Renowned Arizona tattoo artist Anthony Prince talks about his craft, his Oliver Twist childhood, the troubles and tribulations of the past – and the incredulous story behind his success.
By Katharina Moser
A neat kitchen in white tiles, instant coffee in a mug and keratin in a glass, and a warm smile on a face framed by tattoos and a crown-crested starter cap – that is Prince on a sunny Wednesday morning in Arizona just before he opens the tattoo studio for his clients who have been queuing in his waiting list for months. But that is not how mornings used to looked like for the successful tattoo artist with a star-studded roster of projects and clients, long before Prince had his own brand, a studio to work in and a reputation so shining that it has made its way across the Pacific all the way to Europe, where he will be attending the “Gods of Ink” tattoo convention in Frankfurt, Germany, next year.
15 years ago, when Anthony Prince started out on this journey and picked up his first tattoo needle, studios and brands, sponsorships and big clients were just figments of a tormented imagination. 15 years ago, young Prince was in prison for multiple accounts of robbery. “The only way to make money in there is selling drugs or tattoo, and I’m not into drugs”, Prince says, looking back on his past with the eyes of someone who has seen a lot and yet managed to keep them firmly set on a future. “I had to build my own needles and make my own ink, which is incredibly difficult as all prisons are the same: they are dirty.” And Prince started tattooing his inmates, badly at first, he admits, and then better and better. “You need money to survive in a prison”, he says. Although, in a prison, money does not necessarily mean coins and bills. “I would tattoo all day for a couple of ramen soups”, Prince says. While they cost just 10 Cents in American stores, they went for 2,50 dollars in a prison – a small treasure in a place like this. “I would tattoo all day for just a couple soups or a honey bun or something sweet, or some toothpaste or deodorant.” In a world governed by rules of its own, tattooing was Prince’s way to stay alive – and he became better at it day by day. Today, fully self-taught, a tattoo session by Prince is worth between 2,500 and 4,000 dollars for just a day.
Today, Prince is sponsored by no other than Ez Tatoo and Revolution, has worked with Christian Dior, Fender Guitars and many more. But the road to a fulfilled and successful life for Prince has been one full of obstacles and challenges, of which the time spent in prison was only one last piece in a puzzle of pain, abandonment, violence, abuse and the fight to create a life of happiness, peace, forgiveness and success out of the rubble that is his past.
Prince has lived in Arizona for most of his life, but was born in New York, where he grew up in an abusive household dominated by an alcoholic father. The court took him out once, but he was put back in his mother’s care after his father had left and a new boyfriend came in. Prince’s stepfather, however, was a tall man, muscular from steroids and lifting competitions, and did not think much of the young kid in his house either. “He was a hard-ass. I didn’t like getting hit, I couldn’t stand him, and at times I wanted to kill myself because I couldn’t take it anymore”, he says. “One day, I was just so sick of getting hit, and I was so scared when he came into my room to hit me again. I knew he owned a gun and I had taken it from him. When he came into my room, I shot at him. I didn’t hit him. I was just trying to scare him”, Prince recalls. For that, he was put in juvenile detention, and he still did not reveal to the authorities how his stepfather treated him. Yet, after a moment, when they took pictures of the kid in the detention center, they realized that the bruises on his body could not possibly come from a school fight. “They realized that I was hiding something”, Prince recalls. The court offered him a deal: He could stay in juvenile detention until he was 18 years old, or he could live with a foster family in Arizona that had agreed to take him in. After 90 days of processing, 11-year-old Prince was released from juvenile detention and placed in a new foster family.
With his eleven years, Prince was a tough kid, and yet, he seemed to have been dealt a set of particularly mean hands. The foster family which took him in, he says, was much worse than the family he was taken out of. “They had about 10 kids in total, all of which they were collecting state assistance for. They made us work for them, real jobs, and took that money we made. They said that them giving us a roof over our heads was our payment. If I wanted to eat or have nice things like clothes, I would have to steal it”, Prince says. “One year for example, I was about 14, they sent me and the other kids to a property they were working on, to dig a swimming pool. Not with excavators or anything. We had to dig an actual swimming pool with shovels. We did a lot of maintenance, landscaping, anything that has to do with building a home. I’ve helped build nine or ten entire homes before I was 17 years old.”
Today, Prince is happy about the skills he learned as a child. “I’m thankful now, because I learned a lot of trades, but I do know that I was being used and taken advantage of. I am okay with it today, though, because, honestly, it taught me a lot. Now I can talk to people and understand when I’m getting manipulated.” How he and the other children were used in this foster family, Prince knows now, was wrong, yet he appreciates some of the competences, both in human interaction and in manufacture, he learned during that time. “Realistically, the trade was awesome to know and to learn. It is good to know how to use your hands. I just don’t think the suffering was worth it. Or maybe it was. I’m not mad at the way things went.“ Yet, Prince was not allowed the chance to go to school. Instead, he was introduced to an additional trade, one other than construction, one that brought him on the path that would later take him to prison.
