For a long time, Mick Squires believed he might be an impostor.
Not in the way people sometimes confess self doubt after the fact, when the admission feels safe and even flattering in hindsight, but in a way that genuinely unsettled him while it was happening. The kind of doubt that does not interrupt your work but quietly shadows it, sharpening your self scrutiny and making every near success feel provisional. It did not stop him from turning up, from committing to the craft, from doing what was required. It simply stayed with him, unresolved, shaping his relationship with tattooing long before recognition ever arrived.
Tattooing, as an industry and as a culture, tends to prefer cleaner narratives. It likes inevitability. It likes the idea that the best artists always knew, that from the first moment they held a machine something clicked and the rest followed naturally. The prodigy story reassures everyone involved. Talent reveals itself early. Direction is obvious. Success becomes a matter of time.
Mick never felt that way.
He began tattooing in his early twenties in a coastal town outside Melbourne, not because he felt called to it, but because it was available and he was willing to work. There was no moment of destiny, no internal certainty that this was what he was meant to do. When he later moved into the city, it was not driven by romantic ambition so much as practical necessity. Better studios meant better clients. Better clients meant the chance to improve. He followed that logic carefully, building his career step by step.
From the outside, it looked like progress. He worked relentlessly. He stayed disciplined. His technical ability improved. But internally, something never quite aligned. The images he carried in his head were vivid and precise. What appeared on skin, again and again, felt close but incomplete. Good work, often very good work, but not yet honest to the vision that had drawn him toward realism in the first place.
“I could see exactly what I wanted,” he says. “I just couldn’t get it to land.”
Close enough is an uncomfortable place to live. Close enough to recognise what is missing. Close enough to feel responsible for it. Close enough that effort alone no longer feels like an adequate explanation. For years, Mick carried that tension quietly. He did not dramatise it or talk about it much. He simply worked harder, assuming that persistence would eventually close the gap.
Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t.
The moment that changed everything did not arrive as inspiration or confidence or affirmation. It arrived as interruption.
A steady pace. A careful eye. And standards that do not move.
Mid session one day, a tattoo machine failed. There was no immediate replacement. The client was waiting. Mick adapted out of necessity. He slowed down. He reduced voltage. He softened his hand speed. Instead of forcing the process forward, he began paying closer attention to how the skin was responding in real time.
Almost immediately, the work changed.
The skin calmed. Pigment settled more evenly. Transitions softened. Depth appeared where it had previously felt forced. For the first time in years, the image on the body resembled the image he had been carrying privately in his head.
It was not triumphant. It was quieter than that, and more unsettling.
For Mick, the realisation was clear and slightly disorienting. Tattooing had never been something he was meant to do in a mystical sense. The problem had not been talent or vision. The problem had been alignment. His equipment, his setup, the assumptions he had inherited, none of it truly matched the way he worked.
That tattoo, the one that emerged from that broken machine and those improvised adjustments, changed him. It was the first time the work on skin fully matched what he had always been trying to achieve. It did not feel like discovery so much as permission.
Depth that arrives without force. Transitions that read as inevitable, not worked over.
From that point on, Mick became intensely attentive to mechanics. Not out of technical obsession, but because mechanics were the final barrier between intention and execution. He began modifying his machines, then building them, tuning them to respond precisely to his hand rather than forcing his hand to adapt to something generic. As the tools receded, as they stopped demanding attention, the work opened up.
Realism was no longer something he chased. It was something he allowed.
Long before a needle touches skin now, Mick is already observing. Hydration is the first thing he notices, how well the skin has been looked after, how it feels under his hands. Even then, he avoids judgement. Experience taught him that certainty in tattooing is risky. Skin that appears ideal can resist ink. Skin that looks compromised can surprise you. He no longer predicts outcomes before the work begins, because tattooing has a way of humbling those who assume too much.
Skin moves. Bodies shift. Pain changes posture. Swelling alters perception. Healing introduces variables no plan can fully account for. Control, Mick learned, is always temporary.
Tattooing, as he practices it, is not a performance but a conversation. Between artist, machine, and a living surface that refuses to behave like paper or canvas. The work lives in adjustment, in thinking and responding simultaneously, in staying present without frustration or ego. It is art and science, but never fully one or the other, because the human element refuses to be fixed.
This philosophy extends far beyond the needle.
Presence first. The work follows. The client is never just a surface.
