Some people are tattoo artists and spend their lives honing their art using the body as a canvas. Other people are pastors at churches and dedicate their lives to spirituality and religion. Then there are some people, like Rev. Dave “Tattoo” Cormack, who are both.
Cormack is the owner of Sacred Art studios, a small tattoo parlour in Orleans, as well as the main artist. He says tattoos have been a part of his life as long as he can remember.
“One of my sisters had a professional tattooist friend and it’s a long crazy story [that goes] back 25 years,” he said. “Even before I’d met this guy, I had accidentally poked myself with an HB pencil and reveled in, that it left a mark after it healed.”
Cormack says becoming a professional tattoo artist was very hard for him. After travelling to Ottawa from Calgary alone at the age of 15, carrying the contents of his tools in one little bag, Cormack says that he went around to various studios looking to buy equipment.
“But quite unsuccessfully, this 15-year-old kid wanting various pigment colours and needles — you know, nobody was too helpful,” he says.
But they directed him to somebody who was: Pete McDonald, who took him in and became his mentor. “Through him I learned, and spent many hours just filling my mind with everything that he could bestow upon me, from manufacture to the actual practice. I learned the best from the best of that time,” Cormack says. “It was amazing.”
Through McDonald, Cormack says he got a reference for a professional studio, where he started working. He was 16 years old at the time.
Luke Spirito, who was one of Cormack’s customers, says he came to Cormack because of word-of-mouth. “I got a lot of word of mouth saying that Rev. [Cormack] was one of the best in town. I think he’s the best,” he said.
“He’s more of a people person, on a down-to-earth basis with everybody. He’ll joke around with you. It’s not a very pleasant situation to be in, getting tattoos, and it hurts, but he’s just there to guide you.”
Sacred Art studios is a small white house sitting on the side of the road in Ottawa’s east end. The only way to distinguish it from any other house is the posters and banners decorating the area around the entrance.
Most prominent is the sacred art logo, a heart with a crown and wings. Cormack says he based the logo off of the first tattoo he ever got.
“[It was] a heart with a halo, and it had a little banner across the heart that I never wrote any script in, because I wasn’t totally decided on what I wanted to do,” he says. “I loved it. It was actually why I used a heart, in its simplicity and glory, in my logo today.”
Inside the studio, examples of his and other art are mixed in with religious symbols. A statue of an angel stands in the foyer, as well as a cross on the wall. A handful of computer screens cycle various pictures of tattoos and piercings he has already done. Inside his workstation, the Templar cross is painted on a shield that hangs on his wall.
Cormack doesn’t think being a minister has much of an influence on his art, he says. “I think it’s just a way that I govern myself. Moreso, I don’t directly associate the two. God makes man who they are, and he made me what I am, and also his servant,” he says. “I think it’s just more me personally in the way that I govern and carry myself.”
Some Christians believe tattooing is against the Christian faith, citing an excerpt from the Old Testament of the Bible where God forbids people to make cuts or prints into their skin.
Cormack says he is aware of the position he is in, being an artist and a representative of the faith. “I’ve definitely heard a lot of mixed opinions based on it, and it’s just water under the bridge to me,” he says.
“People are entitled to their own opinions and beliefs.” Cormack experiments with various styles of tattoos. “[It] varies. I’m like Bruce Lee, no set style,” he says.