“I grew up stealing for the job. If we needed tools, we’d go steal them. They taught me how to steal. They taught me how to rob. The foster family was like a gang, to be honest with you. They knew the loopholes. They knew officers. They paid them off”, Prince recalls. At the age of around 14, the family taught Prince to be a thief. “They treated it like it was a game. They would start off small. In a shop, they would say, hey, let’s take the suit. They wouldn’t say steal it. They said, here, hold this for me. I did not know if they had paid for it or not, they just handed it to me. And then they walked me out”, Prince recalls. “From there, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Sometimes I was doing two carts of tools or supplies at Home Depot. They would fill up the cart for me and I’d walk it right out like nothing. I got so confident, and it became so easy. They said, let’s see what you can get today. Or things like, your step brother got way more than you. They were very smart people, very manipulative. So much so that even if they got caught, they could talk their way out of it. From the outside, they looked like an ordinary family.”
The work and the stealing were one part of growing up in the foster family, but it surely was not the worst. The house in Arizona, too, was a place of violence, of beatings and abuse. “They hit and beat us every day. But they also made us train. They ran a boxing school. Every day, we trained. We ran three miles and trained in the gym for an hour every single day, no matter what. They started to use cattle prods. When they wanted us to stop running our mouth, they tased us.”
Prince smiles in the camera reassuringly, a reminder that these are things of the past, that the trauma he has faced may have led him through some of the darkest times but ultimately, here, standing in his kitchen, he is a figure of survival and redemption and change. “We were like dogs”, Prince recalls his life in the foster family. “We were worked and we were trained and we stayed home. We didn’t get to go out or party. So anytime we did get out, we were like dogs out of the cage. When we fought, all the anger and pain went into the fight, and that’s why we became such good fighters over the years.”
Prince became an excellent fighter indeed. He fought in Junior Olympics Golden Gloves, and took first place. And he never told on his foster family either, throughout all these years. “They were dangerous people. I wasn’t scared, and mostly, they treated me okay, but they were also dangerous, and I wasn’t stupid.” They were caught only later, when the police got on to their scheme.
At the age of 17, Prince ran away from the foster family. Out on the streets, Prince stuck to the only thing he had learned to do: stealing and fighting. For countless theft-related offenses, he was caught and tried in court. “I wasn’t even mad when the judge told me that I was facing 25 years. I told him, it’s fine, give it to me. My life wasn’t any good at the time. I didn’t care about anything. I wasn’t scared. I just didn’t care, you know, I had nothing to live for. He must have felt bad for me, and he gave me pretty much the minimum sentence.” Prince was sentenced to eleven years in Super Max on 24-hour lockdown, which was, after a bit of trouble in prison, later raised to 13 years. Although his charges where mostly just theft-related – he never really hurt anybody, Prince says, except in the occasional sparring match – he was placed in highest-security prison because through his professional boxing training, his hands are, to this day, registered weapons. Having won the Junior Olympics in Golden Gloves, his hands are licensed and registered in Arizona. “This meant that I had to go on a prison yard where my violence was met. I could theoretically kill somebody with my hands. That’s why I was placed under 24-hour-lockdown, in a prison with all the killers and lifers.”
Spending 13 years in jail with people who have nothing to lose certainly changes one’s perspective on life. “All prison does is make you hate the world. It makes you a harder criminal. It did nothing to help me. But in my mind, I already knew that this was not me, that this was just part of my journey, so I never got mad. Yes, I could have gotten killed in there. Luckily, I was trained to fight, and luckily, I only had to fight five times in the whole 13 years in there. I am only 5’5’’, but I was respected in there, and I gained a little bit of a name for myself. And that was also thanks to the tattooing. Anybody can get killed in a Super Max. There, it just takes somebody having a bad day. If you’re already doing life, you don’t care. What does it matter”, Prince recalls his time in prison and the danger he faced every day.
But prison also taught him valuable lessons about humanity and inner strength which help him face the world until today. “When I was younger, I was scared of everything. I kept my head down. You know when you go pet a dog and he just crouches into the ground, away from you? I was like that. When someone came to shake my hand, I would shy away, afraid of getting hit”, Prince tells us. “Prison broke that. Everything that I was scared of and not being able to communicate – that all changed, because in there you’re called on your bullshit. Nobody’s there to defend you. If you have an issue, you need to speak to somebody. Respect is so big in there, you need to learn it – shaking hands, opening doors, folding your hands when you’re walking by somebody”, Prince says. In prison, he thinks, he learned respect – both to respect and to instill respect in others. “Before prison, I was not able to carry a conversation with anybody. I was so embarrassed, so shy, so scared. Prison broke me out of my shell. I learned respect, I learned how to open up. I learned how to say what I want. Because when I was growing up, what I wanted didn’t matter. I was always told what I need to do, and if I said anything against it, that was considered talking back and that’s an ass whooping. The best thing I could do growing up was to keep quiet and look down. But in prison, it’s the other way around. And so I learned that I can I have a say. That I don’t have to do what you tell me to do”, Prince explains. “I’m thankful for that, because in both houses that I lived in, I was not taught to speak up. I was never allowed to speak up. I was hardly ever allowed to talk at all in each house. Did I need 13 years to learn that? No, but the universe said, this is what you need”, he ponders. “And now I’m getting paid back in tenfold, being able to live this life I have now. What I’m saying is, I would have never had any of these opportunities if it wasn’t for the prison and if wasn’t for the foster family.”
