One Place, His Rules: An Interview with Austin Funk

Article

One Place, His Rules:

An Interview with Austin Funk

Austin Funk (@austin_translation_tattoo) on Style, Fatherhood, and Building a Career Word by Word

September 29, 2026

Austin Funk runs a small private studio in Petaluma, about an hour north of San Francisco, and a few days a month, you'll find him at a shop in the city too. "I like the camaraderie of being in a tattoo shop, but also sometimes I just need to be alone," he says. "It's nice to have both ends of that spectrum."

Five years into tattooing full-time, Austin has built something a lot of Artists chase and rarely catch: a client base that mostly finds him on its own, a style that's unmistakably his, and a schedule that still leaves room for his kids. Here's his story, and how CO:CREATE fits into it.

A Father First, a Tattooer Second

Tattooing had been on Austin's mind long before he ever picked up a machine. "I had always wanted to get into tattooing, but never had an avenue for that," he says. The pull started in his teens, deep in the local punk and hardcore scene, at a venue his friend had keys to, where some of his first tattoos were guitar-string hand-pokes at four in the morning. "Marking your body is pretty sick, you know, and that opened the door," he says. It wasn't really about the craft yet. It was about control: the idea that he could decide what went on his own skin.

So he asked around. The answer, more than once, was no. "It's a hard industry to get into," he says. "I asked a handful of people I grew up with who tattooed, and I got a lot of, 'Oh, you don't want to do this, it kind of sucks. It's brutal, it's a grind.' And, 'Your art isn't really aligned with traditional tattooing, so I don't know if this is for you.'" He took the hint. "I just kind of left it there, and I went to college."

Years later, the industry finally let him back in on different terms. He lived abroad for a few years, then settled in Portland, where he got together with his now-wife. It was her friends who ran a tattoo studio, and they were the ones who pulled him in this time. "How about instead of designing ugly track housing for billionaires, you make art for yourself and still make a living?" he remembers them saying.

His daughter's birth landed around the same time, and it shaped everything that came after. "I'll get to make my own schedule," he remembers thinking. "If I'm a tattooer, I can be a more present father." Today, she has her own art table in the back of his studio. "She'll be like, 'I'm drawing a tattoo for you, Dad. Then you don't have to be at work as long.'" He also had a son in October, not quite old enough for the studio yet. "He screams too much to be here when I have clients."

From Architectural Drafting to Lino Cuts

Austin's high-contrast, linocut-inspired style didn't start out that way. He was studying architectural drafting when tattooing pulled him in, and it shows in his early work. "Honestly, when I first started, I was doing a lot of high contrast architectural stuff," he says. "Perfect straight lines on organic people don't always work. It's an uphill battle."

The shift toward looser, more impressionistic linework came from home. "I grew up in a big art family. My mom's a painter, my grandma's a painter, my sister is an animator at NBC," he says. "My mom was like, 'You love impressionist art, you love abstract art. Why are you drawing all these things that are very perfect and contained?'" He leaned into influences like Matisse and Monet instead.

The lino-cut tattoos, now a signature of his, started almost by accident. "I sat down one day to draw flash and I really didn't feel like doing it," he says. "I had a lino block carving tool a friend gave me, so I tried that." A few months later, it's taken over his practice. "It's a really fun, therapeutic process."

Building a Client Family, Not Just a Client List

Ask Austin why clients keep finding him, and the answer isn't a marketing plan. "I don't have a super specific plan or vibe with social media. I just try to shoot from the hip and have it be authentic," he says. "Nowadays everything is so polished that it can seem phony, and I don't want to seem like that."

That authenticity is the engine behind his business. While social media plays a role, he's clear about where his strongest clientele actually comes from: "My strongest, most consistent clientele comes from word of mouth. I tattoo someone, we get along, we find commonalities, and then they send their friends." It's built him a kind of extended family: clients who've become his friends, feeding right back into his own creative practice.

He's especially proud of the trust that's built around it, particularly with clients who are women and queer people. "I try to make sure that I'm safe, and it's nice to have the effort I put into making people feel safe and recognized, and the fact that people share that with others."

Watching the Work and the Relationships Grow Up

Some of Austin's most meaningful clients are the ones who've been with him since the beginning, several from his early days in Portland. "There are people who have tattoos where I see the progress over the last five years," he says. "I remember that piece took me four hours, and now we did this one in an hour and a half, and I like the composition better."

It's a career built on gratitude more than grind. "I love it. I really enjoy it. I try to always keep a mindset of gratitude. How lucky am I to get to doodle and put that on people for a job? If you told me when I was 14 tattooing would be my job, I'd be like, damn, future me is so sick."

Reclaiming the Time Admin Was Taking

For all the parts of the job Austin loves, the paperwork behind it was where things were breaking down, and where his therapist stepped in. "Something has to give. I don't have the time or energy I want to have for my family," he remembers realizing. "I want to hire an assistant, but that's money out of my pocket. What can I do?"

A tip from a fellow Artist led him to CO:CREATE. "I reached out to my friend Megan, who works at the shop I work at in San Francisco. I was like, 'I know you just updated how you book. What did you use?' She said, 'Oh, I use CO:CREATE.'"

What's kept him on the platform is the same authenticity he looks for in his own work. "Of the few tattoo booking platforms, yours seemed the most in line with what I'm about. It doesn't seem overly polished, it seems authentic." When he ran into an early hiccup with his Instagram handle on the platform, the fix came straight from a person, not a ticket queue. "I know things like that can change as they scale, but it seems really personal, and that's what drew me to it. I started thinking I'd try it for a month and see how it goes. Now I'm sold."

The day-to-day impact has been just as concrete. Syncing his calendar meant he didn't have to rebuild his existing schedule from scratch, and moving communication off email solved a problem he'd been living with for years.

"Ending up in people's spam is the dungeon of no return," he says. "It texts people, so they know I responded. It's made the back-and-forth a lot quicker. I'm not waiting five days to hear back, then another five days to see if a different date works." Between tattooing, metal fabrication, woodworking, and two kids, that time back matters. "You guys have saved mental bandwidth."

Find Austin Funk and more on CO:CREATE.