My parents had one rule about tattoos. Don’t get one until we’re six feet under.
Did I listen? Not a fucking chance.
I turned eighteen and went with a group of friends to a shop in San Antonio. Everybody had a plan. Everybody’s plan was something small. Mine was a single star, right below the collar bone, tasteful, easily hidden, the kind of first tattoo you can show your mother in eleven years when you’re ready.
I came out with a half sleeve. Stars and stippling bands, all the way down.
I want to be clear that this happened in one sitting. There was no gradual escalation, no coming back next month. I sat down for one star and got talked into a mural by nobody but myself.
Safe to say I did not hide it long.
The part I did not see coming
My parents weren’t even mad. They were shocked, mostly. Not that I got a tattoo, they’d called that one. Shocked that I went that big that fast. They laughed about it, which was somehow worse.
Then a few days later they said something like, we know why you picked stars.
I said, why.
Because your dad hand painted stars all over your bedroom when you were a kid.
I did not know that. I mean I knew the room. I did not connect it. I walked into a tattoo shop at eighteen years old to rebel against my parents and came out permanently wearing something my dad painted over my head while I slept.
That one still gets me.
So here’s the actual thesis
Go big or go home.
That’s it. That’s the whole operating system, and it’s been running since before I could legally vote.
One star turns into a half sleeve. My first race ever was a half marathon, because the 5k and the 10k are bullshit and I was not interested in the on-ramp. I didn’t learn design, I learned the entire machine, because I spent almost seven years as the only graphic designer on a corporate marketing team and there was nobody else to hand anything to. When I finally left that job at the end of 2022 I didn’t ease out of it. I quit.
I keep waiting for the part of this story where somebody sits me down and tells me I’m being an idiot. Never happened. My family had my back immediately, and then asked if I’d take on more of the marketing over at the shop, which is the most Herrera response available: absolutely go chase it, also can you fix our ads.
And I don’t run a photography business. I run five brands. Weddings, commercial work, boudoir, a photo booth company, portraits. Five sets of books. One guy who has genuinely lost his phone while talking on it.
Even the thing that started all of it was oversized. I was the kid who read magazines back to front, for the ads, not the articles. I collected advertising award annuals the way other kids collected baseball cards. I watched commercials on purpose. On purpose. Nobody made me do that.
The wiring was there way before the camera was.
Even my organs go big
Quick detour, because it belongs here.
In 2008 I was at the Art Institute taking design courses toward a BFA in graphic design. I did not finish. Got pretty damn close, though.
Not because I lost interest. And not because I had some clarifying moment about school being a scam, although in fairness it kind of was, which is presumably why that campus eventually closed the fuck down.
I got sick. It took about a year to work out that it was my gallbladder. By the time they got in there it had more than twenty-three stones in it, and the thing disintegrated in the surgeon’s hands.
Twenty-three. I could not just have a gallbladder problem like a regular person.
I never went back and finished. In twenty years of doing this, across corporate work, agency-adjacent work, and every client I have ever had, exactly zero people have asked to see the degree. Not one. I’m not saying school is worthless. I’m saying I got a substantially better education getting paid to be the only designer on a marketing team, and I got it with one fewer organ.
Which brings us to the fire ants
July 2024. Senior session at a ranch in Mountain Home. Ninety minutes booked around sunset, which if you shoot out here you know is the only ninety minutes that matter.
Ten minutes in, I stepped in a fire ant pile.
I am deathly allergic to fire ants.
Here is the part that will tell you everything about how my brain works. Kyle had already told me about the pile. He pointed it out. I heard him. I acknowledged it. And then I got locked in on the shot and my head went somewhere else entirely and my boot went directly into it.
Did I listen? Yes. Did I forget? Absolutely.
So I get behind the truck, well away from the client, take my boots off and drop my pants, and ants pour out. An actual pour.
I had, of course, forgotten my EpiPen. The one item. Thankfully the client’s family had Benadryl and I had topical itch cream in the bag. I slathered up, took five Benadryl like they were Skittles, and went back to work.
I was hot. I was itchy everywhere. Things were clearly heading somewhere.
While the senior was changing outfits, mom came over to talk to us and stopped mid sentence. “Oh my god, are you okay?”
My lips were starting to swell. I was red as hell.
But I could still breathe. And we still had twenty minutes of absolutely epic light.
So I finished the session.
The part where it stops being funny
We drove straight to the hospital after.
