Recovery Ink. –      

Feb. 27, 2020 – When he was around 15 years old, he got his first gang tattoo in large letters across the top of his back. He’d been drinking and smoking pot since sixth grade. He started doing hard drugs, like the hallucinogen LSD, in seventh grade. From then on, he rarely did homework and skipped school often. 

“I couldn’t even say I have a third grade education because third graders are much smarter now,” he says and laughs. “They’re probably way ahead of me.” 

About the same time he got the his first gang tattoo, Williams got “Skins” tattooed on the inside of his lip — a homage to members of gangs affiliated with the skinhead subculture he’d been hanging out with in junior high school. “I felt that whoever got tattoos were tough, and the tougher people that I could be around, the safer I would be,” Williams says.

But as some of the skinheads fell deeper into neo-Nazism, he says he stopped associating with them. “The whole Nazi thing never fit me,” Williams says. “I only did any of those things because I was in fear.”

@EugeneWeekly