What happened to tattooists working in multiple styles?

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, tattooists used to work in multiple styles.
Now, it seems that most tattooists only want to work in one style. Often times they’ve never even learned about other styles let alone how to ink them into your skin.
Why is this?
It seems there are a lot of opinions, a lot of which appear to be focused on being condescending towards fineline tattooing.

I can’t speak for others but I’ll give my two cents here.
One of the biggest factors for me is the rise of social media, prior to this, the world of tattooing was set up where the tattoo studios had the name and reputation. Artists were desperate to work in those studios because those would be the busiest and you’d perhaps be able to build a reputation for yourself from there.
During that time to survive and thrive in that environment, you would need to be able to tattoo whoever walked in the door with whatever they wanted. If someone walked in asking for Blackwork tattoos or Japanese tattoos or whatever style, you would need the skills if you wanted tattooing to pay your bills.
This all changed when social media arrived.

The era of social media created a circumstance where artists could promote themself completely independent of the studio they worked in. Obviously, this was possible and artists were doing so before, but social media gave artists a chance to spread their own promotion so much further than ever before.
Artists, for the first time, were able to focus on what they wanted to do and promote that much more. This gave rise to people only promoting the one style they wanted to focus on, meaning that this generation of artists could choose to do other work if times were hard but mostly worked in “their” style.

Then, tattooing got greedy!

During the social media boom, there were a lot of tattooists who became more interested in money than preserving the quality of tattooing. Apprentice tattooists were hired in droves and rushed to be tattooing as soon as possible. The quicker those tattooists could get their apprentices to earn them money, the better.
Along with this, we saw a rise in artists selling their tattoo information online for money. This has given rise to a generation of tattooists who can only do one style.

I don’t want to put any blame on these new artists at all; I don’t think it’s fair. if anything, I worry for them when style trends change, and they’re stuck only doing a style most people aren’t interested in. It puts them in a really bad position in the future, which they don’t know is coming down the line.
It’s unfair on them to have not been taught properly.
Overall, it seems the biggest issue is that those who teach should want to teach properly, and most of those people don’t. Even if it means that it takes three times as long before the artist is earning them money, it should be the priority to make sure their apprentices have the biggest toolset of skills to work from.

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Beyond the Ink: How Tattoo Culture Changes Across Borders

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Rebecka talks about growing up in a tattooing family