We sit down and I adjust to the sound of needles buzzing in the background as Hollywood Mark (43) starts to relate the special journey that brought him to Amsterdam.

Growing up in the barrio (poor Spanish neighbourhood) of Los Angeles as the youngest of seven kids, Hollywood Mark soon realized he had to take any opportunity for a different life. At the age of 12 he took a test to enter another school in LA, which changed his perspective on his future.

“I got out of my neighbourhood which was kind of Mexican, black, lower class and ghetto,” he says. “That’s when I started to go to Hollywood, and that also had a big impact and changed the way I viewed the world. I was exposed to a lot more interesting people because they came from all different parts of LA and from every corner of society. My motivation to become an artist was conceived through that experience.“

Yet he never thought about becoming a tattoo artist, not even when he began to hang out at the tattoo shop of one of his friends. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, I was in art school and bouncing around from job to job but it was always art related. After I got off from school I usually went to Charlie’s tattoo shop to hang out. I didn’t really think of it as something for me, I just thought of it as hanging out with my friend who had a tattoo shop. But after a couple of years of doing that they asked me if I’d ever considered working as a tattoo artist because they thought I would be pretty good at it since I was always drawing.”

He made that decision pretty quickly, and tattooed his first artwork at the age of 23. He worked in his friends tattoo shop for only one year when another life changing opportunity arose. Henk Schiffmacher, a well-known Dutch tattoo artist came to visit the shop and asked Mark to join him as his apprentice in Amsterdam, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“That took me out of LA into Europe and showed me new cultures and a whole other way of living. I met some of the best tattoo artists during this time because they all worked for Henk. So my education as a tattoo artist was incredible. One door opened with Henk but after that hundreds of doors opened because he introduced me to so many people in the celebrity and tattoo world.”

When I asked Mark for some last words of advice, he says: “So many people do things in life for the money. Money is there when you’re good in what you do, so you might as well enjoy what you do because I think you’ll have a more profitable life. At one point you’re going to look back on your life and wonder what it is you’re doing here and how you spend your time.”