Prince, who has paid the price for his past way of life even if it was only partly of his own choosing, has learned to take responsibility for every step he takes – and has learned that what kind of game you play with the cards you are dealt ultimately boils down to just one thing: the decisions you make. “It’s really not about the system. It’s about you. It’s all about choice”, he is convinced. “After prison, I could have gotten back out there and started stealing again. It would have been easy. Why didn’t I? Because it was my choice not to.”
And that is the reason why, despite the horrors of his childhood, Prince has made peace with his past. He holds no grudges, he says, and is full of forgiveness. “I can’t say I regret my past, because without it, I wouldn’t have what I have now. So being regretful would feel to me like being ungrateful for a blessing”, he says. “I take responsibility for everything I’ve done. And I also forgive everybody in my past. Things have been so good for me lately, how could I be mad?” Prince believes in a higher power, he says – and that the universe will somehow deliver justice to everybody. “I don’t have to worry about anything, because I know that the universe put me in my place. And the universe is going to put everybody else in their places, too.” Forgiving and letting go is also a way of self-empowerment for Prince: “If I hold on to hate, what’s it gonna do? I held on to hate for so long. There were times where I would just want to cry because I was so fucking mad at somebody, right? But it didn’t do nothing”, he says. “Who is the one actually hurting me? I’m the one stuck in my own prison. My actual prison was my own mind. The only person that was hurting me was me, and if I hold on to all this resentment, all it does is drag me down”, Prince says. “I grew up fighting. I’ve been in more fights than I wanted to be in. I’m just tired of it. I hate fucking fighting.”
In the end, even his relationship to his stepfather has become a story of forgiveness. During his time in jail, Prince heard that his stepfather had fallen sick to cancer, he tells us. Prince started calling him every week. “He was sick for five years. When I got out of prison, I flew out to see him. I gave him a hug. He felt really bad about what he had done. I could see it was killing him inside. He apologized and wished he could take it all back. I said, let it go, it’s okay, I’m not mad at all. And I wasn’t.” Prince spent three weeks out with his stepfather, and tattooed his entire back and sleeves. “We worked every day on it together. He was so happy. He didn’t wear a shirt for the whole time was there. He was just so excited, to have that piece of me. And I think some of the pain from the tattoo he was wanting back from me, like a sacrifice, to let me hurt him a little bit.” After three weeks of tattooing, Prince and his stepfather had formed a deep connection. “We hugged, and he cried. He had been fighting a long fight, and it wasn’t easy. On my last day there, he asked me to take care of mom. He said to me, I just want to let you know I love you, and I’m really sorry. And I want to let you know that I’m extremely proud of you”, Prince recalls. “That meant a lot”. The next day, Prince received a call from his mother. His stepfather had killed himself.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think he had been hanging on just to apologize to me. All this time, he had been fighting his own battle. Maybe he was just trying to make amends before he went out”, Prince says. “I was mad at first, but it’s selfish of me to want somebody to stay who is in incredible pain. Our connection in his last three weeks was genuine, and I saw it in his eyes that he was a different person than what I used to know.”
Over the past 15 years, Prince has taken the losses, fights and pains of his past and turned them into a story of perseverance, survival and transformation. And it is a story that he seeks to represent not only in his tattoos, but also in his brand. He has called it “Tilted Krown” – a symbol of his own rise to prominence. “I was tucked away and forgotten about. So many people have counted me out. Now, my brand has been on billboards in Vegas. I want people to see that this is what I did. I don’t want to brag. All I want is to be seen. Because for a long time, I wasn’t”, Prince says. “I want my crown. People say, you need to slow down. But no, I can’t. I’m too hungry.”
His tattoos glowing in the soft Arizona morning light, the tilted crown on his cap a reminder of a hard-fought visibility, and his licensed and registered hands just a little less intimidating through the warm, welcoming smile on his face, Prince is still very much a fighter today. But, that we have learned, a fighter of a very different kind. Now he can tell the story of a man who has exchanged fists for needles, violence for fulfillment, and prison bars for the opalescent view from one of the most notorious tattoo studios in the country – of a life born out of abuse and chaos into the radiance of success, of peace, and of forgiveness.
The Wrapper 