Meet Ram Perez of Rampage Tattoo in Montrose

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ram Perez.

Ram, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started Rampage Tattoo with 900 dollars. I was fresh out of jail. Homeless. Surfing couch to couch. My daughter was just born a couple years before and we had been split up. My closest immediate family was 300 miles away so I was alone in the big city. I didn’t have furniture in our place. No computer. Every tattoo had to be hand drawn. The genesis of what made us a custom only shop. I threw every dollar I made back into the business. People would walk into my shop and laugh at how desolate it looked in there but I kept building it up. Little by little. I traded tattoos for the things I couldn’t afford. I was the janitor, the manager, the handy man and the artist. Our first shop didn’t even have a sign. Things were very dark at that time and it didn’t get any brighter for many years but I kept a very motivating playlist on repeat and I had good friends and I was resourceful. My company started growing. That’s when I hired my first crew and together we became a force to be reckoned with. We never did any advertising. It was all word of mouth. I kept pushing my crew to be better artists. I would force them to draw (some of them hated that haha) but they became better artists. Somewhere along the line, that became Rampage Tattoo’s mantra. I wanted to be more than a tattoo shop. I wanted all of us to become better than we were yesterday. To push the boundaries of what we could do. To be the innovators and not the followers. Whatever that meant to each of us personally. So, it’s because of that mantra that we excelled in our respective styles. That’s why many of my artists have gone on to do bigger and better things. I like to think that they held on to some of those things I use to beat into their brains day in and day out. An artist boot camp if you will.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There were struggles at every turn. I was separated from my daughter and that was the biggest struggle for me. It was hard to walk around with that hurt and try to hold it all together for the people around me. The irony is that I would have never done any of this on my own. My little girl Violet is the reason I had to do this. I needed to be something more for her. So that one day she would be taken care of. The biggest struggle is learning how to profit from pain. How to turn it into fire.

Rampage Tattoo – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Rampage Tattoo specializes in custom work. We pride ourselves on taking a customer’s idea and bringing it to life. We create work that has life. We specialize in realism, portraiture, hyper-realism and everything in between. Comic book, illustration, biomech. We can do it all. What sets us apart from the others is our attitude. We treat people like people. I make sure that our customers are treated right and with respect. Too often, we hear about how unfriendly other shops are or how rude another artist was to them. We’re here to break that trend. We don’t hire primadonnas or ego trips. You’ll never experience that at Rampage Tattoo.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I define success by the positive impact you make in people’s lives. I do tattoos and to those people I tattoo, it always has a positive effect on them. You can see the confidence it builds for them to have this really awesome piece that they are just really proud to show off. They tell me about the people that approach them to start conversations with them about their tattoos. It’s like I’m making celebrities in a way and they love the effect. Their happiness makes me happy. That is success all day.

Contact Info:

• Address: 1425 Westheimer Rd Houston, TX 77006
• Website: Www.rampagetattoo.com
• Phone: 281 888 0294
• Email: rampagetattoo@gmail.com
• Instagram: Rampage Tattoo
• Facebook: Rampage Tattoo

Image Credit:
Jessica Garcia

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