Promotion opportunities for tattoo artist

None, unless you can afford to buy the shop. A lot of jobs are like that--you can call them "dead end" jobs, but I prefer to think of them as "starting out at the top." In tattoo, there are apprentices and permitted artists. Once you're permitted to tattoo, you'll find the shop owner is at the top of the heap, and all the permitted artists are one step below that person. Some shops have a foreman between the artists and owner, but these are huge production shops that put out hundreds of pieces per week. (One shop I know of that's set up this way does about 500 tattoos per week--that's over 70 tattoos per day, which is a ridiculous number for 12 artists--nearly six pieces per artist.)