I’m in triage answering the usual questions, they’re taking vitals, everything is very normal and procedural, and partway through a sentence my voice changed. Just dropped out from under me into something that wasn’t mine.
The nurse looked at me. Then she looked at Kyle. Kyle looked at her. And they both went “yeaaaa,” in perfect unison, and she called for a bed immediately.
I stripped down and I was covered head to toe in hives. Swollen everywhere. I found body rolls I have genuinely never seen before or since.
They got an IV in me and I passed out. I woke myself up by vomiting, with no idea where I was or what was happening.
Over twenty minutes of good light.
Go big or go home has a bill
I’m not telling that story as a flex. I’m telling it because it’s the honest version of the motto.
The same reflex that turns one star into a half sleeve is the reflex that keeps me shooting through anaphylaxis. It’s the reflex that builds five brands instead of one good one. It’s why I have a folder on my desktop called “Systems” with nineteen things in it that I do not use.
Go big or go home is an incredible engine. It has no brakes on it at all. Every good thing in my career and every genuinely stupid decision I have ever made came out of the exact same place, and I have stopped pretending those are two different traits.
The tattoos actually make the point better than I can. That original stippling? Looks like absolute shit to me now. Not because it was bad work for what it was, but because I got good enough at seeing art to know better. So it’s getting covered. Most of it already is, under a raven that runs up my right arm and onto my chest.
Go big. Be wrong. Cover it up. Go big again.
That’s a tattoo timeline and it’s also a career.
What’s on the arm now
The left arm is a full sleeve. Dia de los muertos skulls at the wrist that run into the tail of a snake, and the snake’s head comes out on my chest. A running shoe from that first half marathon. My parents. A lotus on the shoulder with “everything you want is on the other side of the fear.” A mandala on the elbow that is, if we are being honest with each other, a stoner eye.
There’s Lola, who my best friend found on the street when the vet guessed she was about six months old. She’s nine now and she is my shadow. She followed me into this room to write this.
There’s a date on that arm too. It’s my sobriety date.
I’m not going to turn that into a whole thing here, because this is a post about fire ants and bad stippling and it would be a hell of a swerve. But it’s on my arm in the same list as my dog and my parents and a running shoe, and that’s exactly where it belongs. Not hidden. Not a headline. Just one of the true things about me, sitting there with the rest of them.
I’ll write about it properly one of these days.
On the right forearm, by itself for now, there’s a paper airplane I designed. I made them constantly in class instead of paying attention, which in hindsight was ADHD standing on the desk waving both arms while every adult in the building called it a focus problem.
That one came after I got sober. Which means somewhere in the middle of all this, the doodle I got in trouble for became the thing I chose to mark the hardest thing I’ve done. Go big or go home finally pointed at something worth going big on, and that one stuck.
And on the inside of my upper arm, there’s a Canon AE-1.
That’s my dad’s camera. The one I picked up in 2000.
I asked him about it, for the record. I saw it, I got curious, he showed me. That’s the whole origin story. No lightning bolt, nobody died, nothing got stolen. A kid asked his dad a question about a camera and then never put it down.
Same guy, twice, fifteen years apart
So here’s where I’ve landed.
At eighteen I picked stars to piss off my parents and accidentally chose the thing my dad painted over my bed while I slept.
Years later I put his camera on my arm completely on purpose, because he handed me the object that turned into my entire life and I don’t think he knew that either.
Same man. Twice. About fifteen years apart. Once by accident and once because I finally caught on.
Go big or go home gets you a half sleeve you didn’t plan and a hospital bed you really didn’t plan. Turns out it also gets you two permanent thank you notes to your dad, one of which I wrote without knowing what I was writing.
I’ll take the trade.
So, hi
I’m Gabe. I run Gabe Rene LLC out of Kerrville with my fiancé Kyle, who is a Navy veteran and a Hill Country native and the reason I have not spontaneously combusted at a reception yet. He’s the one who told me about the ant pile. He is right a lot.
The wedding advice lives at GR Weddings. The brand and marketing stuff lives at GR Studio & Co. Both of those have actual jobs to do and neither of them wants me writing about fire ants.
So this is the rest of it. Building a business with ADHD, honestly, without the superpower talk and without using it as a hall pass. Long drives and big skies from a travel series called Ridin’ Shotgun. Gear reviews from somebody who actually bills with the stuff instead of unboxing it for the algorithm.
And tangents. A lot of tangents. The warning on the front page was not a bit.
Wear boots you can get off fast.