Lucky Bastard didn't get into tattooing for the money or the fame. For that matter, when Lucky started tattooing there really wasn't any money or fame in the industry. It was just about inking your homies who wanted tattoos to look tougher.

Decades later, a lot has changed about tattooing, but one thing's stayed consistent: Lucky still isn't in tattooing to get rich or famous. These days it's all about the art for him, and he wants to do that art as big and as beautifully as he can.

While that might mean a half-sleeve or a chest tattoo for many artists, Lucky's carved out a niche for himself as one of the top guys in Southern California for larger work. Whether it's an ornate back piece or a full bodysuit, Lucky's experience and skill doing enormous tattoos is virtually unmatched outside of Japan.

Myspace caught up with the respected tattooer while he was working on a bodysuit at his shop (Fine Tattoo Work in Orange, CA) to talk about his punk rock beginnings and what it is people don't understand about doing bigger designs.

You started off tattooing in the LA punk rock scene decades ago, what was that like?

Well, I got into tattoos basically through punk rock. I was an '80s punk rock kid and tattoos were part of the uniform. All of my friends were older, so they had shop tattoos. My obsession with it started pretty early. I was already tattooing people before I could get tattooed. I started tattooing people for money when I was 17, but I think I did my first hand-poked tattoos at 13. I got one tattoo in Hollywood and they didn't ask me for ID, so then when I went to get a second tattoo, I showed them the first one and they were just like "Well alright..."

There was like a lull in tattooing for quite some time because there were no good wars. World War II, men got their war paint in tattoos. There was a lot of pride and patriotism in World War II and some in Korea, but Vietnam did not have that. Then in the '60s with the hippie movement and everything, that kind of pushed tattooing even farther back as a subculture thing. I think the late '70s and early '80s, tattooing kind of started to make its mark again with the musicians and the punk rock subculture that was happening then. Tattooing kind of fit in with that whole style, so that's where I started to see it. Gang members always had tattoos, but even sailors didn't have many tattoos by the '80s, and the sailors who were getting tattooed weren't getting Navy tattoos, but rock and roll tattoos. There wasn't that much culturally going on in tattooing for me until I started seeing the punk rock stuff happening. The '80s were real big on uniforms, and it was kind of a part of the punk rock uniform.

How did you first get into doing the bigger Japanese-style tattoos?

All this big work kind of came to me slowly over years and years and years because I got to grow into it with the rest of tattoo culture. Japanese tattooing wasn't really big when I first got into tattooing in the late '80s. People didn't have Japanese sleeves or body suits, and you couldn't even get information or many books with Japanese tattoos in them outside of Ed Hardy. The public didn't know about it, and if the public's not into it, it doesn't matter how cool you think it is. I always disregarded the bigger Japanese stuff because I always thought there was no place for it in my world. There was no market for it, but it kind of came around with the Internet when people got more access and interest to that kind off stuff.

I had clients who don't even know what subject matter they wanted, they just wanted a tattoo that went from their wrist to their chest. They wanted that look of a Japanese sleeve, and bigger pieces began to come to the forefront. It made it easier for us to be ambitious of the work we wanted to do, so it was kind of a slow progression for me getting into it. Then I went to Japan a lot and got tattooed by Horiyoshi (III, a legendary Japanese tattooer), so when it was time to do this stuff, I was in a better position to jump into the Japanese tattoo game than a lot of other people.

What would be your advice to a tattooer who wants to get into doing more bodysuits? 

Well you shouldn't just jump into doing bodysuits. You have to be a pretty adequate tattooer first to be able to do a bodysuit. You have to learn all these new parts of the body if you've been tattooing arms, lower legs, chests and backs from the waist up, that stuff's totally different than when you have to tattoo the inside of somebody's thigh or where their butt meets their thigh. Every inch of skin is different than when you're doing torso pieces. A lot of it is the technical aspect and learning how to actually tattoo it. Anybody can draw this stuff, but it's when it comes down to actually putting the pins to the skin, you have to know what you're doing.

See Lucky's work on Instagram at @lucky_bastard_ftw.