Tattoo Industry and Culture (part 1)
[As promised, here is the first section of the final article I wrote for my feature-writing class last semester on the tattoo industry and culture. It is just a little intro, highlighting the beginnings of one tattoo artist I have talked about a few times on this blog already, Brian Brenner of Truth & Triumph Tattoo. I hope you all enjoy it and come back for the other posts of the series.]


Brian Brenner grew up in the 1970s and 1980s listening to rock ‘n’ roll and old-school punk rock and hanging out with the “misfits” of his day. He said mainstream culture saw him and his friends as a “different breed of scumbag,” viewing them in only a slightly better light than bikers and criminals. And at the time, bikers and criminals were notorious for their tattoos. So it was not long before Brenner decided that getting tattooed fit who he was, given how society viewed him.

He got his first tattoo when he was 19, a tribal design on his right leg. Brenner has had a love for art all his life, but he did not immediately think of getting into the tattoo business until the owner of the shop he went to suggested the idea.

“I knew I didn't want to work a factory job or a grunt labor job for the rest of my life, and I loved art,” Brenner said. “I just never imagined doing it on people's skin until I'd received my second tattoo, and it was then I knew it was for me.”

Brenner began tattooing as a side job with a kit he had ordered from an old tattoo magazine when he was 21 or 22. He started doing tattoos at his kitchen table, with his first being a little rose on an ex-girlfriend. Eventually, Brenner was not satisfied with the money he was making airbrushing T-shirts in Myrtle Beach, S.C., so he decided to make tattooing his career and joined the crew New Breed Tattoo. But in the past two decades, Brenner has established himself as one of the top tattoo artists in the Dayton area with his own shop, Truth & Triumph Tattoo.

“I always remained loyal and worked at the shop that brought me into the business until I had a different vision for opening my own studio four or five years into tattooing,” he said. “That is what you know as Truth & Triumph today.”

Truth & Triumph Tattoo at 3250 Kettering Blvd. in Dayton, Ohio, where Brian Brenner and John Lloyd tattoo clients.

Since opening the shop, he has traveled the globe, showcasing his skills at conventions and having his work featured in prominent tattoo magazines. Brenner said that though in high school his peers saw him as the “class clown” and “least likely to succeed,” he now has exceeded everyone’s expectations by owning three successful tattoo shops.

In these three locations, he and his staff have done thousands of tattoos, some representing only a desire to check one item off a bucket list and others holding truly significant meanings to the wearers.