By Krystle S. Morey

It all started with doodling in the margins of worksheets and penciling stick figures in his notebooks during class. Now, Josh Doyon runs his own tattoo shop.

“I started drawing when I was quite young,” said Doyon, a local tattoo artist.

It wasn’t until Doyon, of Granville, was in his early teens that he thought of pursuing tattooing as a career.

“I came to the realization that, if I can draw this kind of stuff on paper and paint this kind of stuff, I wonder what I could do on skin,” he said.

Doyon started tattooing himself.

“It was just to kind of test myself to see what I could and couldn’t do,” he said, noting that self-tattooing is not always advisable for safety reasons and it often diminishes the life of the ink.

“It’s not something you really want to do to yourself because the human brain naturally has a cutoff point for pain. With tattoos, you have to go a certain depth into the skin in order for it to be deposited correctly and your brain will stop you from doing that,” Doyon said. “It’s kind of like trying to bite off your own finger.”

Doyon, a 2010 graduate of Granville High School, now manages Vixen & Viking Tattoo Studio with partner Amanda Colegrove.

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