Archive Note
Derick Montez grew up in Albuquerque around the low-rider and Chicano black-and-grey work his uncles wore: barbed wire, the Virgin of Guadalupe, praying hands. He was working in medical care and active in the city graffiti scene when he met Mike Giant, who took him on around 2006 as an apprentice at Stay Gold Tattoo. Early on he thought black-and-grey was the easy stuff and preferred color, but that flipped and it became his focus. He has tattooed at Family Business in London and at the 2011 Rome convention, and now works at Picture Machine Tattoo in San Francisco.