He put me on some books and I read about it. I always cared about the passion for the art and took a liking to it. But I never really cared about the money aspect of it. “But if you can do something like this on a pair of sneakers, man, I can only imagine what you could do on some skin with a needle and ink.” I was immediately drawn to it and I said, man, you know what, I want to try that because I was already getting tattoos and I wanted more and I was infatuated about the lifestyle. And he was like, “man, you know what bro? This is not my style.” He’s like a little more of like an all white air force guy. Then I met D and I had designed, painted a pair of Nikes and Adidas. Just being inspired just by the art period.

Then that transcended out to being a fashion guy, but that’s still art and I was always putting clothes together. I was always into just art, drawing and draw for girls in school. So you hit your 10th year of tattooing, what created the spark of wanting to go that route? Just by me having that back then shows loyalty to my friend and that gave me a platform to do something different with my life. Years later of course we partnered and we had another space in the building we just kept the name. I never really disagreed with the brand being that name. So he’s like I’m going to call it Cold As Ice. So the tattoos that he thought that he was doing back in the day, it was always cold. When I was older, everything that looked cold, was nice. So he came up with the name because it was just dope. Van Johnson: My friend and business partner now taught me how to do tattoos 10 years ago, 10 years. The Source: What sparked the name of Cold As Ice Tattoos, the movement behind it and association with everything that you’re doing is as a businessman?

Van from black ink