Roger Rabbit started looking at tattoo machines in 1996, he had all the usual stuff namely Mickey Sharpz, Mickey B, Spalding, which were all okay machines, but his biggest problem was keeping his machines in tune regularly.  One week they were okay the next week he had to tune them.  There was no real available answers, everybody Rabbitt talked to seemed to have their own idea, it just seemed it was like tuning your car radio then turning it on to see if you had the right station, so he decided it was time to look at building a machine that could be adjusted whilst it was running without the need for stopping, starting and messing about. 

After about 3 years of playing about designwise and a lot of input from many people (in particular Brian Nye from Wales; a very experienced machine builder with an incredible amount of machine building knowledge and also Rabbitt’s father John; ex chief design draftsman, mathematician and precision engineer of 50 years, 80 years old and still not retired!) the first machine Rabbitt and Black Lotus actually produced was called the Monobeam of which there were only 8 of these ever made, this was used as a general workhorse to iron out any bugs or problems within the machine, the outcome of this, in 1999, was a slightly thinner machine with a single ‘beam’ style sideplate, a chamfered spring perch to give a longer rear spring length, the coil system was also bonded together with fully integral wiring and a fully adjustable rear coil core giving the machine a very clean and uncluttered look and since then has been known worldwide as the Black Lotus Slimbeam.  In 2007, after taking a year out on personal issues, Rabbitt and his partner Dawn decided to make Black Lotus a registered trademark, take a different direction and design some new machines (The Pirata Pro) which use the same adjustable ability as the ‘Slimbeam’ and also a series of static machines, built to perform as reliably as the adjustable machines and also several very limited edition machines aimed at the collector market (gold plated, jewelled and Damascus steel).. To keep costs down and machine prices at a respectable level Black Lotus has now established a new workshop in Bulgaria, which has proved to be successful in a very short space of time.