

In 2000, Betts followed Cooper to Seattle, a move that spurred a switch from piercing to tattooing. Betts began a tattoo apprenticeship in 2005 when his boss at a Seattle tattoo shop offered to teach him. Betts quickly cultivated a clientele of customers who liked his work.

Even though his apprenticeship was going well, in the spring of 2006, Betts returned to Iowa City. Cooper had become Nemesis’ new owner and offered him an apprenticeship there.

“Nemesis is where I got really serious about becoming a tattoo artist,” Betts says.

And Betts isn’t just serious about giving tattoos, he’s also passionate about getting them. He boasts a collection of nearly 30 tattoos on his body. His right arm bears his religious tattoos: a skeleton praying before a stained glass window and a snake wrapped around the Fruit of Truth and Knowledge. A monkey flies over one shoulder. One of his favorites, a gift he received when he left Seattle, depicts the Japanese suicide tradition of hara-kiri. It’s a sword pointing toward a dotted-line on his belly and beneath the line are the words “Cut along dotted line to regain honor.” He says it’s intended to be humorous.

He gave himself his first tattoo when he was 16.

“I wound up a needle with some black ink and just went for it,” he says. “It was an image of a naked girl sitting down,
facing away on my left upper-arm. It was embarrassing — a really stupid one — so I actually covered it up with my second tattoo ever. That was a giant skull.

“My first tattoo didn’t actually hurt at all, but now it seems every new tattoo I get, especially as I get older, hurts more and more. Tattoos are still permanent; even if you try getting them removed, there’ll always be a scar.”

Since the start of his apprenticeship, Betts has administered almost 100 tattoos to customers. And two years later, he knows almost everything there is to know about the mechanics behind the process of tattooing.

He has dozens of stories about stupid tattoos customers have gotten in the shops in which he has worked, including a “cowboy” who had “Love Me Tender” tattooed on his ass. The cowboy passed out during the procedure.

“The dumbest tattoo I ever heard of was from this guy in Seattle,” Betts says. “He wanted a picture of Goofy smoking a crack pipe with the word CRACKHEAD underneath … I couldn’t do that to him. His request was rejected. I told him, you may like crack a lot now, but I doubt you will in 10 years.”

Betts says there’s a great deal of integrity maintained in a respectable tattoo shop. When customers don’t seem to understand the permanence of a tattoo, proper placement, or aesthetic consideration, their request can often be rejected by artists. Good artists should make sure their customers have put a lot of thought into the desired tattoo.
Cooper says Betts has exceeded his expectations by 10-fold. He estimates in about one year, Betts’ apprenticeship will be complete, at which point, he’ll give him a raise and let him make his own schedule. For now, Cooper wants to see Betts’ clientele grow.

“Betts’s got it all. He’s a smart guy, has a huge passion for art, loves bettering himself, loves the art form,” says Cooper. “He has a lot of pride in his work and in the shop. I hope he stays with us when he’s done.”

About the writer Daniel D’Angelo, a Bettendorf native, loves watching professional tennis. His favorite player is the Russian Goliath Marat Safin. At the UI, he studies journalism, Japanese, and poetry with the hopes that he’ll be accepted to a high-ranked graduate writing program. He finds death metal hilarious and relishes making jukeboxes play Slipknot’s “Duality” in crowded bars.