When Mick co founded The Black Mark, he built it around the same values that guide his tattooing. Calmness. Acceptance. Care. He wanted a space that felt grounded before it ever felt impressive. A studio where clients could feel, from the moment they walked in, that they were welcome and appreciated, that their choice to trust someone with their skin was taken seriously.
That feeling matters more than people realise. How someone feels in a space affects how they sit. How they sit affects how their skin responds. None of it is separate.
The culture at The Black Mark is deliberately human. Built on friendship, learning, support, and something that sounds simple but is surprisingly rare, genuine care for one another. Mick has little patience for detachment disguised as professionalism. Sitting behind headphones, withdrawing into comfort at the expense of connection, misses the point entirely.
“You don’t tattoo paper,” he says. “You tattoo humans.”
Some clients want quiet. Others need conversation to manage nerves. Some want to watch movies. Some want to talk through their story. Mick pays attention. He adjusts. Making someone comfortable is not complicated, but it does require awareness. Tattooing is a people business, and treating clients like objects, no matter how efficient that might feel, is not the right way to go about it.
Even the studio’s relationship with coffee reflects this mindset. What began as Mick making morning coffees for his team evolved into a considered in house ritual. Not for show, but for pace. Good coffee slows people down. It creates space before a long day. At home, Mick uses a fully manual spring lever espresso machine, a piece of equipment that demands attention and offers no shortcuts. He loves the romance of it, the physicality, the requirement to be present.
There is no perfect cup of coffee, he insists. He may have had the best one years ago and has been chasing it ever since. That does not mean the coffee now is bad. It means his standards are high.
Still, he draws a distinction. Coffee, for all its nuance, is more science than tattooing. It operates within fixed parameters. Tattooing does not. Tattooing requires constant adjustment, because the body is never static. The person moves. The skin changes. Everything shifts.
“You can prepare,” he says. “But you have to respond.”
Realism demands patience of a particular kind. Not the dramatic patience of suffering, but the quieter discipline of refusing to accept near enough. Mick traces that patience back to an inner voice that has never let him settle for approximation. Near enough is not good enough. It needs to be better than that.
His sessions are often long, sometimes spread across months. There is no rush, no spectacle. Just a steady accumulation of detail and nuance, built carefully until the image feels complete. He remembers clearly the first tattoo that fully aligned after he changed his approach, not because it made his reputation, but because it resolved a tension he had been carrying for years.
Over time, recognition followed quietly. Mick is now recognised as a SKINGRAPHICA Global Top 100 Artist, a distinction reserved for those whose work demonstrates sustained mastery, consistency, and restraint at the highest level. The acknowledgment matters, but not for the reasons people might assume. It reflects a body of work built patiently, without shortcuts, over time.
What he is most proud of, however, is something easier to overlook.
When Mick was developing his craft, colour realism in tattooing was still being figured out. Techniques that feel established now were uncertain then. A small group of artists around the world were working without templates, without guarantees, sharing information, solving problems together, often by trial and error. Someone had to be first to attempt what had not yet been proven possible.
Mick was part of that moment.
He does not speak about it loudly. But it matters to him that he helped push the craft forward, that what is now taken for granted once required patience, experimentation, and a refusal to accept near enough when the rules were still being written.
He has tattooed clients across the world, in the United States, Europe, Asia, and beyond, and travel has only confirmed what he already suspected. Geography does not change the fundamentals. Tattooing is always one on one. Needles in and out of skin. A human exchange built on trust.
When a client finally leaves his chair after a major piece, sometimes after months of work, Mick hopes the tattoo carries more than technical accuracy. He hopes it carries memory. The reason they chose the image. The experience of the process. The feeling of being treated as a person rather than a surface.
Ink settles. Skin changes. Life moves on. Experience, when handled properly, stays.
In an industry that often rewards volume, noise, and visibility, Mick Squires has built his career through restraint. He works quietly. Attentively. With care. His discipline does not announce itself.
And it is precisely that, the willingness to slow down, to listen, to adjust, to refuse shortcuts, that allows his work to endure, long after the machine is switched off and the skin has healed.
For availability and booking enquiries, reach out directly. Or email contact@micksquires.com.
Nothing forced. Nothing overplayed. Just the image arriving cleanly, exactly where it should.
Work that holds its ground. The longer you look, the more it gives you back.
Portfolio
A selection of Mick’s work
© Mick Squires, 2026
For availability and booking enquiries, reach out directly. Or email contact@micksquires.com.
