Archive Note
Timothy Aaron Beck was born in Peoria on January 18, 1979 and raised in Creve Coeur, Illinois, the son of a Korean War veteran and Caterpillar worker; he started drawing as a young child, played in punk and ska bands as a teenager, and got his first tattoo at seventeen, which set him toward the trade. After a self-taught start that he later called the wrong way to learn, he apprenticed under Nick McCarty at Nick's Tattoos in Pekin for about five years, then worked under Cleen Rock One in the Elgin area near Chicago and briefly at Artkore Tattoo in Bloomington before founding Freedom Ink Tattoos in 2006, eventually anchoring it at 760 SW Washington Street in Peoria's Warehouse District. He worked in an old-school Americana register with a commitment to durable, timeless designs, summarizing his traditionalism with the view that "a lot of times, we try to change things that don't need to be fixed," and he kept a deep stock of historical flash and ran the shop to strict single-use sanitation. Diagnosed with stage four colon cancer in October 2022, he died on January 22, 2024 at age 45; Freedom Ink continued for a time under his partners before later closing.
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