When you choose for Chris Lee at Little Vinnie's Tattoos in Maryland to create your masterpiece, you better be prepared to like FOX's TV show Family Guy. Chris is a collector of the episodes, and had them playing the entire time that we were in his studio. Not holding that against him, he is an awesome artist.

     Chris was born and raised in Modesto, CA, going to the same high school that George Lucas attended. He was interested in tattoos ever since he was young, looking at the images that his grandfather received on his arms and legs while in the Navy that were applied using a bamboo shoot.

     He was living in Seattle when he started tattooing his friends, and then received an apprenticeship at a shop where he was the "shop bitch" for over six months. While in training as an apprentice, Chris would buy the homeless a bottle of Wild Irish Rose in exchange for the opportunity to practice on a real person's skin to fine-tune his techniques. He almost had the unique opportunity to practice on John Doe's, courtesy of a friend's father being a mortician - but the mortician backed out at the last minute.

     Finally getting into his own, he found that Seattle was a dog-eat-dog city, where artists were secretive of their work and techniques. So, he called up a childhood friend living in PA, and jumped on over to the East Coast. Working at Vinnie's, he says, is the best thing that could have happened to him, a dream come true.

     Chris wants to make his mark on the industry, just like every other artist. But he realizes that you have to know where you are coming from to know where you want to go. He has great respect and is influenced by the work done by H.R. Geiger, Tom Beazlie, Aaron Cain, Guy Atchinson, and Masamune Shirow, just to name a few. He is disappointed in the new generation of tattoo artists that are so tied up in themselves and what they are doing that they haven't taken the time to look at those that have paved the way for them. He believes in buying quality frames for his machines, and then tearing everything apart so that he knows how the machine is working and so that he is able to manipulate it to work the way he wants it to. Chris wants to know why things work the way that they do.