Our local reporter visited him to find out what made him decide that this was his mission in life...
So tell me a little about yourself?
Well, originally I am from Madrid but I have lived in many different parts of Spain and Limerick in Ireland. I was on the graffiti scene, when I was younger and I stopped when I was about 14 or 15 years old, this was how I started tattooing. I always liked doing graffiti with tribal around them. One day a friend asked me to do a tribal design for them and then had a tattoo done. After a while my cousin started pushing me and I tried to sell my designs to tattoo shops. However, nobody wanted them; they would look at my designs and then just copy them. In the end I started hanging around with a few tattoo artists and I would draw the design and they would do the tattoos. One day one of them turned around and said did I want to tattoo him. So since that day I started.
Where did you get the name “El Loco Martinez”
It was actually a friend of mine from Tipperary; he just looked at me one day and said “hey man – you’re loco”. It just stuck; from then on everybody just started calling me El Loco!!
Do you think tattoos are now accepted in normal social circles?
Well they used to be associated with alternative or underground cultures. Now they are pretty much accepted in all social circles. This is good. People used to think “oh, tattoos, they must be criminals!!”
¨It ´s not like that anymore. Nowadays everybody has them from footballers to the girl next door. It has become a fashion statement but it’s not that either. It’s just art. But with all the famous people showing it off on TV and in magazines its being more and more accepted. That’s actually good because not only bad people have tattoos!! And hey, you don’t see people with tattoos complaining about those who don’t have them¨
What would your advice be to someone who wants a tattoo done but doesn’t due to the misconception of how people may view them or they think they have less chances of getting work?
If you have any doubt – don’t do it, you know what I mean…If you’re not sure of what you wanna do, then don’t do it. If I wanna do something, I’m gonna do it! If someone don´t like it, well it’s my body. And if someone is not going to give me a job for it, well that’s fine too. But it’s true, these things do happen. People sometimes don´t get a job due to their tattoos or they are being asked to take their piercings out when they do get a job. Or even not being served in a restaurant! As happened to me once in Limerick! But it will change, little by little.
