Mark Longenecker

Mark Longenecker came off as incredibly likable on season five of Spike TV’s Ink Master. He’s even nicer in person. I see Mark at every tattoo convention I go to, but I’d never interviewed him until last week.

- Dan Lorenzo

Dan Lorenzo: What age did you move out of New Jersey?

Mark Longenecker: I left Dirty Jerz the summer after high school to go to the Savannah College of Art And Design for a degree in Graphic Design. Savannah is an amazing town to live in and study art. I raged at every party and still got my degree!

DL: If you didn’t grow up on the Jersey shore do you think you would have still drifted towards skateboarding and surfing?

ML: I didn’t exactly grow on up “down the shore.” I grew up in the middle of south Jersey in a town called Medford. I was about 40 minutes from Philly where I would skate around Love Park and all downtown. I would hit up places like Margate, Ocean City, Atlantic City and Long Beach Island when I would go to the Jersey shore and surf. I was a pretty good skater but never was that good of a surfer back then. After high school a bunch of friends and I got a shore house in Margate for the summer. I remember the beginning of the summer asking my one roommates how long it would take me to learn to do some turns on the wave like him. He said I would be shredding by the end of the summer. I surfed as much as I could that summer and could only ride the wave straight in with a kook stance the whole time.

DL: I just got back from Key West. How long did you live there?