West Town tattoo artist perseveres after traumatic brain injury to bring hyperrealistic designs to life
After a car accident in 2014, Garrett Harper couldn't remember his sister's name or what inspired his old tattoos.
Harper, 36, suffered a traumatic brain injury after being thrown from a car during a crash in New York. In the 10 years since, he's battled to return to his baseline, perform even the simplest of tasks and — perhaps the most difficult — rebound in his tattooing career.
"The confidence that lets someone know that something's good for their own terms, it's something you build over a lifetime," he says. "[I thought] 'I don't know what I'm doing with this, I don't know how I relate to the world.' "
Harper grew up in Garfield Park and works as a tattoo artist at Mayday Tattoo Company in West Town. As a college student with aspirations of being a dentist, Harper initially took up tattooing as a side gig to pay the bills. He'd always been artsy, he said, but the "starving artist" trope dissuaded him from pursuing it seriously.
But after he began working as a tattoo apprentice and learned more about the industry, he was sold.
"It was one of those things where ideas kind of come and go, but this one kind of stuck," Harper says.
Then, about four years into his career, the accident happened. Recovery was slow and tough. His memory was shot, and he struggled to understand who he was and where he came from. He tried to introduce his sister to some friends, and her name escaped him.
That confusion seeped into his career as an artist. He'd look at old tattoo designs, puzzled by what made him create them.
"After the accident, I didn't know what I was trying to compare it to, I didn't have a sense of what I was trying to project," Harper says. "I would stare at it and I would see that technically there was something good about it but I didn't understand how it connected to me."
For the first few years after the crash, Harper wrestled with his own mind. He couldn't focus for more than two or three hours at a time, a far cry from his typical 12-hour sessions before the accident. It took about seven years to return to "normal."
"All of those things I was trying to develop in myself as an artist, the quirks that you pick up from people and kind of make it your own, it was literally just smacked out of my brain," he says.
To get to where he is now artistically, Harper has pushed through extreme anxiety and internal criticism of his own work. In the years following the crash, he held completed designs privately for years before feeling they were good enough to show people and ultimately tattoo.
Now, he describes his style as black and gray surrealism with sci-fi inspiration or existentialism. His tattoos often depict architecture and statues in designs that prompt a double take, they look so real. Above all, he says his art is an "analysis on what it means to experience life."
Visually, there may not be many noticeable differences in Harper's art before the crash and after. But as the artist, he knows there's much more meaning behind the designs on the other side of his recovery.
His focus shifted from a style that was simply visually appealing to one that evoked emotion, introversion, analysis and existentialism.
"[Before the crash] I would just do work that I thought looked cool and that was kind of the core concern of it," Harper says. "But as I had to grapple with 'What does it mean to be alive?' 'What are we here for?' ... it led me to a more conscious understanding of what I was trying to create."